Language and Culture Prof. R. HickeySS 2006

Language and Thought

Martin Oberließen Grundstudium TN Miriam GrigoAnthony AjunwaNina Delvos Hauptstudium LN

Introduction

Linguistic relativity hypothesis:

Diverse languages influence the thought of those who speak them.

Development of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: Boas, Sapir, Whorf

Approaches in anthropological linguistics

Approaches in comparative psycholinguistics:

- lexical coding of colours

- grammatical categories

The development of the relativity hypothesis: Boas

Franz Boas (1858-1942)

1. Language classify experience enormous range of personal experiences – limited number of phonetic groups and grammatical categories

2. Different languages classify experiences differentlyone idea in one language – different phonetic groups in another (Eskimos and Snow)

3. Linguistic phenomena are unconscious in characteruse of language is so automatic – notions do not emerge into consciousness

But: linguistic classifications reflect but do not dictate thought

The development of the relativity hypothesis: Sapir

Edward Sapir (1884-1939)

1. Formal completeness of each language as a symbolic system: Whatever any speaker of a language wants to communicate – the language is prepared to do the work.Language categories are interrelated in a formal system: individual experiences are related, too.Therefore: Experiences are ordered by the classifications of a language.

2. Different Languages classify experiences differently, completely and incommensurablyComparisons how the same experience would be encoded in different languages

Using this creative symbolic tool shapes conceptual thought.

Relation of thought and language: Thought is expressed by language.

The development of the relativity hypothesis: Whorf

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941)

Chemical Engineer and worked as a fire-prevention engineer for his entire professional career.

Pursued a wide variety of interests (Science-Religion/Physics)

Self-taught linguist, later worked with Sapir at Yale University

Study of Hebrew and Hebrew ideas, Mayan languages and Hopi language

Added detailed case studies to language classifications in different languages.

Overt and covert language categories.

Language classification are out-of-awareness

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The relativity hypothesis (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

Language classifications influence thought:

The structure of a language tends to condition the ways in which a speaker of that language thinks. Therefore the structures of different languages lead the speakers to view the world in different ways.

Example: the way people view time and punctuality is influenced by the types of verbal tenses in their language.

If a language is vague and inaccurate or burdened with prejudices of the past this influences the user’s thinking.

No fully developed theory of the relation of language and thought.

The differences in word-view imposed by different languages have proved extremely difficult to elucidate or test experimentally.

George Orwell 1984, Newspeak

Conclusion

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that diverse languages influence the thoughts of those who speak them.

“..we dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages … by the linguistic systems in 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 … is codified in the patterns of our language.” (Whorf 1940, pp213-214)

Dorothy D. Lee and the Wintu Language

analysed the Wintu language, spoken by Indians in northern California

distinction between generic and particular in noun phrases- differs from English categories of number and definiteness

she couldn’t complete her studies, because this language is extinct

- only one mother tongue speaker (Florence Jones) of Wintu extant

different culture different language (structure)  “The Wintu Indians of northern California have a

conception of the self which is markedly different from our own.”

Madeleine Mathiot

separation of structure and meaning in a languageassigning structure to grammar and meaning to lexicon

relationship between language and culturei.e. between grammatical structure ( “linguistic”) and lexical structure ( “non-linguistic”)

lexical structure folk-classification (see “ethnoscience”) she focused on the quantifiable noun categories

- tried to identify “cultural” similarities- categorisation of lexeme groups by an a priori

but without any interpretable results elicitation of a folk classification based on inclusion relationships

between lexemes as judged by informants yielded a general association between individual nouns and living things and aggregate nouns an plants- later refined into life [+ animate] and dead [- animate] distinction.

Harry Hoijer

  was a student of Edward Sapir (Sapir-Whorf-hypothesis) in 1958 Hoijer became President of the American

Anthropological Association and the President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1959

one of his works on the “language and thought” problem is the “best-known and most highly regarded empirical work”

- investigated the relation between language and culture

he differed in his opinion on culture from Whorf- saw the systemic and integrated nature of culture

language = system; culture = system- relation between two systems, in which the

language- system is a part of culture 

Approaches in comparative psycholinguistics:

Experimental studies on the lexical coding of color 

Introduction/ structure of the topic

The problem Information to the underlying text General approach Three kinds of snow- differences between

