Linguistic relativity

Last updated

Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrounding world. [1]

Contents

Several various colloquialisms refer to linguistic relativism: the Whorf hypothesis; the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis ( /səˌpɪərˈhwɔːrf/ sə-PEERWHORF); the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis; and Whorfianism.

The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history. [2] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II; [3] since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists. [4] [ need quotation to verify ] Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity: [4] [3] that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them.

Although common, the term Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is sometimes considered a misnomer for several reasons. Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) never co-authored any works and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later development; Sapir and Whorf never used such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their opinions of this relativity principle expressed it in stronger or weaker terms. [5] [6]

The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields, including philosophy, psychology and anthropology. It has also influenced works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages.

History

The idea was first expressed explicitly by 19th-century thinkers such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder, who considered language as the expression of the spirit of a nation. Members of the early 20th-century school of American anthropology including Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also approved versions of the idea to a certain extent, including in a 1928 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, [7] but Sapir, in particular, wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism. Sapir's student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, came to be considered as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences for human cognition and behavior. Harry Hoijer, another of Sapir's students, introduced the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", [8] even though the two scholars never formally advanced any such hypothesis. [9] A strong version of relativist theory was developed from the late 1920s by the German linguist Leo Weisgerber. Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who performed experiments designed to determine whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently.

As the emphasis of the universal nature of human language and cognition developed during the 1960s, the idea of linguistic relativity became disfavored among linguists. From the late 1980s, a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for non-deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts. [10] [11] Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they are generally weak. Currently, a nuanced opinion of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better considered as developing from connectionist factors. Research emphasizes exploring the manners and extent to which language influences thought. [10]

Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment

The idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient. In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato explores the idea that conceptions of reality, such as Heraclitean flux, are embedded in language. But Plato has been read as arguing against sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini, who claimed that the physical world cannot be experienced except through language; this made the question of truth dependent on aesthetic preferences or functional consequences. Plato may have held instead that the world consisted of eternal ideas and that language should represent these ideas as accurately as possible. [12] Nevertheless, Plato's Seventh Letter claims that ultimate truth is inexpressible in words.

Following Plato, St. Augustine, for example, argued that language was merely like labels applied to concepts existing already. This opinion remained prevalent throughout the Middle Ages. [13] Roger Bacon had the opinion that language was but a veil covering eternal truths, hiding them from human experience. For Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several methods used by humans to experience the world.

German Romantic philosophers

During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or Volksgeister, of different ethnic groups was a major motivator for the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism. [14]

Johann Georg Hamann

Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to discuss the concept of the "genius" of a language. [15] [16] In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question", Hamann suggests that a people's language affects their worldview:

The lineaments of their language will thus correspond to the direction of their mentality. [17]

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt WilhelmvonHumboldt.jpg
Wilhelm von Humboldt

In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt associated the study of language with the national romanticist program by proposing that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker's native language. [18] This opinion was part of a greater idea in which the assumptions of an ethnic nation, their "Weltanschauung", was considered as being represented by the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an inflectional morphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European languages, were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers with respect to the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world. [18]

In Humboldt's humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual's worldview in its particular way through its lexical and grammatical categories, conceptual organization, and syntactic models. [19]

Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin. [20] Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis.

Boas and Sapir

Franz Boas FranzBoas.jpg
Franz Boas
Edward Sapir Edward Sapir.jpg
Edward Sapir

The idea that some languages are superior to others and that lesser languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was widespread during the early 20th century. [21] American linguist William Dwight Whitney, for example, actively strove to eradicate Native American languages, arguing that their speakers were savages and would be better off learning English and adopting a "civilized" way of life. [22] The first anthropologist and linguist to challenge this opinion was Franz Boas. [23] While performing geographical research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit and decided to become an ethnographer. Boas stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages, that there was no such thing as a primitive language and that all languages were capable of expressing the same content, albeit by widely differing means. [24] Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture and he was among the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture to be studied and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original language. [25] [26]

Boas:

It does not seem likely [...] that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of the culture is conditioned by the morphological traits of the language." [27]

Boas' student Edward Sapir referred to the Humboldtian idea that languages were a major factor for understanding the cultural assumptions of peoples. [28] He espoused the opinion that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation. Sapir also thought because language represented reality differently, it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently.

Sapir:

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. [29]

However, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, "It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language." [30]

Sapir was explicit that the associations between language and culture were neither extensive nor particularly profound, if they existed at all:

It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves. [31]

Sapir offered similar observations about speakers of so-called "world" or "modern" languages, noting, "possession of a common language is still and will continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical, physical, and economics determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout the area." [32]

While Sapir never made a practice of studying directly how languages affected thought, some notion of (probably "weak") linguistic relativity affected his basic understanding of language, and would be developed by Whorf. [33]

Independent developments in Europe

Drawing on influences such as Humboldt and Friedrich Nietzsche, some European thinkers developed ideas similar to those of Sapir and Whorf, generally working in isolation from each other. Prominent in Germany from the late 1920s through the 1960s were the strongly relativist theories of Leo Weisgerber and his concept of a 'linguistic inter-world', mediating between external reality and the forms of a given language, in ways peculiar to that language. [34] Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky read Sapir's work and experimentally studied the ways in which the development of concepts in children was influenced by structures given in language. His 1934 work "Thought and Language" [35] has been compared to Whorf's and taken as mutually supportive evidence of language's influence on cognition. [36] Drawing on Nietzsche's ideas of perspectivism Alfred Korzybski developed the theory of general semantics that has been compared to Whorf's notions of linguistic relativity. [37] Though influential in their own right, this work has not been influential in the debate on linguistic relativity, which has tended to be based on the American paradigm exemplified by Sapir and Whorf.

Benjamin Lee Whorf

More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he termed the "linguistic relativity principle". [38] Studying Native American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought remain under contention. However, a version of theory holds some "merit", for example, "different words mean different things in different languages; not every word in every language has a one-to-one exact translation in a different language" [39] Critics such as Lenneberg, [40] Black, and Pinker [41] attribute to Whorf a strong linguistic determinism, while Lucy, Silverstein and Levinson point to Whorf's explicit rejections of determinism, and where he contends that translation and commensuration are possible.

