CHAPTER II: REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
B. Theoretical Background
6. Language and Culture
48 on linguistic and normative uniformity vs. subjective identification, and a choice of focus on institutional power vs. individual agency – and thus to The Speech Community another issue: scale, the size of group studied and its influence on assumptions, methods and interpretation. These are not new problems for sociolinguistics, but their interrelationship and connection to the SpCom needs clarification.
Based on the theory above, this researcher decided the sitting of his research is Lombok Island where Sasak people reside and communicate by Sasak Language. Sasak people divided into verities social status. Hence, they make community or group themselves. In daily interaction, they choose the language level of Sasak language for honor and respect among their member of their community or group.
49 without rules for processing data, and that data is added and rules for processing are formed solely by one’s experiences.
The notion is central to Lockean empiricism. As understood by Locke, tabula rasa means that the mind of the individual was born "blank,"
and it also emphasized the individual's freedom to his/her own. Each individual was free to define the content of his/her character, but his/her basic identity as a member of the human species cannot be so altered. It is from this presumption of a free, self-authored mind combined with an immutable human nature that the Lockean doctrine of "natural" rights derives.
Locke thus believed that the combination of simple ideas derived from experience into complex ideas required the intervention of our mental activity. In this theory can be concluded that the power of human idea to think everything about him/her is done by a media which is called language. Language competence based on the experiences that create them to be. It is an indication of experience (what have been seen, done, heard, learned, felt etc.) as main aspect of culture.
The actual, language ability firstly promoted by Ferdinand D.
Saussure in C. Bally (1966)in his theory: langage, parole and languge.
The langage is the language ability, in the brain of individual consists of the structure of the language universally. It will be the specific language depends on what language influent his brain is called languge, and the individual performance to use Language is called parole. Sapir and Whorf
50 (1958: 69), stated “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone or alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection.
The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached...
We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation”.
The Sapir and Whorf‘s statement “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this
51 way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees,” (Whorf 1940: 213-21).
The emphasize of Sapir – Whorf hypothesis (1956: 66) are two associated principles; the first is linguistic determinism or our thinking is determined by language and the second, linguistic relativity, people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently. Meanwhile Chomsky’s theory(1965) explained that
‘competence and performance’. Competence is the knowledge of a man to a language skill and how to apply knowledge of language in written and oral form. While performance refers to language seen as a set of specific utterances produced by native speakers, as encountered a corpus;
analogies to Sauserean concept of parole.
Chomsky with his Nativism as oppose to Empirism. The nativist position (soundness referred to as mentalism) focuses on the fiat that much of human behavior in biologically determined instead of culturally determined as proposed by empiricism. According to nativism much of our behavior is a function of the fact that we are human being and our genes are structured in characteristic ways. Human being by virtue of their characteristic genetic structure is born in an initial mental state.
52 Candidates for this inmate (inborn) knowledge would be these characteristics. Common to all human language to nativists, language acquired but to empiricists, language is learned
All of theories above discussed the nature; competence performance and skill are the basic of human being to be cultured creation. Language cannot be separated from culture because all aspects of human being are expressed by language. Meanwhile language is the product and simultaneously the media of culture. As European identities which haven explored by Kramsch (1998: 63), he stated “European identities have traditionally been built much more around Language and national citizenship, around folk model of ‘one nation=one language’, than around ethnicity or race”.
The explanations above indicate that the relationship between language and culture is a very fundamental case of some individuals in social life. White and Kirkpatrick (1985: 9) stated “formulating and exploring subjective experience, as well as person are recognizable as elements of social life, as occupying social statuses and participating in social groups and events”. Every individual or member of societies in doing interaction to other always thinks and agreed a code or symbol which attributed the culture values in it. Every code and symbol is dominance declared through language.
Language is a crucial universal form of human symbolic behavior.
Atthe same time, language is a manifestation of the culture where it is
53 spoken. Communication skills are one of the most important tools in our lives, and are essential for the development, maintenance, and transmission of culture from one generation to the next, (White and Kirkpatrick, 1985: 8).
In any society, a child’s life is driven in part by particular models of what parents believe to be the ‘good life’ and the ‘ideal individual. ’Culture has a variety of implications in this respect. Culture is defined as consisting of a set of attitudes, beliefs, customs and values shared by a group of people, communicated from one generation to the next via language or some other means of communication (Fischer & Lazerson, 1984; Matsumoto, 2000; Super & Harkness, 1980). Communication cannot neglect speech community that uses the language itself as medium of socialization.
As defined by Ochs (1989: 406) “the process whereby children and other novices are socialized through language, part of such socialization being a socialization to use language meaningfully, appropriately, and effectively”. Because “part of acquiring language is the acquisition of the social meaning of linguistic structures,” (Ochs, 1989: 97), in this book culture is considered in relation to linguistic/discursive phenomena. Every individual who use language does not want to be called uncultured man and dislike to be losing face among crowd.
Speech Communities in everyday exchanges in the same culture or intra cultural context have some strategies to create interrelationship.
54 Whether they are being politic or polite and impolite/lie, it will be determined by language politeness which is in typed of ego’s standing with respect to alter, i. e. making other people have better opinion of one self.
The type of politic verbal will be possible done by Sasak people’s achieved social status in language politeness.