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Home , Language and thought, Linguistic determinism, Linguistic relativity

nl FrLE 1 .2 and Thought

11.2.1 What ls ? As most people who have studied another language know, different grammati- cally distinguish different kinds of things (see File 5.2). Some languages mark the gram- matical gender of all nouns and adjectives; some languages do not mark gender at all. Some languages have two or three grammatical genders or noun classes; some languages have as many as twenty. Some languages distinguish several tenses grammatically; some have no grammatically marked tenses. Speakers of some languages express spatial relationships in absolute terms (the car is north of the house); some express spatial relationships relatively (the car is to the right of the house). Some languages have counting systems that consist of 'one,' 'two,' and 'many'; some languages have much more elaborate inventories of num- bers. Do these differences between languages also indicate differences in the thoughts of their speakers? Does speaking a language without tense markers mean you will think about time differently? Does using politically correct terminology change speakers'percep- tion of women, people with disabilities, and others? Does the of a word influence how we think of it? In some cases, the answer to this question seems to be yes. A study by (2003) using speakers of German and Spanish showed that the grammatical gender of an inanimate object can influence the way speakers consider it. When asked to describe a key, for which the German word is masculine and the Spanish word is feminine, speakers' de- scriptions were quite different. German speakers described the key as hard, heat4t, metal, iagged, or useful, while Spanish speakers described the key as little, lovely, intricate, tiny, or shiny. On the other hand, when shown a picture of a bridge, for which the German word is feminine and the Spanish word is masculine, German speakers called it pretty, peaceful, ele- gant, beautiful, and fragile, while Spanish speakers called it strong, dangerous, sturdy, and towering. Boroditsky argues that the grammatical gender of a word influences how speakers see objects such as keys and bridges. A prominent debate in in the past century has been the issue of how language, thought, and culture are interrelated. Simply stated, does language influence thought? Or does language accurately translate "mentalese," the hypothetical system of thoughts represented in the mind prior to any linguistic shape? If so, how do we account for the diversity of linguistic systems? If a language can influence the thoughts of its speak- ers, how strong is that influence-does the language we speak completely determine our outlook on the world, or does it simply condition its users to think in certain patterns? The linguistic relativity hypothesis argues that the language someone speaks affects how she perceives the world. There are two versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis; the weak version, called linguistic relativity, simply claims that language affects thought. One way language can influence thought is shown by the example of the words for 'key' and 'bridge' above. The strong version, called linguistic , claims that language determines thought; speakers of a language can think of things only in the way that their language expresses them. will be discussed in Section 17.2.5.