Detractors such as Lenneberg, [40] Chomsky and Pinker [42] criticized him for insufficient clarity of his description of how language influences thought, and for not proving his conjectures. Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were associated with what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words:

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. 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 kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of 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 way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. [43]

Whorf's illustration of the difference between the English and Shawnee gestalt construction of cleaning a gun with a ramrod. From the article "Science and Linguistics", originally published in the MIT Technology Review, 1940. Whorf Shawnee Example.png
Whorf's illustration of the difference between the English and Shawnee gestalt construction of cleaning a gun with a ramrod. From the article "Science and Linguistics", originally published in the MIT Technology Review, 1940.

Several terms for a single concept

Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where a non-European language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of less-studied languages).

One of Whorf's examples was the supposedly large number of words for 'snow' in the Inuit languages, an example that later was contested as a misrepresentation. [44]

Another is the Hopi language's words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water. [45]

These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that non-European languages sometimes made more specific semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or water, is not always possible. [46]

Another example is from Whorf's experience as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector. [44] While inspecting a chemical plant he observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels, no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous because of the flammable vapors still in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word empty in association to the barrels had resulted in the workers unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg [40] as not actually demonstrating causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead was an example of circular reasoning. Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human insight rather than language. [42]

Time in Hopi

Whorf's most elaborate argument for linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi. [47] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years", but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.

Ekkehart Malotki later claimed that he had found no evidence of Whorf's claims in 1980's era Hopi speakers, nor in historical documents dating back to the arrival of Europeans. Malotki used evidence from archaeological data, calendars, historical documents, and modern speech; he concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time in the way Whorf suggested. Many universalist scholars such as Pinker consider Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi, whereas relativist scholars such as John A Lucy and Penny Lee criticized Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a model of analysis that does not fit the data. [48]

Structure-centered approach

Whorf's argument about Hopi speakers' conceptualization of time is an example of the structure-centered method of research into linguistic relativity, which Lucy identified as one of three main types of research of the topic. [49] The "structure-centered" method starts with a language's structural peculiarity and examines its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The defining example is Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is Lucy's research describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by English speakers. [50] However, philosophers including Donald Davidson and Jason Josephson Storm have argued that Whorf's Hopi examples are self-refuting, as Whorf had to translate Hopi terms into English in order to explain how they are untranslatable. [51]

Whorf dies

Whorf died in 1941 at age 44, leaving multiple unpublished papers. His ideas were continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Hoijer and Lee, who both continued investigating the effect of language on habitual thought, and Trager, who prepared a number of Whorf's papers for posthumous publishing. The most important event for the dissemination of Whorf's ideas to a larger public was the publication in 1956 of his major writings on the topic of linguistic relativity in a single volume titled Language, Thought and Reality.

Brown and Lenneberg

In 1953, Eric Lenneberg criticized Whorf's examples from an objectivist philosophy of language, claiming that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world, and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent. He argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's idea of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity. However Whorf was concerned with how the habitual use of language influences habitual behavior, rather than translatability. Whorf's point was that while English speakers may be able to understand how a Hopi speaker thinks, they do not think in that way. [52]

Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed the necessary association between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such an association required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior. They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and published their findings in 1954. Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own. Their two tenets were (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure". [53] Brown later developed them into the so-called "weak" and "strong" formulation:

  • Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the language.
  • The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language. [54]

Brown's formulations became known widely and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.

Joshua Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind"

Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf's true assertion was largely overlooked. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a "neo-Herderian champion" [55] and in 1982, he proposed "Whorfianism of the third kind" in an attempt to reemphasize what he claimed was Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic value of "little peoples" and "little languages". [56] Whorf had criticized Ogden's Basic English thus:

But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English [...] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. [...] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness. [57]

Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language is a key to culture.

Leiden school

The Leiden school is a linguistic theory that models languages as parasites. Notable proponent Frederik Kortlandt, in a 1985 paper outlining Leiden school theory, advocates for a form of linguistic relativity: "The observation that in all Yuman languages the word for 'work' is a loan from Spanish should be a major blow to any current economic theory." In the next paragraph, he quotes directly from Sapir: "Even in the most primitive cultures the strategic word is likely to be more powerful than the direct blow." [58]

Rethinking Linguistic Relativity

The publication of the 1996 anthology Rethinking Linguistic Relativity edited by Gumperz and Levinson began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that emphasized cognitive and social aspects. The book included studies on linguistic relativity and universalist traditions. Levinson documented significant linguistic relativity effects in the different linguistic conceptualization of spatial categories in different languages. For example, men speaking the Guugu Yimithirr language in Queensland gave accurate navigation instructions using a compass-like system of north, south, east and west, along with a hand gesture pointing to the starting direction. [59]

Lucy defines this method as "domain-centered" because researchers select a semantic domain and compare it across linguistic and cultural groups. [49] Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for linguistic relativity studies. [60] Spatial categories vary greatly across languages. Speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many ordinary tasks. Levinson and others reported three basic spatial categorizations. While many languages use combinations of them, some languages exhibit only one type and related behaviors. For example, Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations—the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. Speakers define a location as "north of the house", while an English speaker may use relative positions, saying "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house". [61]

Separate studies by Bowerman and Slobin analyzed the role of language in cognitive processes. Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to linguistic relativity.[ clarification needed ] [62] Slobin described another kind of cognitive process that he named "thinking for speaking"—- the kind of process in which perceptional data and other kinds of prelinguistic cognition are translated into linguistic terms for communication.[ clarification needed ] These, Slobin argues, are the kinds of cognitive process that are the basis of linguistic relativity. [63]

Colour terminology

Brown and Lenneberg

Since Brown and Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denoted by language was the same for speakers of all languages, they decided to test how different languages codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be proven to affect behavior. Brown and Lenneberg designed experiments involving the codification of colors. In their first experiment, they investigated whether it was easier for speakers of English to remember color shades for which they had a specific name than to remember colors that were not as easily definable by words. This allowed them to compare the linguistic categorization directly to a non-linguistic task. In a later experiment, speakers of two languages that categorize colors differently (English and Zuni) were asked to recognize colors. In this manner, it could be determined whether the differing color categories of the two speakers would determine their ability to recognize nuances within color categories. Brown and Lenneberg found that Zuni speakers who classify green and blue together as a single color did have trouble recognizing and remembering nuances within the green/blue category. [64] This method, which Lucy later classified as domain-centered, [49] is acknowledged to be sub-optimal, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is hardwired into the neural system and as such is subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains.

