Lecture 1 - Speech Acts

One of the first questions i asked myself in the lecture, was our unique case in Singapore. Being a multi-racial society (of course there's more to this word, but hey! it's a LANGUAGE course), Singapore does have many ethnic groups. Yet the bilingual policies of the government has created a diverse yet singluar group of people who speak predominantly English, but also many other languages - English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, dialects. So, how do we define the native speakers in Singapore? Do we consider Chinese native speakers of Mandarin? Because i certainly have trouble asking a Chinese speaking girl out on a date -__-

Another thought (pardon my sociological mind), was that speech acts allow us to see social, cultural values of a society or culture. Like the example in the lecture, rejection of compliments could show modesty is a valued characteristic.

However, this point kept nagging at the back of my head. When we look at such "data" and interpret it (i.e. equate rejection of compliments as showing modesty), we interpret such data from our culture point of view. Isn't this a little ethnocentric?

Thus perhaps i feel (at this point - who's to say in a few weeks i'll change my mind) maybe using language to understand culture isn't the only way. Perhaps it can be used to complement other fields like sociology and anthropology.

-31/1/10