Eskimos and the English Why color? Conclusion

The problem Certain speakers of different languages

are different from each other according to their psychological potentials

Certain aspects of language have a direct influence on or connection with a given psychological mechanism; speakers of different languages differs along certain psychological parameters

Information to the underlying text

The psycholinguistic is a subdiscipline of psychology Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) had great influence on

the findings in this field of psychology All the studies in this tradition compare some feature of one

or more languages with the behavioral pattern of a sample of speakers on tasks designed to reveal cognitive processes

The psycholinguistic studies can be divided into two broad groups:

-Those involving the significance of lexical codability, which is concerned with the significance of color terms for cognition

-those involving the significance of some aspect of grammar such as form classes or logical relators

General approach The basic procedure involves presenting speakers with samples of

colors in two tasks: 1)      The first task involves naming or describing certain of the

color samples. These responses are then used to construct a “linguistic” measure for each color, for example a measure of how readily each color can be lexically encoded or described.

2)      The second task involves performing some other “nonlinguistic” activity with the same colors. Most often a perceptual recognition memory is used. Typically this involves asking subjects to recognize from memory certain colors from within a large array of colors.

  The results are analyzed to see whether there is any relationship

between the two types of responses (linguistic and nonlinguistic), which can be taken as evidence for or against some specific hypothesis concerning the relationship between language and thought

General approach  In order to come to a comparability of data

across languages it seems to be necessary to invent some sort of descriptive metalanguage.

By trying to create such a metalanguage it is important to avoid the usage of our categories for the metalanguage so as to ensure the objectivity of the metalanguage

Why color? Color categories differ from such categories as snow in that

they have boundaries that can be plotted on known dimensions. Color categories, furthermore, are continuous with one another, sharing their boundaries.

The existence of the lexeme color, which suggests that there is a referential experience that has some unity for English speakers.

The color space is simply an ordering device that allows us to assign every possible color a specific position or point.

The study uses color as the objective referential domain upon which both language and thought operate

Three kinds of snow- differences between Eskimos and the English

- falling snow- snow on the ground- slushy snow = mere varieties of snow

- wind-driven flying snow- snow packed hard like ice 

Conclusion 

The linguistic system is more than just a reproductive instrument which puts thoughts into words; rather than it influences human thoughts. In our early childhood we learn to categorize our surrounding in a certain way by learning a specific language. Therefore our worldview is predestined and our thoughts as well.

  

Experimental studies on grammatical categories

Chapter 6 of Lucy’s Language Diversity and Thought summarizes some experiments designed to test whether or not the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds true:

Casagrande & Maclay: Navaho verb-stem classifiers and shape/form preference in object sorting

Bloom: Chinese vs. English counterfactual reasoning

Focus on the difficulties one encounters when conducting experiments which are aimed at testing for linguistic relativity

Casagrande & Maclay

Interest: differences between languages in obligatorily expressed grammatical concepts

For communication to be possible, humans have to fit the experiences they have into the linguistic categories available in their respective languages

There is substantial variation across languages; they differ largely in the grammatical concepts which are mandatory; example: the singular-plural distinction (mandatory in English but completely optional in Chinese)

Casagrande & Maclay

Basic question:

“Granted that languages differ in the ways we have described, what effects will these differences have on the way a person thinks, the way he deals with other people, or the way he deals with his environment?” (Carroll and Casagrande, 1958, p. 20)

Aim:

To identify a precise correspondence between a specific linguistic phenomenon and a specific “nonlinguistic” response

Casagrande:

Casagrande notices that the Navaho language makes a distinction which the English language does not make:

“It is obligatory in the Navaho language, when using verbs of handling, to employ a particular one of a set of verbal forms according to the shape or some other essential attribute of the object about which one is speaking. Thus, if I ask you in Navaho to hand me an object, I must use the appropriate verb stem depending on the nature of the object. If it is a long flexible object such as a piece of string, I must say šańléh; if it is a long rigid object such as a stick, I must say šańtííh; if it is a flat flexible material such as a paper or cloth, I must say šańitcóós, and so on.” (Carroll and Casagrande, 1958, pp. 26-27)

Casagrande:

This way, the various nouns and their associated referents are classified by such verbs into a smaller number of sets (long-flexible objects, long-rigid objects, flat flexible objects, etc.)