Hugo Magnus

In a similar study done by German ophthalmologist Hugo Magnus during the 1870s, he circulated a questionnaire to missionaries and traders with ten standardized color samples and instructions for using them. These instructions contained an explicit warning that failure of a language to distinguish lexically between two colors did not necessarily imply that speakers of that language did not distinguish the two colors perceptually. Magnus received completed questionnaires on twenty-five African, fifteen Asian, three Australian, and two European languages. He concluded in part, "As regards the range of the color sense of the primitive peoples tested with our questionnaire, it appears in general to remain within the same bounds as the color sense of the civilized nations. At least, we could not establish a complete lack of the perception of the so-called main colors as a special racial characteristic of any one of the tribes investigated for us. We consider red, yellow, green, and blue as the main representatives of the colors of long and short wavelength; among the tribes we tested not a one lacks the knowledge of any of these four colors" (Magnus 1880, p. 6, as trans. in Berlin and Kay 1969, p. 141). Magnus did find widespread lexical neutralization of green and blue, that is, a single word covering both these colors, as have all subsequent comparative studies of color lexicons. [65]

Response to Brown and Lenneberg's study

Brown and Lenneberg's study began a tradition of investigation of linguistic relativity through color terminology. The studies showed a correlation between color term numbers and ease of recall in both Zuni and English speakers. Researchers attributed this to focal colors having greater codability than less focal colors, and not with linguistic relativity effects. Berlin/Kay found universal typological color principles that are determined by biological rather than linguistic factors. [66] This study sparked studies into typological universals of color terminology. Researchers such as Lucy, [49] Saunders [67] and Levinson [68] argued that Berlin and Kay's study does not refute linguistic relativity in color naming, because of unsupported assumptions in their study (such as whether all cultures in fact have a clearly defined category of "color") and because of related data problems. Researchers such as Maclaury continued investigation into color naming. Like Berlin and Kay, Maclaury concluded that the domain is governed mostly by physical-biological universals. [69] [70]

Berlin and Kay

Studies by Berlin and Kay continued Lenneberg's color research. They studied color terminology formation and showed clear universal trends in color naming. For example, they found that even though languages have different color terminologies, they generally recognize certain hues as more focal than others. They showed that in languages with few color terms, it is predictable from the number of terms which hues are chosen as focal colors: For example, languages with only three color terms always have the focal colors black, white, and red. [66] The fact that what had been believed to be random differences between color naming in different languages could be shown to follow universal patterns was seen as a powerful argument against linguistic relativity. [71] Berlin and Kay's research has since been criticized by relativists such as Lucy, who argued that Berlin and Kay's conclusions were skewed by their insistence that color terms encode only color information. [50] This, Lucy argues, made them unaware of the instances in which color terms provided other information that might be considered examples of linguistic relativity.

Universalism

Universalist scholars began a period of dissent from ideas about linguistic relativity. Lenneberg was one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the Universalist theory of language that was formulated by Chomsky as universal grammar, effectively arguing that all languages share the same underlying structure. The Chomskyan school also includes the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages are surface phenomena that do not affect the brain's universal cognitive processes. This theory became the dominant paradigm of American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s, while linguistic relativity became the object of ridicule. [72]

Ekkehart Malotki

Other universalist researchers dedicated themselves to dispelling other aspects of linguistic relativity, often attacking Whorf's specific examples. For example, Malotki's monumental study of time expressions in Hopi presented many examples that challenged Whorf's "timeless" interpretation of Hopi language and culture, [73] but seemingly failed to address the linguistic relativist argument actually posed by Whorf (i.e. that the understanding of time by native Hopi speakers differed from that of speakers of European languages due to the differences in the organization and construction of their respective languages; Whorf never claimed that Hopi speakers lacked any concept of time). [74] Malotki himself acknowledges that the conceptualizations are different, but because he ignores Whorf's use of quotes around the word "time" and the qualifier "what we call", takes Whorf to be arguing that the Hopi have no concept of time at all. [75] [76] [77]

Steven Pinker

Currently many believers of the universalist school of thought still oppose linguistic relativity. For example, Pinker argues in The Language Instinct that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, termed "mentalese". Pinker attacks what he terms "Whorf's radical position", declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make". [42]

Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's ideas and committing the Strawman fallacy. [78] [79] [52]

Cognitive linguistics

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. [80] One of those who adopted a more Whorfian philosophy was George Lakoff. He argued that language is often used metaphorically and that languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think. For example, English employs conceptual metaphors likening time to money, so that time can be saved and spent and invested, whereas other languages do not talk about time in that manner. Other such metaphors are common to many languages because they are based on general human experience, for example, metaphors associating up with good and bad with down. Lakoff also argued that metaphor plays an important part in political debates such as the "right to life" or the "right to choose"; or "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers". [81]

An unpublished study by Boroditsky et al. in 2003 reported to have found empirical evidence favoring the hypothesis demonstrating that differences in the grammatical gender systems of languages can affect the way speakers of those languages think about objects. Speakers of Spanish and German, which have different gender systems, were asked to use adjectives to describe various objects that were either masculine or feminine in their respective languages. They reported that speakers tended to describe objects in ways that were consistent with the gender of the noun in their language, indicating that the gender system of a language can influence speakers' perceptions of objects. Despite numerous citations, the experiment was criticised after the reported effects could not be replicated by independent trials. [82] [83] Additionally, a large-scale data analysis using word embeddings of language models found no correlation between adjectives and inanimate noun genders, [84] while another study using large text corpora found a slight correlation between the gender of animate and inanimate nouns and their adjectives as well as verbs by measuring their mutual information. [85]

Parameters

In his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, [52] Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's ideas about how linguistic categorization represents and/or influences mental categories. He concluded that the debate had been confused. He described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity:

Lakoff concluded that many of Whorf's critics had criticized him using novel definitions of linguistic relativity, rendering their criticisms moot.

