======================================================================
= Linguistic relativity =
======================================================================
Introduction
======================================================================
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, part of relativism, also
known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , or Whorfianism is a principle
claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world
view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their
spoken language.
The principle is often defined in one of two versions: the 'strong
hypothesis', which was held by some of the early linguists before
World War II, and the 'weak hypothesis', mostly held by some of the
modern linguists.
*The 'strong' version says that language 'determines' thought and that
linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.
*The 'weak' version says that linguistic categories and usage only
'influence' thought and decisions.
The principle had been accepted and then abandoned by linguists during
the early 20th century following the changing perceptions of social
acceptance for the other especially after World War II. The origin of
formulated arguments against the acceptance of linguistic relativity
are attributed to Noam Chomsky.
Naming
========
The term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by
linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
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 invention; Sapir and Whorf never set
up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of
this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.
Origins
=========
The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers, such as
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw language as the expression of the spirit
of a nation. Members of the early 20th-century school of American
anthropology headed by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir also embraced forms
of the idea to a certain extent, including in a 1928 meeting of the
Linguistic Society of America, 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 seen as the primary
proponent as a result of his published observations of how he
perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human
cognition and behavior. Harry Hoijer, another of Sapir's students,
introduced the term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis", even though the two
scholars never formally advanced any such hypothesis. 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 conducted experiments designed to find out whether color
perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors
differently. As the study of the universal nature of human language
and cognition came into focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic
relativity fell out of favor among linguists. A 1969 study by Brent
Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated the existence of universal semantic
constraints in the field of colour terminology which were widely seen
to discredit the existence of linguistic relativity in this domain,
although this conclusion has been disputed by relativist researchers.
Renewed examination
=====================
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. Some effects of linguistic
relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they
are generally weak. Currently, a balanced view 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 seen as arising from connectionist
factors. Research is focused on exploring the ways and extent to which
language influences thought. The principle of linguistic relativity
and the relation between language and thought has also received
attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and
anthropology, and it has also inspired and coloured works of fiction
and the invention of constructed languages.
Linguistic determinism
========================
The strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which
holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive
processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally
agreed to be false.
Linguistic influence
======================
This is the weaker form, proposing that language provides constraints
in some areas of cognition, but that it is by no means determinative.
Research on weaker forms has produced positive empirical evidence for
a relationship.
History
======================================================================
The idea that language and thought are intertwined is ancient. Plato
argued against sophist thinkers such as Gorgias of Leontini, who held
that the physical world cannot be experienced except through language;
this made the question of truth dependent on aesthetic preferences or
functional consequences. Plato held instead that the world consisted
of eternal ideas and that language should reflect these ideas as
accurately as possible. Following Plato, St. Augustine, for example,
held the view that language was merely labels applied to already
existing concepts. This view remained prevalent throughout the Middle
Ages. Roger Bacon held the opinion that language was but a veil
covering up eternal truths, hiding them from human experience. For
Immanuel Kant, language was but one of several tools used by humans to
experience the world.
German Romantic philosophers
==============================
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence
of different national characters, or 'Volksgeister', of different
ethnic groups was the moving force behind the German romantics school
and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism.
Although himself a Swede, Emanuel Swedenborg inspired several of the
German Romantics. As early as 1749, he alludes to something along the
lines of linguistic relativity in commenting on a passage in the table
of nations in the book of Genesis: In 1771 he spelled this out more
explicitly:
Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the
actual German Romantics to speak of the concept of "the genius of a
language." In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question," Hamann
suggests that a people's language affects their worldview:
In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the
national romanticist program by proposing the view 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. This
view was part of a larger picture in which the world view of an ethnic
nation, their "Weltanschauung", was seen as being faithfully reflected
in 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 over
the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared
in 1820:
Boas and Sapir
================
The idea that some languages are superior to others and that lesser
languages maintained their speakers in intellectual poverty was
widespread in the early 20th
century[
https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00292388/document
Language and colonialism. Applied linguistics in the
context of creole communities], Bettina Migge, July 1, 2008,
University College Dublin (HAL French Open Academic Library website) .
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. The first anthropologist and linguist to
challenge this view was Franz Boas. While undertaking geographical
research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit people
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. 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
under study and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends
in the original language.
Boas:
{{quote|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."}}
Boas' student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that
languages contained the key to understanding the world views of
peoples. He espoused the viewpoint 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:
On the other hand, 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."
Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture
were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep, if they existed at
all:
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."
While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages
affected thought, some notion of (probably "weak") linguistic
relativity underlay his basic understanding of language, and would be
taken up by Whorf.