46"1 462 Language and Culture

1'1.2.2 Early Studies in Linguistic Relativity

The association of language with thought and culture is not new, but its treatment by mod- ern academic social scientists can be traced to anthropologist (1858-1942) in the early twentieth century. Boas noted that language is used to classify our experiences in the world. Although previous ethnologists had focused on word lists, Boas believed that insight into language and culture could be gained only by intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the native language of the group being studied. Because different languages have differ- ent ways of classifying the world (e.g. counting systems, tense, spatial relationships), differ- ent people will classify the world differently based on the languages they speak. In Boas' view, language could be used to describe or articulate how a person saw the world, but it would not constrain that view. One of Boas'students, (1884-1939), took Boas'view one step further, with the idea that linguistic classification is actually the way in which people think. That is, his belief was that thoughts about experience are necessarily channeled through and given shape by language; all of human thought is "done" in a particular language, so the lan- guage we speak can shape our thoughts and experiences. This theory implies that people have different ways not iust of linguistically classifying but of actually thinking about the world. Sapir did not try to extend this line of reasoning to say that language would influ- ence culture: "Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought" (Sapir, Da9 l92tl:2I8). Benjamin Whorf also considered the relationship between language, thought, and culture based on his observations about people's use of language and how it seems to in- fluence their thoughts and behaviors. For example, he noticed that workers tended to be careful around full gasoline drums but might smoke or throw cigarette stubs around appar- ently "empty" gasoline drums, which actually contained a substance more dangerous than gasoline: vapors. He argued that by classifying the drums as "empty," that is, having been emptied of their original contents, the workers thought of the drums as "null and void," that is, that the drums did not in fact contain anything. The mental classification of the drums using a particular of the word influenced the workers' actual of the world and then their actions. Whorf also studied several Native American languages, including . He claimed to see substantial differences between the structures of English and Hopi. For instance, Whorf argued that English tends to classify the world into discrete objects more than Hopi does. In English, for example, we apply plurality and cardinal numbers to temporal entities as well as to physical entities. Although we say both ten men and ten days, physically, days and men are quite different. Ten men can be seen all at once, but days are ephemeral or cyclical; you can only see one at a time. The view that time is linear and segmental, Whorf argued, is reinforced by a grammatical system in which past, present, and future are obliga- tory categories, and this view is tied to the idea that English speakers think of themselves as on a point, the present, moving along the line of time, which extends indefinitely into the past and the future. In Hopi, on the other hand, time is not divided up into units that are used as count nouns; time is expressed adverbially. According to Whorf, in Hopi, which lacks the tense system so common in European languages such as English, ten days are viewed not as a collection of different days but as successive appearances of the same cycle of dawn to dusk-every day contains the potentiality of the future as well as the experi- ences of the past. The primary distinction indicated by Hopi verbs instead concerns whether the action takes place in the Objective (Manifested) Realm or the Subiective (Unmanifest) Realm. Whorf argued that these differences in how we talk about time are closely related to how we think of time and how we act. For example, Western society tends to be very concerned with exact dates and records, keeping calendars and diaries that mark time into File 11.2 463

sequential units. The Hopi that Whorf described, on the other hand, seemed to be uncon- cerned with this sort of timekeeping; whatever had happened still was, but in an altered form. According to Whorf, the Hopi believed that the present should not be recorded but rather treated as "preparin8," and he claimed there is much emphasis on preparation in their culture. Based on these observations, Whorf developed the principle of linguistic relativity, which is sometimes called the Whorf hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, although the two men never formally worked together on this topic. Whorf defined linguistic relativ- ity as follows: "users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars to- ward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat differ- ent views of the world" (1956: 58). Essentially, this means that the language someone speaks affects how he perceives the world.

11.2.3 Criticism of the Early Studies Linguistic relativity came under scrutiny with the rise of cognitive science and the Univer- sal Grammar (UG) school of thought (see File 8.1), which sought to describe the universals of human and saw linguistic diversity as mere superficialities masking the same fundamental cognitive makeup. Further, Whorf's studies of the Hopi and their language and culture have been dis- puted in a number of ways (e.g. see Ekkehart Malotki's 1983 book). First, some scholars have questioned Whorf's analysis of the Hopi of space and time by suggesting that Whorf was simply prolecting his ideas about their culture from what he understood of the Hopi grammatical structure. This would make his arguments circular. Second, it has been proposed that while the Hopi may not express time on verbs using tenses, this does not mean that the Hopi do not have ways of locating particular events in time, just as English does. There are certainly other languages that are tenseless (i.e. they do not grammatically mark time on verbs), but this fact is not incornpatible with the conceptualization of time in a linear fashion. 'fhird, and perhaps most importantly, Whorf's descriptions of how the Hopi linguistic system categorizes time do not seem to have been completely accurate; for example, time can be expressed using nouns in Hopi, and there are nouns for like 'day,' 'night,' 'month,' and 'year.' Unfortunately, his methods of collecting data were very questionable, and thus any conclusions drawn from his data are equally questionable. Does this mean that the principle of linguistic relativity is wrong? Not necessarily, but it does mean that we need stronger evidence than Whorf was able to provide.'Ihe next sec- tion will outline some more contemporary investigations of linguistic relativity.