Refinements

Researchers such as Boroditsky, Choi, Majid, Lucy and Levinson believe that language influences thought in more limited ways than the broadest early claims. Researchers examine the interface between thought (or cognition), language and culture and describe the relevant influences. They use experimental data to back up their conclusions. [86] [87] Kay ultimately concluded that "[the] Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left". [88] His findings show that accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective.

Behavior-centered research

Recent studies have also used a "behavior-based" method, which starts by comparing behavior across linguistic groups and then searches for causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. [49] In an early example of this method, Whorf attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word 'empty' to describe barrels containing only explosive vapors.

More recently, Bloom noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counterfactual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. He concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese. Other researchers attributed this result to Bloom's flawed translations. [89] Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a greater occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process while Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker. [90]

Everett on Pirahã

Everett's work on the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon [91] found several peculiarities that he interpreted as corresponding to linguistically rare features, such as a lack of numbers and color terms in the way those are otherwise defined and the absence of certain types of clauses. Everett's conclusions were met with skepticism from universalists [92] who claimed that the linguistic deficit is explained by the lack of need for such concepts. [93]

Mandarin and Thai

Recent research with non-linguistic experiments in languages with different grammatical properties (e.g., languages with and without numeral classifiers or with different gender grammar systems) showed that language differences in human categorization are due to such differences. [94] Experimental research suggests that this linguistic influence on thought diminishes over time, as when speakers of one language are exposed to another. [95]

Swedish and Spanish

A study published by the American Psychological Association's Journal of Experimental Psychology claimed that language can influence how one estimates time. The study considered three groups: those who spoke only Swedish, those who spoke only Spanish and bilingual speakers who spoke both of those languages. Swedish speakers describe time using distance terms like "long" or "short" while Spanish speakers do it using quantity related terms like "much" or "little". The researchers asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed while watching a line growing across a screen, or a container being filled, or both. The researchers stated that "When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity." When the bilinguals were prompted with the word duración (the Spanish word for duration) they based their time estimates of how full the containers were, ignoring the growing lines. When prompted with the word tid (the Swedish word for duration), they estimated the time elapsed solely by the distance the lines had traveled. [96] [97]

Pronoun-dropping

Kashima & Kashima observed a correlation between the perceived individualism or collectivism in the social norms of a given country, with the tendency to neglect the use of pronouns in the country's language. They argued that explicit reference to "you" and "I" reinforces a distinction between the self and the other in the speaker. [98]

Future tense

A 2013 study found that those who speak "futureless" languages with no grammatical marking of the future tense save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese than those who do not. [99] This effect has come to be termed the linguistic-savings hypothesis and has been replicated in several cross-cultural and cross-country studies. However, a study of Chinese, which can be spoken both with and without the grammatical future marking "will", found that subjects do not behave more impatiently when "will" is used repetitively. This laboratory-based finding of elective variation within a single language does not refute the linguistic savings hypothesis but some have suggested that it shows the effect may be due to culture or other non-linguistic factors. [100]

Psycholinguistic research

Psycholinguistic studies explored motion perception, emotion perception, object representation and memory. [101] [102] [103] [104] The gold standard of psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is now finding non-linguistic cognitive differences[ example needed ] in speakers of different languages (thus rendering inapplicable Pinker's criticism that linguistic relativity is "circular").

Recent work with bilingual speakers attempts to distinguish the effects of language from those of culture on bilingual cognition including perceptions of time, space, motion, colors and emotion. [105] Researchers described differences[ example needed ] between bilinguals and monolinguals in perception of color, [106] representations of time [107] and other elements of cognition.

One experiment found that speakers of languages without numbers greater than two had difficulty counting the number of taps, for example, making more errors distinguishing between six and seven taps. [108] Presumably this is because they could not count the taps using numbers repeated in the phonological loop.

Other domains

Linguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought and emotion could be influenced by manipulating language.

Science and philosophy

The question bears on philosophical, psychological, linguistic and anthropological questions.[ clarification needed ]

A major question is whether human psychological faculties are mostly innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning, and hence subject to cultural and social processes such as language. The innate opinion is that humans share the same set of basic faculties, and that variability due to cultural differences is less important and that the human mind is a mostly biological construction, so that all humans sharing the same neurological configuration can be expected to have similar cognitive patterns.

Multiple alternatives have advocates. The contrary constructivist position holds that human faculties and concepts are largely influenced by socially constructed and learned categories, without many biological restrictions. Another variant is idealist, which holds that human mental capacities are generally unrestricted by biological-material structures. Another is essentialist, which holds that essential differences[ clarification needed ] may influence the ways individuals or groups experience and conceptualize the world. Yet another is relativist (cultural relativism), which sees different cultural groups as employing different conceptual schemes that are not necessarily compatible or commensurable, nor more or less in accord with external reality. [109]

Another debate considers whether thought is a type of internal speech or is independent of and prior to language. [110]

In the philosophy of language the question addresses the relations between language, knowledge and the external world, and the concept of truth. Philosophers such as Putnam, Fodor, Davidson, and Dennett see language as representing directly entities from the objective world and that categorization reflect that world. Other philosophers (e.g. Quine, Searle, and Foucault) argue that categorization and conceptualization is subjective and arbitrary. Another view, represented by Storm, seeks a third way by emphasizing how language changes and imperfectly represents reality without being completely divorced from ontology. [111]

Another question is whether language is a tool for representing and referring to objects in the world, or whether it is a system used to construct mental representations that can be communicated.[ clarification needed ]

Therapy and self-development

Sapir/Whorf contemporary Alfred Korzybski was independently developing his theory of general semantics, which was intended to use language's influence of thinking to maximize human cognitive abilities. Korzybski's thinking was influenced by logical philosophy such as Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . [112] Although Korzybski was not aware of Sapir and Whorf's writings, the philosophy was adopted by Whorf-admirer Stuart Chase, who fused Whorf's interest in cultural-linguistic variation with Korzybski's programme in his popular work "The Tyranny of Words". S. I. Hayakawa was a follower and popularizer of Korzybski's work, writing Language in Thought and Action . The general semantics philosophy influenced the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), another therapeutic technique that seeks to use awareness of language use to influence cognitive patterns. [113]

Korzybski independently described a "strong" version of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. [114]

We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of s[emantic] r[eactions] and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us.