Since these noun classes are not overtly marked on the nouns themselves, they constitute covert categories in the Whorfian sense

out-of-awareness covert grammatical category

Casagrande:

Psychological studies available at that time had shown that (American and European) children first sort or distinguish among objects on the basis of size and color and only later on the basis of form

Navaho children as young as three use the verb stem signaling “form/shape” differences correctly

Casagrande’s hypothesis was that Navaho-speaking children would attend earlier to form as a basis of classification than would comparable English-speaking children

Casagrande’s experiment:

Subjects: Navaho children aged three to ten divided into two groups according to whether they were language-dominant in English or Navaho

Triads sorting task:Ten pairs of objects (colored wooden blocks, sticks, and pieces of rope) , each of which differed significantly in two respects, e.g. color and size, color and shape, size and shape

Each child was presented with one pair of objects, then it was shown a third object similar to each member of the pair in only one of the two relevant characteristics; then the child was asked which object of the pair went best with the object shown to him

Casagrande’s experiment:

Expectations:

Navaho-dominant children: shape or form-based choices in line with their grammatical pattern

English-dominant children: sort by color or size

Blue clothYellow piece of string

Blue rope

Casagrande’s experiment:

Results were in the expected direction:

Navaho-dominant children preferred verb-form and shape as a basis of classification whereas English-dominant children preferred color or size

But: The older the subjects, the stronger the tendency to favor shape over color in both groups

Casagrande’s experiment:

But: The same task was later administered to two groups of non-Navaho English speakers

First group: white American middle-class children in the Boston metropolitan area

Second group: Harlem schoolchildren

Results: contrary to his expectations, the first group favored shape or form over color and size, exactly as had the Navaho-speaking children

Cultural experience of upper-middle-class white children, specifically “practise with toys and other objects involving the fitting of forms and shapes”

Casagrande’s experiment:Casagrande’s conclusion:

“The tendency of a child to match objects on the basis of form or

material rather than size or color increases with age and may be

enhanced by either of two kinds of experiences; (a) learning to

speak a language, like Navaho, which because of the central role

played by form and material in its grammatical structure, requires

the learner to make certain discriminations of form and material in

the earlier stages of language learning …; or (b) practise with toys

and other objects involving the fitting of forms and shapes, and the

resultant greater reinforcement received from form-matching.”

(Carroll and Casagrande, 1958, p. 31)

Obligatory linguistic categories are only one source of effects on behavior; cultural factors also play an important role

Casagrande’s experiment:

From a linguistic point of view, the study is deficient in two respects:

1) It was not really comparative:

only Navaho was analyzed, there was no explicit analysis of

English; the comparison therefore was not between two well-

defined patterns, a pattern in English and a pattern in Navaho,

but between one pattern in Navaho and its absence in English.

2) The analysis of Navaho itself was very weak:

no information was given about the significance of the

grammatical pattern in the overall structure of the language or in

the use of language

Casagrande’s experiment:

From a cognitive point of view, there are also some problems:

1) the task did not simulate or represent everyday habitual

behavior (when do you ever have to sort objects according to

either color or shape?)

2) His experiment only had to do with a transient aspect of child

development, rather than with an enduring disposition of adult

speakers

3) Not only linguistic factors could have been responsible for an

early preference for “form”, but also cultural ones

Maclay:

Maclay was interested in the same phenomenon as Casagrande, but his experiment was slightly different

He worked with a different subject pool than Casagrande; his subjects were mostly adults

In addition to Navaho speakers, he included both white English speakers and Pueblo Indian groups whose languages are unrelated to Navaho

to ensure that the results gotten would not merely reflect an Anglo versus Indian or majority-minority difference

Maclay:

In Maclay’s classification task, the subjects were shown four objects which then should be grouped into two pairs. Items were constructed so that groupings could be made on the basis of “Form” (in accordance with the Navaho verb categories), “Function or Material”, or “Color”

Results: No statistically significant differences emerged among the three groups either in pattern of sorting or latency of responses. In particular, Navaho and English subjects performed very much alike both in terms of sorting and in terms of latency

Maclay:

After the experiment, Maclay interviewed one Navaho subject and it became clear that the verb categories were not the only way of classifying the objects

In particular, two items sometimes had the same name in Navaho and “could thus be said to be classified together linguistically on a lexical basis”

Therefore, no meaningful conclusion could be drawn from the results of the experiment

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Bloom noticed that Chinese speakers had difficulty with counterfactual questions

“If the Hong Kong government were to pass a law requiring that all citizens born outside of Hong Kong make weekly reports of their activities to the police, how would you react?”

