2. 外语
  3. What is the relation between the code and culture which creates it, and which it transmits to the next generation? ~Linguists in

What is the relation between the code and culture which creates it, and which it transmits to the next generation? ~Linguists in

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问题     What is the relation between the code and culture which creates it, and which it transmits to the next generation? ~Linguists in the anthropological tradition had tried to establish links with meanings expressed lexically: Eskimo words for ’snow’, Arabic words for ’camel’ and so on. Yet vocabulary only ’reflects’ culture by courtesy of its internal organization as a whole; and the assertion that "because ’camels’ are important to the Arabs, therefore they have a lot of different words for ’them’ "is a statement as much about English as about Arabic. Presumably nothing is more important than rice to the Chinese; yet Chinese has a single word for rice and it means various other things besides. Chinese happens to be a type of language that favors general nouns.
    As the essential medium for people to organize and convey their ideas, language is no longer what it seemed to be for the traditional linguists who used to think of language as simple for mal codes. It is also closely related to the context, social or anthropological, in which the communication takes place. Today most linguists come to realize that language is an important component of culture. It determines not only tile form in which ideas are transmitted, but also the method with which the content of the ideas are organized. In this perspective, language is also a communicative base on which members of a speech community form their ideas in a way that is readily comprehensible to other members of that community. It is also regarded as part of culture that is related to other fields of humanity(人类)studies.
    But what is merely cornic(滑稽)when applied to lexics(词汇学)becomes seriously misleading when applied to grammar. As Whorf pointed 50 years ago, it is naive and dangerous to take isolated grammatical phenomena and try to relate them to features of a culture. When linguists recognized this, their response was to avoid the language/culture issue altogether, thus closing the door on an important area of research. That there is a relationship between a code and the culture that engenders(造成)it is beyond question; but it is an extremely complex and abstract one.
The first paragraph mainly discusses ______.
选项 A、the early history of human language
B、how important words are in the cultural issue
C、the way in which people name different things
D、the relation between language and culture on the lexical level
答案D
解析 主旨大意题。根据第一段第二句，语言学家试图通过词汇所表达的含义来建立语言和文化之间的联系。接着举例，爱斯基摩语的词汇与雪的联系、阿拉伯语的词汇与骆驼的联系等。可以推断，第一段主要讨论语言和文化在词汇层面上的联系。
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