— Korzybski (1930) [115]

Artificial languages

In their fiction, authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell explored how linguistic relativity might be exploited for political purposes. In Rand's Anthem, a fictive communist society removed the possibility of individualism by removing the word "I" from the language. [116] In Orwell's 1984 the authoritarian state created the language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think critically about the government, or even to contemplate that they might be impoverished or oppressed, by reducing the number of words to reduce the thought of the locutor. [117]

Others have been fascinated by the possibilities of creating new languages that could enable new, and perhaps better, ways of thinking. Examples of such languages designed to explore the human mind include Loglan, explicitly designed by James Cooke Brown to test the linguistic relativity hypothesis, by experimenting whether it would make its speakers think more logically. Suzette Haden Elgin, who was involved with the early development of neuro-linguistic programming, invented the language Láadan to explore linguistic relativity by making it easier to express what Elgin considered the female worldview, as opposed to Standard Average European languages, which she considered to convey a "male centered" worldview. [118] John Quijada's language Ithkuil was designed to explore the limits of the number of cognitive categories a language can keep its speakers aware of at once. [119] Similarly, Sonja Lang's Toki Pona was developed according to a Taoist philosophy for exploring how (or if) such a language would direct human thought. [120]

Programming languages

APL programming language originator Kenneth E. Iverson believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning it by name). His Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms. [121] [122]

The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top. Thus, the so-called blub paradox (after a hypothetical programming language of average complexity called Blub) says that anyone preferentially using some particular programming language will know that it is more powerful than some, but not that it is less powerful than others. The reason is that writing in some language means thinking in that language. Hence the paradox, because typically programmers are "satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs". [123]

In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel Babel-17 , based on the Whorf Hypothesis. [124]

Science fiction

Numerous examples of linguistic relativity have appeared in science fiction.

Sociolinguistics and linguistic relativity

The manner in which sociolinguistics [127] plays a role in variables within language, like the manner in which words are pronounced, word selection in certain dialogue, context, and tone, suggests it may have implications for linguistic relativity.