“But the government hasn’t.”

“We don’t think that way.”

“It’s unChinese.”

These questions were no problem for American or French speakers.

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

These observations correlated with the absence in the Chinese language of “structures equivalent to those through which English and other Indo-European languages mark the counterfactual realm” (Bloom, 1981, pp. 13-14)

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Expressing counterfactuals in English:

If [clause 1], (then) [clause 2].

If he ran faster, he would win.

If John had come earlier, they would have arrived at the movies on time.

counterfactuals explicitly marked; it is clear to us that John doesn’t run faster/hadn’t come earlier

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Expressing counterfactuals in Chinese:

If John come + past earlier, they arrive at the movies on time.

typically, this sentence has a simple implicational meaning, equivalent to “If John came earlier, they arrived at the movies on time” (we don’t know yet) sentence only interpreted counterfactually if it is already known by the addressee that John didn’t come earlier (context)

otherwise, the speaker would have to state the necessary premise explicitly:

John is + past late. If John come + past earlier, they arrive at the movies on time

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

In Chinese:

immediate context of speaking is the relevant factor in interpreting a sentence as counterfactual

In English:

immediate context not relevant; counterfactuals are explicitly marked

Therefore Bloom asked himself if having or not having an explicit counterfactual construction in one’s language could play a role in determining how inclined one will be to think in counterfactual terms

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Bloom’s 1st experiment:

He presented a story to different samples of speakers (Chinese, English, bilingual Chinese speakers):

[English:] X was not the case, but if X had been the case, then Y would have been the case, Z would have been the case, and W would have been the case, etc … [Chinese:] X was not the case; but if X was, then Y, then Z, then W, etc …

Then he asked the subjects if W has happened or not.

His expectations were met: English subjects consistently outperformed the Chinese subjects; bilingual Chinese speakers generally did better than monolinguals and, when given both English and Chinese versions of the story, they tended to do better on the English version.

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Bloom’s 2nd experiment:

Chinese and English speakers were asked the following question:

“If all circles were large and this small triangle ▲ were a circle, would it be large?”

Most Chinese speakers said “No,” whereas most English speakers answered “Yes.”

Bloom’s conclusion: “On the one hand, Chinese certainly do, within certain situations, think and speak counterfactually; on the other, the lack of a distinct marking for the counterfactual seems ... to be associated with significant cognitive consequences.” (Bloom, 1981, pp. 19-20)

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Criticism of Bloom’s experiments:

No comparatively based, referentially grounded framework

His experiments do not clearly demonstrate the effect of language on nonlinguistic behaviour (question answering is linguistic behaviour)

Au, a native Chinese, claimed that his Chinese stories were only unidiomatic translation of the English stories; she conducted some experiments similar to Bloom’s and obtained different results

Alfred Bloom (1981): Counterfactual reasoning – English vs. Chinese

Criticism of Bloom’s experiments:

Other factors could account for the differences between English and Chinese speakers, particularly cultural ones: Does language influence thought and then thought culture or is it the other way around?

As Bloom himself noticed:

“One could argue that rather than reflecting the impact of language structure on thought, the evidence reflects the existence within Chinese society of a general proclivity against counterfactual thinking which is responsible for both the lack of an explicit marking of the counterfactual in the language and the reluctance of Chinese speakers to venture into the counterfactual realm.” (Bloom, 1981, p. 32)

Conclusion:

Very difficult to design an experiment aimed at testing for linguistic relativity

Many different factors have to be taken into account

Until today, no experiment effectively proved that the (strong) linguistic relativity hypothesis holds true: “there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking” (Pinker, 1994, p.58)

ReferencesBloom, Alfred H. (1981): The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Carroll, John B., Casagrande, Joseph B. (1958): “The function of language classifications in behavior”. In: Maccoby, Eleanor E., Newcomb, Theodore M., Hartley, Eugene L. (eds.): Readings in social psychology. 3rd edition. New York usw.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston: 18-31.

Crystal, David. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. 5th ed. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing 2003.

Encyclopedia Britannica 2005 DVD. Ultimate Reference Suite. Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. 2005

Lucy, John A. 1992. Language diversity and thought. A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge: University Press.