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  3. In the canonical writing of the cultural essentialists, language has a very close and intimate relationship with culture,

In the canonical writing of the cultural essentialists, language has a very close and intimate relationship with culture,

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问题             In the canonical writing of the cultural essentialists, language has a very
       close and intimate relationship with culture, an association evinced by the
       language/culture interchangeability of Ngugi, who asserts that language as
Line    culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history. In his
(5)      view, language carries the burden of a particular, evolving culture and becomes
       the people’s expression of their accumulated experience to the point that it
       becomes almost indistinguishable from the culture that defines its growth,
       articulation and transmission to other generations.  This interchangeability
       betrays Ngugi’s longing for an ideal: the isomorphism between a particular
(10)     language and a certain (cultural) reality.
           Two objections deserve articulation, however, the first following from the
       early Wittgensteinian view that the limits of language mean the limit of the
       world. The view is not only that language influences our conception of the
       world, as Ngugi would agree, but that language alone determines our particular
(15)     manner of establishing perceptions and sentiments. This view is overly focused
       for permitting the experience of reality only one constitutive factor, language,
       to the exclusion of other non-linguistic factors. Yet since reality is many-sided
       and aleatory, its boundary can not be determined or captured solely by
       language, or in other words, humans experience the world in innumerable ways
(20)     too varied and complex to be captured by language.
           The second claim inherent in Ngugi’ s expressive theory is that it is
       language, above all else, determines a people’s distinctive cultural identity.
       That is, for the linguistic expressivist, one is only introduced to a certain
       community or form of life by means of language learning. The resemblance of
(25)     this to Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation is rather
       obvious, but Ngugi rather discountenances notions of dialectic materialism that
       ground "praxis" or labor over language such that it is from labor, and not from
       language or thought, that the category of meaning arises. For most cultural
       theorists, labor possesses the property of being intelligible prior to the
(30)     intelligibility of language and thought, and thus, on the basis of what has been
       called the "constitutive activities", an outsider, whether a layman, a writer, or
       an anthropologist need not retreat from understanding another culture due to
       the difficulty in radical translation. Objects of the external world can be
       meaningfully singled out to facilitate an understanding of the community before
(35)     one can begin to master the language.
           This last statement, reinforced by an experiment carried out on 3-to
       4-month old pre-linguistic babies and the influence of their communal form of
       life, has proven that contrasting child-rearing practices bring about a way of
       socializing babies into a structure of shared social practices, a way of relating to
(40)     others prior to the acquisition of language. In other words, Ngugi’s principle
       shortcoming is his failure to recognize that language-learning alone does not
       determine one’s entry into a community.
Which of the following best states the author’s main point about the theory of cultural essentialists?
选项 A、It is a sterile, abstract theory, which fails to make experimental predictions.
B、It is a historically important element in the linguistic discourse on enculturation, but is incorrect.
C、It is a convincing and cogent alternative to the theories of linguistic expressivists.
D、It is experimentally accurate but theoretically inconsistent.
E、It is overly focused on the complicated nature of non-linguistic reality.
答案B
解析
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