See also

Citations

  1. ↑ Ottenheimer, Harriet (2009). The anthropology of language : an introduction to linguistic anthropology (2 ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. pp. 33–34. ISBN   978-0-495-50884-7. OCLC   216940204.
  2. ↑ Leavitt 2010, p. 3.
  3. 1 2 Boroditsky, Lera; Liberman, Mark (13–23 December 2010). "For and Against Linguistic Relativity". The Economist . The Economist Newspaper Limited. Archived from the original on 15 February 2012. Retrieved 19 September 2019. (a debate between university professors)
  4. 1 2 Ahearn, Laura M. (2012). Living language : an introduction to linguistic anthropology. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. p. 69. ISBN   978-1-4443-4056-3. OCLC   729731177.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  5. ↑ Hill & Mannheim 1992.
  6. ↑ Kennison, Shelia M. (2013). Introduction to language development (1 ed.). Los Angeles: Sage. p. 207. ISBN   978-1412996068. Scholars have noted that Sapir's view may have reflected a weaker version of the hypothesis than the view of Whorf (Rollins, 1980). However, others point out that Whorf's own writings suggest that his view may have fluctuated between the weak and strong versions (Carroll, 1956).
  7. ↑ Koerner 1992, p. 180.
  8. ↑ "The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis", in Hoijer 1954 , pp. 92–105.
  9. ↑ This usage is now generally considered as a misnomer. As Jane Hill and Bruce Mannheim write: Yet, just as the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire the "Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis" is neither consistent with the writings of Sapir and Whorf, nor a hypothesis ( Hill & Mannheim 1992 , p. 386)
  10. 1 2 Koerner, E.F.K. "Towards a full pedigree of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis: from Locke to Lucy", chapter in Pütz & Verspoor 2000 , p. 17.
  11. ↑ Wolff & Holmes 2011.
  12. ↑ McComiskey, Bruce (2002). Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric. SIU Press. ISBN   978-0-8093-2397-5.
  13. ↑ Gumperz & Levinson 1996, p. 2.
  14. ↑ Leavitt 2010, p. 75.
  15. ↑ Robert L. Miller The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics p. 18.
  16. ↑ McAfee 2004.
  17. ↑ Quoted in Bernard D. Den Ouden, Language and Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Essay in Chomskyan Humanism, p. 25.
  18. 1 2 Trabant, Jürgen. "How relativistic are Humboldts "Weltansichten"?", in Pütz & Verspoor 2000.
  19. ↑ Kahane, Henry; Kahane, Renée (1983). "Humanistic linguistics". The Journal of Aesthetic Education. 17 (4): 65–89. doi:10.2307/3332265. JSTOR   3332265.
  20. ↑ Beek, Wouter. "Linguistic Relativism Variants and Misconceptions" (PDF). Universiteit van Amsterdam. Archived (PDF) from the original on 26 January 2021. Retrieved 18 November 2022. Linguistic relativism is a relatively new concept, it did not exist in the Enlightenment. It was posed for the first time, as will be treated below, in the Romantic era by Hamann and Herder, and later by Humboldt.
  21. ↑ Migge & Léglise 2007.
  22. ↑ Seuren 1998, p. 180.
  23. ↑ Seuren 1998, p. 181.
  24. ↑ Dall, Wm. H.; Boas, Franz (1887). "Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification". Science. 9 (228): 587–589. Bibcode:1887Sci.....9..587D. doi:10.1126/science.ns-9.228.587. ISSN   0036-8075. JSTOR   1762958. PMID   17779724. S2CID   46250503.
  25. ↑ Ottenheimer, Harriet (2009). The anthropology of language : an introduction to linguistic anthropology (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. p. 8. ISBN   978-0-495-50884-7. OCLC   216940204.
  26. ↑ Boas, Franz (1911). Introduction. Handbook of American Indian Languages. vol. 1, p. 1–83. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology). p. 73.
  27. ↑ Boas, Franz (1911). Handbook of American Indian languages. Vol. 1. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington: Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology).
  28. ↑ Leavitt 2010, p. 133.
  29. ↑ Sapir, Edward (1929), "The status of linguistics as a science", Language, 5 (4): 207–214, doi:10.2307/409588, hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-002C-4321-4 , JSTOR   409588, S2CID   147181342
  30. ↑ Sapir, Edward; Swadesh, Morris (1946). American Indian Grammatical Categories. pp. 100–107.
  31. ↑ Sapir 1921, p. 213–4.
  32. ↑ Sapir 1921, p. 215.
  33. ↑ Leavitt 2010, p. 135.
  34. ↑ For a critique of Weisgerber, see, for example: Beat Lehmann (1998), ROT ist nicht ″rot″ ist nicht [rot]. Eine Bilanz und Neuinterpretation der linguistischen Relativitätstheorie. Gunter Narr, Tübingen. pp. 58–80; Iwar Werlen (2002), 'Das Worten der Welt', in: Lexikologie ... Ein internationales Handbuch, ed. by D. Alan Cruse et al., Walter de Gruyter, Berlin & New York, 1. pp. 380–391.
  35. ↑ Vygotsky, L. (1934/1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  36. ↑ Lucy & Wertsch 1987.
  37. ↑ Pula 1992.
  38. ↑ Whorf 1956, p. 214.
  39. ↑ "Linguistic Relativity". Nursing Hero. Archived from the original on 9 May 2024.
  40. 1 2 3 Lenneberg 1953.
  41. ↑ Pinker 1994, pp. 59–64.
  42. 1 2 3 Pinker 1994, p. 60.
  43. ↑ Whorf 1956, p. 212–214.
  44. 1 2 Pullum 1991.
  45. ↑ Whorf 2012, p. 182.
  46. ↑ Whorf 2012, p. 203.
  47. ↑ Whorf 1956.
  48. ↑ Lee 1996, Leavitt 2011 , pp. 179–187, Lucy 1992b , p. 286, Lucy 1996 , p. 43, Dinwoodie 2006.
  49. 1 2 3 4 5 Lucy, J. A. (1997). "The linguistics of 'color'". In C.L. Hardin & L. Maffi (eds.), Color categories in thought and language (pp. 320–436). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  50. 1 2 Lucy 1992b.
  51. ↑ Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism : the future of theory. Chicago. p. 185. ISBN   978-0-226-78679-7. OCLC   1249473210.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  52. 1 2 3 Lakoff 1987.
  53. ↑ Brown & Lenneberg 1954, p. 455,457.
  54. ↑ Brown 1976, p. 128.
  55. ↑ Fishman 1978.
  56. ↑ Fishman 1982, p. 5.
  57. ↑ Whorf 1956, p. 244.
  58. ↑ Kortlandt, Frederik (1985). "A Parasitological View of Non-Constructible Sets" (PDF). In Pieper, Ursula; Stickel, Gerhard (eds.). Studia linguistica diachronica et synchronica. De Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110850604. ISBN   9783110850604.
  59. ↑ Levinson 1998, p. 13.
  60. ↑ Lucy 1997, p. 301.
  61. ↑ Levinson 1996.
  62. ↑ Bowerman, Melissa (1974). "Learning the Structure of Causative Verbs: A Study in the Relationship of Cognitive, Semantic and Syntactic Development." Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, no. 8. Stanford University, California Committee on Linguistics.
  63. ↑ Slobin, Dan I. (1987). "Thinking for Speaking." Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. p. 435–445.
  64. ↑ D'Andrade 1995, p. 185.
  65. ↑ P. Kay, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001
  66. 1 2 Berlin & Kay 1969.
  67. ↑ Saunders, Barbara (2000). "Revisiting Basic Color Terms". Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 6: 81–99. doi:10.1111/1467-9655.00005.
  68. ↑ Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). "Yeli Dnye and the Theory of Basic Color Terms". Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 10: 3–55. doi:10.1525/jlin.2000.10.1.3. hdl: 11858/00-001M-0000-0013-2A6B-F .
  69. ↑ MacLaury, Robert E.; Hewes, Gordon W.; Kinnear, Paul R.; Deregowski, J. B.; Merrifield, William R.; Saunders, B. a. C.; Stanlaw, James; Toren, Christina; Van Brakel, J. (1 April 1992). "From Brightness to Hue: An Explanatory Model of Color-Category Evolution [and Comments and Reply]". Current Anthropology. 33 (2): 137–186. doi:10.1086/204049. ISSN   0011-3204. S2CID   144088006.
  70. ↑ MacLaury, Robert E. (1 January 1997). Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica: Constructing Categories as Vantages. University of Texas Press. ISBN   978-0-292-75193-4.
  71. ↑ Gumperz & Levinson 1996, p. 6.
  72. ↑ Gumperz & Levinson 1996, p. 3, 6.
  73. ↑ Malotki 1983.
  74. ↑ Lucy 1996.
  75. ↑ Lucy 1992b, p. 286.
  76. ↑ Leavitt 2011, p. 180.
  77. ↑ Levinson 2012, p. xii.
  78. ↑ Casasanto 2008.
  79. ↑ Lucy 1992a.
  80. ↑ Seidner 1982.