'l'1.2.4 More Recent lnvestigation of Linguistic Relativity

Because of these problems, it is generally agreed that Whorf's study did not actually show that language influences thought. Nevertheless, the linguistic relativity hypothesis has been taken up and tested by other scholars. The Whorf hypothesis can be difficult to test because it can be challenging to identify tasks that really are linguistically and culturally neutral, which are desirable features if you are trying to isolate the effects of language and culture upon each other. Nevertheless, many studies have sought to test the non-linguistic reasoning of speakers of different languages. a. Color Terms. Several such studies have dealt with colors; these studies are based on the idea that there is a universal ccllor continuum, but that different languages have dif- ferent ways of dividing this continuum into discrete categories. Although it is acknowl- edged that many languages may have numerous descriptive terms for many subtle color Language and Culture gradations (e.g. brick red vs. fire engine red vs. scarlet), such studies generally focus on the "basic" color terms of a language. In a 1956 experiment, and John Roberts presented chips of various shades ranging between yellow and orange to English speakers and Zufli speakers. The English speakers, who have two basic color terms for this range (namely, yellow and orange), were highly consistent in sorting the colors, whereas the Zufli, who have a single term encompassing yellow and orange, made no consistent choice. These results seem to support the Whorf Hypothesis because the fact that English has these color terms resulted in the fact that English speakers could more easily distinguish the colors into two different parts of the spectrum. A similar experiment by Andre von Wattenwyl and Heinrich Zollinger in 1978, how- ever, found the opposite result. Wattenwyl and Zollinger worked with Q'ueqchi sub- jects on the blue-green area of the spectrum (for which Q'ueqchi has a single term). They showed that speakers tended to form groupings based on criteria apart from their lexicon, separating out blue chips from green chips consistently despite not having terms for these categories. These findings would seem to contradict the Whorf hypothesis, showing that speakers can identify differences in hue even if their language does not code this in the lexicon. One of the most famous studies on the cross-cultural classification of colors into fixed terms, conducted in 1969 by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, provided strong evidence against the linguistic relativity hypothesis. For each of twenty languages, they listed the basic color words. Then they gave speakers of each language a chart of 329 chips of different colors and asked them to perform two tasks: (a) for each basic color word, circle all those chips that could be called by that word, and (b) for each basic color word, select the best, most typical example of that color. They then calculated the focus of each color word in each language-the best and most central chips for each color. Their findings were as follows:

. About 70 percent of the chips did not fall within the range of any color word in any language. . The foci of the color terms for different languages were quite close. r Universallt every language has at least two color words: black (covering also most dark hues) and white (covering also most light hues). . If a language has more than two basic color terms, then it follows a hierarchy of color terms:

. Languages with three color terms have black, white, and red (the latter having its focus close to English red); . Languages with four terms have black, white, red, and eithet green or yellow; . Languages with five terms have black, white, red, andboth green andyellow; . Languages with six terms have these five plus blue; . Languages with seven terms have these six plus brown; . Languages with more than seven terms have these seven plus some of purple, pink, orange, or gray.

English, according to Berlin and Kay, is an eleven-term language, as are Japanese and He- brew Hungarian and Russian have twelve basic terms-Hungarian has the standard eleven with a distinction between voros 'dark red' and piros 'light red,' while Russian has the stan- dard eleven with a distinction between siniy'dark blue' and goluboy'light blue.' Shona is a typical three-term language: citema covers 'black,' cicena'white,' and cipswuka'red.' Bassa is a typical two-term language. These findings were used to conclude that colors are univer- sal distinctions, and all humans divide up the spectrum in different ways, some more elab- orately than others. The Berlin-Kay experiment gave strong evidence for a predictable hierarchy of color-coding cross-linguistically. File 1 1.2 Language and Thought 46s