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 into the 1960s were the strongly
relativist theories of Leo Weisgerber and his key concept of a
'linguistic inter-world', mediating between external reality and the
forms of a given language, in ways peculiar to that language. 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'" has been compared to Whorf's and taken as mutually
supportive evidence of language's influence on cognition. 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. Though influential in their own right, this
work has not been influential in the debate on linguistic relativity,
which has tended to center 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 called the "linguistic relativity principle". Studying Native
American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which
grammatical systems and language use differences affected perception.
Whorf also examined how a scientific account of the world differed
from a religious account, which led him to study the original
languages of religious scripture and to write several
anti-evolutionist pamphlets. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of
the relation between language and thought remain under contention.
Critics such as Lenneberg, Black and Pinker 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 is possible.
Although Whorf lacked an advanced degree in linguistics, his
reputation reflects his acquired competence. His peers at Yale
University considered the 'amateur' Whorf to be the best man available
to take over Sapir's graduate seminar in Native American linguistics
while Sapir was on sabbatical in 1937-38. He was highly regarded by
authorities such as Boas, Sapir, Bloomfield and Tozzer. Indeed, Lucy
wrote, "despite his 'amateur' status, Whorf's work in linguistics was
and still is recognized as being of superb professional quality by
linguists".
Detractors such as Lenneberg, Chomsky and Pinker criticized him for
insufficient clarity in 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 connected to what were
apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words:
Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are
instances where an indigenous 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 language, an example which later was contested as
a misrepresentation.
Another is the Hopi language's words for water, one indicating
drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of
water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing
that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained 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.
Another example is from Whorf's experience as a chemical engineer
working for an insurance company as a fire inspector. 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 highly flammable vapors still in the barrels. He concluded that
the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had led the
workers to unconsciously regard them as harmless, although consciously
they were probably aware of the risk of explosion. This example was
later criticized by Lenneberg 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.
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. 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. Malotki later claimed that he had found no evidence of
Whorf's claims in 1980's era speakers, nor in historical documents
dating back to the arrival of Europeans. Malotki used evidence from
archaeological data, calendars, historical documents, modern speech
and concluded that there was no evidence that Hopi conceptualize time
in the way Whorf suggested. Universalist scholars such as Pinker often
see Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi,
whereas relativist scholars such as Lucy and Penny Lee criticized
Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing
Hopi grammar into a model of analysis that doesn't fit the data.
Whorf died in 1941 at age 44, leaving multiple unpublished papers. His
line of thought was continued by linguists and anthropologists such as
Hoijer and Lee who both continued investigations into 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'.
Eric Lenneberg
================
In 1953, Eric Lenneberg criticised Whorf's examples from an
objectivist view of language holding 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 view
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.
Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed
the connection between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental
phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such a
connection 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". 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.
Brown's formulations became widely known and were retrospectively
attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging
on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.
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.
They 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
way, 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 Zuñi speakers
who classify green and blue together as a single color did have
trouble recognizing and remembering nuances within the green/blue
category. Brown and Lenneberg's study began a tradition of
investigation of linguistic relativity through color terminology.
Universalist period
=====================
Lenneberg was also one of the first cognitive scientists to begin
development of the Universalist theory of language that was formulated
by Chomsky in the form of Universal Grammar, effectively arguing that
all languages share the same underlying structure. The Chomskyan
school also holds 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 in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s,
while linguistic relativity became the object of ridicule.
Examples of universalist influence in the 1960s are the studies by
Berlin and Kay who 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. 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. 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. This, Lucy
argues, made them blind to the instances in which color terms provided
other information that might be considered examples of linguistic
relativity.
Other universalist researchers dedicated themselves to dispelling
other aspects of linguistic relativity, often attacking Whorf's
specific points and 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, but
seemingly failed to address 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). Malotki himself acknowledges that the
conceptualizations are different, but because he ignores Whorf's use
of scare 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.
Today many followers 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, called
"mentalese." Pinker attacks what he calls "Whorf's radical position,"
declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense
they make."
Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of
misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen.
Joshua Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind"
==================================================
Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf's true position was largely
overlooked. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a "neo-Herderian
champion" and in 1982, he proposed "Whorfianism of the third kind" in
an attempt to refocus linguists' attention on what he claimed was
Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic value of "little peoples"
and "little languages". Whorf had criticized Ogden's Basic English
thus:
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'.
Cognitive linguistics
=======================
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, advances in cognitive psychology
and cognitive linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. One of those who adopted a more Whorfian approach 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 with money, so that
time can be saved and spent and invested, whereas other languages do
not talk about time in that way. Other such metaphors are common to
many languages because they are based on general human experience, for
example, metaphors likening '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".
Parameters
============
In his book 'Women, Fire and Dangerous things: What categories reveal
about the mind,' Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and
especially Whorf's views about how linguistic categorization reflects
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:
* The degree and depth of linguistic relativity. Perhaps a few
examples of superficial differences in language and associated
behavior are enough to demonstrate the existence of linguistic
relativity. Alternatively, perhaps only deep differences that permeate
the linguistic and cultural system suffice.