  81. ↑ Lakoff, George (1980). Metaphors we live by. Mark Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   0-226-46801-1. OCLC   6042798.
  82. ↑ Mickan, Anne; Schiefke, Maren; Stefanowitsch, Anatol (1 November 2014). "Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003". Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. 2 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1515/gcla-2014-0004. ISSN   2197-2796. S2CID   147302364.
  83. ↑ Elpers, Nan; Jensen, Greg; Holmes, Kevin J. (1 December 2022). "Does grammatical gender affect object concepts? Registered replication of Phillips and Boroditsky (2003)". Journal of Memory and Language. 127: 104357. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2022.104357. ISSN   0749-596X. S2CID   251419363.
  84. ↑ Kann, Katharina (2019). "Grammatical Gender, Neo-Whorfianism, and Word Embeddings: A Data-Driven Approach to Linguistic Relativity". arXiv: 1910.09729 [cs.CL].
  85. ↑ Williams, Adina; Cotterell, Ryan; Wolf-Sonkin, Lawrence; Blasi, Damián; Wallach, Hanna (2020). "On the Relationships Between the Grammatical Genders of Inanimate Nouns and Their Co-Occurring Adjectives and Verbs". arXiv: 2005.01204 [cs.CL].
  86. ↑ Gentner, Dedre; Boroditsky, Lera (2001). "Individuation, relativity, and early word development". In Melissa Bowerman and Stephen Levinson (ed.). Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development . Cambridge University Press. pp.  215–256. ISBN   978-0-521-59659-6.
  87. ↑ Levinson, Stephen (2001). "Covariation between spatial language and cognition, and its implications for language learning". In Melissa Bowerman and Stephen Levinson (ed.). Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development . Cambridge University Press. pp.  566–588. ISBN   978-0-521-59659-6.
  88. ↑ Gilbert, Aubrey L.; Regier, Terry; Kay, Paul; Ivry, Richard B. (10 January 2006). "Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 103 (2): 489–494. Bibcode:2006PNAS..103..489G. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0509868103 . ISSN   0027-8424. PMC   1326182 . PMID   16387848.
  89. ↑ Au, T. (1984). "Counterfactuals: In reply to Alfred Bloom". Cognition. 17 (3): 289–302. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(84)90012-X. S2CID   53204914.
  90. ↑ Lucy 1997, p. 304.
  91. ↑ Everett, Daniel L. (2005), "Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã" (PDF), Current Anthropology, 46 (4): 621–646, doi:10.1086/431525, hdl: 2066/41103 , S2CID   2223235 , retrieved 1 October 2012
  92. ↑ Frank, Michael C.; Everett, Daniel L.; Fedorenko, Evelina; Gibson, Edward (2008), "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" (PDF), Cognition, vol. 108, no. 3, pp. 819–24, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2008.04.007, PMID   18547557, S2CID   14863459, archived from the original (PDF) on 15 February 2010, retrieved 14 May 2009
  93. ↑ Ira Nevins, Andrew; Pesetsky, David; Rodrigues, Cilene (2009). "Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment" (PDF). Language. 85 (2): 355–404. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.404.9474 . doi:10.1353/lan.0.0107. hdl:1721.1/94631. S2CID   15798043.
  94. ↑ Kou, J. Y.; Sera, M. D. (2007). "Classifier effect on human categorization: the role of shape classifiers in Chinese Chinese. In". Journal of East Asian Linguistics. 18: 1–19. doi:10.1007/s10831-008-9036-6. S2CID   120382476.
  95. ↑ Bross, Fabian; Pfaller, Philip (2012). "The decreasing Whorf-effect: a study in the classifier systems of Mandarin and Thai" (PDF). Journal of Unsolved Questions . 2 (2): S19–S24.
  96. ↑ Pandey, Avaneesh (3 May 2017). "The Language You Speak Affects How Your Brain Experiences The Passage of Time". International Business Times. Retrieved 15 December 2019.
  97. ↑ Pierre, Kendra (9 May 2017). "The language you speak changes your perception of time". Popsci.com. Retrieved 4 June 2018.
  98. ↑ Kashima, E., & Kashima, Y. (1998). Culture and language: The case of cultural dimensions and personal pronoun use. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 29, 461–486.
  99. ↑ Chen, M. Keith (1 April 2013). "The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets" (PDF). American Economic Review. 103 (2): 690–731. doi:10.1257/aer.103.2.690. PMID   29524925.
  100. ↑ Chen, Josie I.; He, Tai-Sen; Riyanto, Yohanes E. (November 2019). "The effect of language on economic behavior: Examining the causal link between future tense and time preference in the lab". European Economic Review. 120: 103307. doi:10.1016/j.euroecorev.2019.103307. hdl: 10356/142990 . S2CID   203248774.
  101. ↑ Hickmann, Maya; Robert, Stéphane (16 May 2006). "The relativity of motion in first language acquisition". Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories. John Benjamins Publishing. pp. 281–308. ISBN   978-90-272-9355-8.
  102. ↑ Perlovsky, Leonid (2009). "Language and emotions: Emotional Sapir–Whorf hypothesis". Neural Networks. 22 (5–6): 518–526. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2009.06.034. ISSN   0893-6080. PMID   19616406.
  103. ↑ Mazuka, Reiko; Friedman, Ronald S. (2000). "Linguistic Relativity in Japanese and English: Is Language the Primary Determinant in Object Classification?". Journal of East Asian Linguistics. 9 (4): 353–377. doi:10.1023/A:1008356620617. ISSN   0925-8558. S2CID   118785578.
  104. ↑ Pavlenko, A. (2003). "Eyewitness memory in late bilinguals: Evidence for discursive relativity". International Journal of Bilingualism. 7 (3): 257–281. doi:10.1177/13670069030070030301. ISSN   1367-0069. S2CID   144633646.
  105. ↑ Pavlenko 1999, Cook & Bassetti 2010, Athanasopoulos 2009, Phillips & Boroditsky 2003.
  106. ↑ Andrews 1994.
  107. ↑ Boroditsky, Ham & Ramscar 2002.
  108. ↑ "The birth of a language". Subtitle (Podcast). 24 June 2020.
  109. ↑ Leavitt 2011.
  110. ↑ Raykowski, Wes (2014). Conceptual Understructure of Human Experience: Volume 1 (Thesis).
  111. ↑ Josephson-Storm, Jason Ānanda (2021). Metamodernism : the future of theory. Chicago. pp. 186–7. ISBN   978-0-226-78679-7. OCLC   1249473210.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  112. ↑ Korzybski, Alfred (1949). Time-binding: The General Theory : Two Papers 1924–1926. Institute of General Semantics. pp. (5), 54.
  113. ↑ Wake, Lisa (31 March 2008). Neurolinguistic Psychotherapy: A Postmodern Perspective. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-134-09482-0.
  114. ↑ Read, Allen Walker (1983). "The Semiotic Aspect of Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics" (PDF). ETC: A Review of General Semantics. 1. 40 (1). JSTOR: 16–21. doi:10.5840/cpsem19828. JSTOR   42576577. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 April 2014. Retrieved 20 January 2013.
  115. ↑ Korzybski, Alfred (1958). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Institute of GS. ISBN   978-0-937298-01-5.
  116. ↑ "Critical Essays The Meaning and Importance of "I" in Anthem". CliffNotes. 2021. Retrieved 25 October 2021.
  117. ↑ Pinker 1994, chap. 3.
  118. ↑ Okrent, Arika (2009), In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language , Spiegel & Grau, pp.  208–257, ISBN   978-0-385-52788-0
  119. ↑ Foer, Joshua (24 December 2012). "UTOPIAN FOR BEGINNERS: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented". The New York Times.
  120. ↑ A Million Words and Counting: How Global English Is Rewriting the World, Paul J. J. Payack, (C) 2007, p. 194.
  121. ↑ Iverson, Kenneth E. (August 1980). "Notation as a tool of thought". Communications of the ACM . 23 (8): 444–465. doi: 10.1145/358896.358899 . S2CID   14177211.
  122. ↑ "Kenneth E. Iverson - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". amturing.acm.org. Retrieved 5 April 2024.
  123. ↑ Graham 2004.
  124. ↑ "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby (or, how to create Babel-17)". Archived from the original on 11 August 2003.
  125. ↑ "The Art of Fiction, No 210". The Paris Review. Retrieved 7 March 2021.
  126. ↑ "The science behind the movie 'Arrival'". The Washington Post. Retrieved 23 April 2017.
  127. ↑ "Models of Language and Culture". College Sidekick. Archived from the original on 23 March 2024.

