Relativity 4-5 page essay

Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism

Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism

The “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” (named after Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir, two well-known American linguists):

The language one speaks determines (to some degree) one’s thought.

Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism

More specifcally:

1) Linguistic determinism: the language one speaks determines one’s thought.

2) Linguistic relativity: diferent languages lead to diferent thinking.

Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism

There are stronger and weaker versions of this:

Strong: language determines thought and behavior.

Weak: certain aspects of language can predispose one toward certain thoughts or behaviors.

Vocabulary

People are often struck upon learning a new language by just how diferently it can “carve up” the world of objects and ideas.

Vocabulary

A simple example: Russian color terms include two basic words for blue:

<-- darker lighter --> English |---------------”blue”-------------------| Russian |-----”sinii”-------|------”goluboi”----|

The sky is “goluboi”, but the ocean is “sinii”.

Similarly, Chinese has a word meaning “fruits and nuts”.

Vocabulary

Does this imply anything about how Russian versus English speakers see colors or think about them?

Vocabulary

There are words in one language that are hard to translate into another, because they are so culture- dependent or intertwined with other words/concepts.

Another Russian word: “blat”.

Conveys ability to infuence or gain advantage by connections.

Possible English equivalent: “pull”, “sway”.

Vocabulary

It seems easy to overstate the signifcance of these things. Even if a language lacks a single word for something, it is normally possible to arrive at the concept by some kind of paraphrase.

Thus this seems to be a distinction involving the ease with which certain notions are expressed, or perhaps can be thought about, rather than the (im)possibility of expressing or thinking about things. This is weak linguistic relativity, if anything.

Grammar

Languages can difer dramatically also in the things they encode in their grammars.

For example:

<-- more informal more formal --> English |-----------------”you”-------------------| Russian |------”ty”----------|-------”vy”---------|

Grammar

This is not just another vocabulary distinction: it Determines verb endings. “You work”:

Ty rabotajesh Vy rabotajete

For example:

<-- more informal more formal --> English |-----------------”you”-------------------| Russian |------”ty”----------|-------”vy”---------|

Grammar

Again, it isn’t that English speakers are unaware of differences in status and formality, and can’t express or think about them.

But it seems true that speakers of Russian, Spanish, French, German, etc., are forced to constantly attend to such matters in a way that English speakers are not.

Grammar Experiments in the 1950s showed that children speaking only Navaho would more often group or categorize together objects based on shape characteristics that happen to be grammatically marked in Navaho verbs (such as long and thin versus fat), compared to children who speak Navaho and English (who depend more on color).

On the other hand, it turns out that African American children raised in Harlem also categorized based on shape more than white children of Boston.

Grammar

So language has an efect, but so does environment. What’s more, these diferences become smaller as children get older.

Grammar

English has no future tense marking on verbs, but would we want to claim that this constrains English speakers’ thinking about the future in any way?

A more absurd example: some languages, e.g., Mandarin Chinese and Irish Gaelic, have no word meaning “yes”. What should we conclude?

Linguistic Relativity and Linguistic Determinism

All of this seems to support (at best) a weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in which language may guide or direct our thoughts, but not imprison them.

Linguistic versus Biological Determinism: Color terms

Two cognitive universals involving color:

1) People consistently pick the same shades of e.g., red, yellow, and green as the best examples of these colors - independently of language.

Linguistic versus Biological Determinism: Color terms

For example: the Grand Valley Dani, of Papua New Guinea, speak a language having basic color terms only for black and white.

Linguistic versus Biological Determinism: Color terms

But it was found that they learned more quickly a new color category based on fre engine red (the universally preferred shade) than one based on another shade.

Linguistic versus Biological Determinism: Color terms

Two cognitive universals involving color:

2) Languages do difer in the basic color vocabulary they have, but they difer predictably. Oversimplifying for now...

Linguistic versus Biological Determinism: Color terms

2 terms: black, white (or dark and light) 3 terms: black, white, red 4 terms: black, white, red, and either

green or yellow 5 terms: black, white, red, green, yellow 6 terms: black, white, red, green, yellow,

blue And so on...

Linguistic versus Biological Determinism: Color terms

Such facts suggest that we have “hard-wired” into us some color universals: a shared sense of basic color categories, and of what prototypical “red” or “blue” are, for example.

Some Evidence for Weak Determinism

Memory is apparently afected by vocabulary.

People are shown a shape which is named either “eyeglasses” or “dumbbell”, and then asked to draw it from memory. The drawings show infuence of naming.

Some Evidence for Weak Determinism

Perhaps more disturbing: a study by Loftus and Palmer (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13, 1974).

People are shown a flm of an auto accident and later asked “About how fast were the cars going when they hit/smashed/collided/bumped/contacted each other?”

Some Evidence for Weak Determinism

Verb used Mean Speed Estimate

Smashed 40.8 Collided 39.3 Bumped 38.1 Hit 34.0 Contacted 31.8

Some Evidence for Weak Determinism

In another experiment, subjects were led with only “smashed” versus “hit”. (A third group was not asked about speed.) They returned a week later and (without seeing the flm again) answered the question “Did you see any broken glass?”

Some Evidence for Weak Determinism

Response Smashed Hit Control

Yes 16 7 6 No 34 43 44

There was actually no broken glass.

Some Evidence for Weak Determinism

A fear of such a connection between language and thinking seems to be behind the courtroom notion of a “leading question”.

Summing Up

Experimental evidence suggests that language can infuence certain aspects of thought, especially memory and categorization.

In addition, people probably attend better to concepts that are “encoded” in their language’s vocabulary.

Summing Up

There is no good evidence for stronger versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.