Behaviorism

Context, Culture, and

Style

By:
Aradila Priando
Bela Yunita
Delviana Anggra Mustikah

Behaviorism
Malinowski and Firth believed that the
description of a language could not be
complete without some reference to the
context of situation in which the language
operated.
Bloomfield defined the meaning of
linguistics form as the situation in which
the speaker utters it and the response it
calls forth in the hearer.

Jill is hungry, sees an

Since, with
Jack a was
with
Bloomfield
illustrated
his
views
now
apple and with the use
her,
the
stimulus
account
of Jill and jack.
offamous
language
gets Jack
produced
not
the
to fetch it for her. If
reaction R, but a
she had been alone ( or
linguistic reaction, that
if she had not been
of speaking to Jack,
human ) she would
which may symbolize
have first received a
by r. The sound waves
stimulus
(s)
which
resulting from this in
would have produced a
turn created a stimulus
reaction ( r ) ( the term
for Jack, a linguistic
response is more usual
stimulus (s), which
) she would have made
results in his nona move to get the
linguistic reaction R of
apple. This can be
getting an apple.

 One important point for the theory is that the

stimulus and the reaction are physical events, for Jill
it is a matter of light waves striking her eyes, of her
muscles contracting and el fluids being secreted in
her stomach. Jacks action is no less physical.
Bloomfield accounted for this by arguing that the
speech the practical events depend upon predisposing
factors which consist of the entire life history of the
speaker and hearer.

For not only may the same apparent

situation
produce
quite
different
linguistic responses but also the same
linguistic response may occur in quite
Im situation.
hungry might be uttered
different
not only by someone who really
was hungry but also by a
naughty child who did not want
to go to bed.

 Now, it may be well be that ultimately all activity is

in principle, explainable in term of physical entities
and event, the chemistry, electromagnetism, etc
involved in the cell of human brain.
It seems probable that our experiences are recorded
in some way by changes in the state of the brain.
But this is, in the light of present human knowledge,
no more than an act of faith, a simple belief in the
physical nature of all human activity.
But Bloomfield theory loses its force when we
realize how many of the relevant predisposing
factors are unknown and unknowable.

Context, culture and style

Language has deictic, which identify
objects, persons and events in terms
of their relation to the speaker in
space and time. There are three main
types of deictic.

1. The speaker must be able to identify the

participants in the discourse himself and
2. English has here and there, this and that to
the person or persons to whom he is
distinguish between the position of the speaker
speaking.

or closeness to it and other positions or greater

distances. The exact spatial relationship
indicated by such words will vary according to
the language. In Malagasy, for instance, the
choice of the words ety and aty which may be
translated here and there depends on
3.
Time
relations
are
indicated
in
English
not
whether the object in question is visible or not
by general adverbs such as now and
toonly
the speaker.
then but also by more specific ones such as
yesterday and tomorrow

 Deictics cannot be ignored in the study of

meaning, but they raise problems for any kind of
analysis that treats propositions or statements
(categorical assertions) as somehow basic to
semantics.
Another very important aspect of context is that
provided by social relations. It is often not
enough for the speaker to be able to identify the
person to whom he is speaking, also indicate
quite clearly the social relations between himself
and this person.

In

many European languages particularly, we can

distinguish between a polite and a familiar second person
pronoun for addressing a single person. The polite form is
either what is grammatically or historically the second
person plural form or a third person form.

French,
Greek
and Russian use
the plural forms,
tu/vous, esi/esis,
ty/vy
(while
English has lost
the singular form
thou altogether).

Italian
and
Spanish use third
person forms and
thus still retain
the singular/plural
distinction

tu/Lei
and
voi/Lor, tu/ustd,

The choices between the familiar and the polite

form, or what, following the French forms are
called the T and V forms seem to be determined
by two factors, which have been termed Power
and Solidarity (Brown and Gilman 1960).
Power involves the
Solidarity
involves
asymmetric relations,
such
symmetric
older than, parent
relations as attended
of, employer of,
the same school,
richer
than,
have
the
same
stronger than, and
parents, practice the
nobler than.
same profession.

 This custom has now almost wholly

disappeared except among older
academics.
The solidarity device today is the use of
first names, though this too has some
power function, as between teacher (or
parent) and child.
There are other characteristics of the
context that affect the choice of language.

Province is concerned with occupation

and professional activity the language
of law, science, advertising, etc.

Status deals (again) with social relations, but

especially in terms of the formality of
language and the use of polite or colloquial
or of slang.
Jooslanguage
(1962) suggested
there were
five degrees of formality: frozen,
formal, consultative, casual
Modality is intended
to relate to the choice
and intimate.
between poetry and prose, essay and short
story, the language of memoranda, telegrams,
jokes, etc.

 A competent speaker of a language must have command

of all these different style.
But he will almost certainly have some command also of
different kinds of his language that are collectively known
as dialect.
The term dialect has until recently been used only to refer
to different forms of the language used in different
geographical areas, but it has been realized that there are
similar differences between the language of social classes
within the same geographical area and that it is not at all
easy to draw a clear distinction between these two
phenomena.

 Most speakers have some command of several

dialects or socially distinct version of their
language. They can, moreover, switch from one to
other in the course of conversation.
Arabic, Modern Greek, Haitian Creole, and Swiss
German have the phenomenon Diglossia.
There are two quite distinct dialects of the
language whose choice depends upon what can
only be described generally as the formality of the
situation >>> Diglossia.

 A bilingual society where two distinct languages are in use

within a single conversation the speakers may switch from one
to the other, example from English to Spanish. This practice is
called Code Switching.
The fact that a single speaker makes use of so many varieties of
language raises a serious theoretical problem.
In the case of diglossia, although it may seem easy enough to
determine that there are two varieties of the language, the
distinction between the two is not always completely clear and
speakers often seem to use language that is, in varying degrees,
somewhere between the two.
Issues of code-switching, diglossia, dialect, sociolinguistics and
stylistics all fall into the area of semantics.

Thank you