Sources

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Lee Whorf</span> American linguist (1897–1941)

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer best known for proposing the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He believed that the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. Whorf saw this idea, named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, as having implications similar to those of Einstein's principle of physical relativity. However, the concept originated from 19th-century philosophy and thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wilhelm Wundt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Sapir</span> American linguist and anthropologist (1884–1939)

Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Eric Heinz Lenneberg was a linguist and neurologist who pioneered ideas on language acquisition and cognitive psychology, particularly in terms of the concept of innateness.

Ethnolinguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural behavior of the people who speak those languages.

Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, United States.

The study of how language influences thought, and vice-versa, has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is a strong and a weak version of the hypothesis which argue for more or less influence of language on thought. The strong version, linguistic determinism, argues that without language there is and can be no thought, while the weak version, linguistic relativity, supports the idea that there are some influences from language on thought. And on the opposing side, there are 'language of thought' theories (LOTH) which believe that public language is inessential to private thought. LOTH theories address the debate of whether thought is possible without language which is related to the question of whether language evolved for thought. These ideas are difficult to study because it proves challenging to parse the effects of culture versus thought versus language in all academic fields.

Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will affect their thought process and therefore people will have different thought processes based on their mother tongues.

Alfred H. Bloom is an American psychologist and linguist. He was the executive vice chancellor of Duke Kunshan University from 2020 to 2021. Before that, he was the vice chancellor of New York University Abu Dhabi from 2008 to 2019 and the president of Swarthmore College from 1991 to 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lera Boroditsky</span> American cognitive scientist

Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of a National Science Foundation Career award, and an American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientist. She is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego. She previously served on the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford University.

Stephen C. Levinson FBA is a British social scientist, known for his studies of the relations between culture, language and cognition, and former scientific director of the Language and Cognition department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Fictive motion is the metaphorical motion of an object or abstraction through space. Fictive motion has become a subject of study in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics. In fictive motion sentences, a motion verb applies to a subject that is not literally capable of movement in the physical world, as in the sentence, "The fence runs along the perimeter of the house." Fictive motion is so called because it is attributed to material states, objects, or abstract concepts, that cannot (sensibly) be said to move themselves through physical space. Fictive motion sentences are pervasive in English and other languages.

Michael Silverstein was an American linguist who served as the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture". Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Biolinguistics</span> Study of the biology and evolution of language

Biolinguistics can be defined as the study of biology and the evolution of language. It is highly interdisciplinary as it is related to various fields such as biology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, mathematics, and neurolinguistics to explain the formation of language. It seeks to yield a framework by which we can understand the fundamentals of the faculty of language. This field was first introduced by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona. It was first introduced in 1971, at an international meeting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Cultural emphasis is an important aspect of a culture which is often reflected though language and, more specifically, vocabulary. This means that the vocabulary people use in a culture indicates what is important to that group of people. If there are many words to describe a certain topic in a specific culture, then there is a good chance that that topic is considered important to that culture.

The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how. This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy. Among the most debated theories in this area of work is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks. The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it.

John A. Lucy is an American linguist and psychologist. His work primarily concerns the relations between language and cognition, especially the hypothesis of linguistic relativity. He is the William Benton Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development and the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. Lucy has worked extensively with the Yucatec Maya language, specializing in the system of noun classification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hopi time controversy</span> Academic debate about conceptualization of time in Hopi language

The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse, the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi have a concept of time.

The question whether the use of language influences spatial cognition is closely related to theories of linguistic relativity—also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—which states that the structure of a language affects cognitive processes of the speaker. Debates about this topic are mainly focused on the extent to which language influences spatial cognition or if it does at all. Research also concerns differences between perspectives on spatial relations across cultures, what these imply, and the exploration of potentially partaking cognitive mechanisms.

Soonja Choi (Korean: 최순자) is a South Korean linguist. She specializes in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.