* Whether conceptual systems are absolute or whether they can evolve
* Whether the similarity criterion is translatability or the use of
linguistic expressions
* Whether the focus of linguistic relativity is in language or in the
brain
Lakoff concluded that many of Whorf's critics had criticized him using
novel definitions of linguistic relativity, rendering their criticisms
moot.
''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 focused on cognitive and social
aspects. The book included studies on the linguistic relativity and
universalist traditions. Levinson documented significant linguistic
relativity effects in the linguistic conceptualization of spatial
categories between 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.
Separate studies by Bowerman and Slobin treated 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. 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. These, Slobin argues, are the kinds of cognitive
process that are at the root of linguistic relativity.
Refinements
=============
Researchers such as Boroditsky, 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. Kay
ultimately concluded that "[the] Whorf hypothesis is supported in the
right visual field but not the left". His findings show that
accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective.
Psycholinguistic studies explored motion perception, emotion
perception, object representation and memory. The gold standard of
psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is now finding
non-linguistic cognitive differences 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.
Researchers described differences between bilinguals and monolinguals
in perception of color, representations of time and other elements of
cognition.
Empirical research
======================================================================
Lucy identified three main strands of research into linguistic
relativity.
Structure-centered
====================
The "structure-centered" approach 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.
Domain-centered
=================
The "domain-centered" approach selects a semantic domain and compares
it across linguistic and cultural groups. It centered on color
terminology, although this domain 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.
Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for
linguistic relativity studies. 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".
Behavior-centered
===================
The "behavior centered" approach starts by comparing behavior across
linguistic groups and then searches for causes for that behavior in
the linguistic system. Whorf attributed the occurrence of fires at a
chemical plant to the workers' use of the word 'empty' to describe the
barrels containing only explosive vapors. Bloom noticed that speakers
of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual
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. Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher
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.
Everett's work on the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon 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 who claimed that the linguistic deficit
is explained by the lack of need for such concepts.
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. Experimental research suggests that this linguistic
influence on thought diminishes over time, as when speakers of one
language are exposed to another.
A study published by the American Psychological Association�s Journal
of Experimental Psychology claimed that language can influence how one
estimates time. The study focused on 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 volume related terms like "big" or "small". 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 researches 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.
Color terminology
===================
Research continued after Lenneberg/Roberts and Brown/Lenneberg. 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 higher 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. This study sparked studies into typological
universals of color terminology. Researchers such as Lucy, Saunders
and Levinson 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.
Other domains
======================================================================
Linguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought
could be influenced by manipulating language.
Science and philosophy
========================
The question bears on philosophical, psychological, linguistic and
anthropological questions.
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
view holds 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 strictures. Another is essentialist, which holds
that essential differences 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.
Another debate considers whether thought is a form of internal speech
or is independent of and prior to language.
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, Foucault) argue that categorization and
conceptualization is subjective and arbitrary.
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.
Therapy and self-development
==============================
Sapir/Whorf contemporary Alfred Korzybski was independently developing
his theory of general semantics, which was aimed at using language's
influence on 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'. Although Korzybski was not aware of
Sapir and Whorf's writings, the movement was followed 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 movement influenced the development of
neurolinguistic programming, another therapeutic technique that seeks
to use awareness of language use to influence cognitive patterns.
Korzybski independently described a "strong" version of the hypothesis
of linguistic relativity.
{{quote|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) }}
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. 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.
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. Speakers of Lojban, an
evolution of Loglan, report that they feel speaking the language
enhances their ability for logical thinking. Suzette Haden Elgin, who
was involved in the early development of neurolinguistic 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" world view. 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. Similarly, Sonja Lang's Toki Pona was developed according to a
Taoist point of view for exploring how (or if) such a language would
direct human thought.
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.
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".
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 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
In popular culture
====================
Ted Chiang's short story 'Story of Your Life' developed the concept of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as applied to an alien species which visits
Earth. The aliens' biology contributes to their spoken and written
languages, which are distinct. In the 2016 American film 'Arrival',
based on Chiang's short story, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the
premise. The protagonist explains that "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is
the theory that the language you speak determines how you think".
In his science fiction novel 'The Languages of Pao' the author Jack
Vance describes how specialized languages are a major part of a
strategy to create specific classes in a society, to enable the
population to withstand occupation and develop itself.
See also
======================================================================
* 'Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution'
* Bicameralism
* Eskimo words for snow
* Ethnolinguistics
* Hopi time controversy
* Hypocognition
* Language planning
* Language and thought
* Linguistic anthropology
* Linguistic determinism
* Psycholinguistics
* Relativism
* Terministic screen
License
=========
All content on Gopherpedia comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under CC-BY-SA
License URL:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