b. Spatial Relationships. Another area in which the principle of linguistic relativ- ity has been investigated is the study of spatial relationships and the of space in different languages. Some languages, Iike English, use relative terms such as left, right, front, and back to indicate the spatial orientation of one object to another: The chqir is to the left of the table, etc. Not all languages use such terms, however; for example, Tenejapan Tzeltal (a Mayan language spoken in Mexico) uses absolute terms similar to north, south, east, and wesf instead. That is, they use a fixed point of reference to locate particular ob jects (e.g. the chair is to the north of the table) rather than using relative reference points that may change based on the location of the speaker. Various aspects of culture seem to reflect such differences in spatial categorization; for example, in Tzeltal, time "is conceived of as stretching up to the south" (Levinson, r996b: 376), whereas in English, time tends to be conceived of as stretching either from left (past) to right (future) or from behind (past) to in front (future). Perhaps most tellingly, Tzeltal and English speakers respond very differently in experimental tasks that require them to describe obiects they see in the world. For example, consider the diagram shown in (1), which sketches the experimental setup used by and Penelope Brown to explore the Tzeltal system of spatial reference (e.g. see Levinson, 1996b, and Brown and Levinson, 1993).

(1) Comparing relative and absolute frames of reference

Right N Task: Choose Stinrulus Le Ii silmc ilrrotv ils stimulus I lt

I ttt?

Lc[t Right

In experiments like this, a participant is first seated at a table as shown on the left side of the diagram; an arrow on the table acts as a stimulus. The participant is asked to look at the arrow and remember which direction it points. The participant is then turned 180", so that she is facing the opposite direction, as is shown on the right side of the diagram. Two arrows are shown, A and B, pointing in opposite directions. The participant is then asked which one matches the arrow she saw earlier (the stimulus arrow). Speakers of a language with a relative frame of reference, such as English, consistently choose arrow B, while speakers of a language with an absolute frame of reference, such as Tzeltal, consistently choose arrow A! Levinson and Brown hypothesize that this consis- tent difference between the groups of speakers is based on the way the languages categorize directions. For English speakers, the stimulus arrow goes from their left to their right; when they are turned around, they still choose an arrow that goes from their left to their right (arrow B). For Tzeltal speakers, on the other hand, the stimulus arrow points from south to north, regardless of which way they are facing; when they are turned around, they still choose an arrow that goes from south to north (arrow A). This result is particularly compelling given that the tasks can be carried out non-lin- guistically; that is, the speakers don't have to say anything in the course of looking at the stimulus, turning around, and indicating which arrow matches the stimulus. Thus, Levin- son and Brown have found evidence that the linguistic categories a speaker's language uses can directly affect the speaker's nonlinguistic perception of spatial relationships. Once 466 Language and Culture

again, however, while studies like these support the basic principle of linguistic relativity (i.e. that speakers of different languages may have different views of the world), it is difficult to draw conclusions because there is contradictory evidence as well.

'l'|-.2.5 Beyond Relativity: Linguistic Determinism and Cultural

Since Whorf developed the linguistic relativity hypothesis, it has been interpreted in many different ways. Some have claimed that Whorf said that language actually determines thought and culture: that people are in some way confined by their language to be able to understand or think only about concepts that their language can describe. This view, which argues that thought and language are identical and it is not possible to engage in any ratio- nal thinking without using language to do so, is called linguistic determinism, as noted in Section 17.2.7. Recently, Peter Gordon (20O\ and (2005) have claimed that evidence for linguistic determinism has been found in the inability of adult speakers of PirahS, an indigenous language of BraziI, to Iearn cardinal numbers as we know them in English. While Pirahd speakers could accurately respond to tasks in which they had to count up to two or three objects, and could at least partially count up to ten, their performance with counting numbers or recognizing quantities larger than these was extremely low. Everett points out that this is not a reflection of their natural intelligence or willingness to learn. Rather, it has been attributed to their language's lack of numbers. Pirahi has no word for one,but only a word that means'roughly one'or'small'; there are also no separate words for he as opposed to they; etc. If it is in fact the case that the Pirahi cannot learn to count, this could be interpreted as evidence for linguistic determinism-that the continued use of a particular language system can in fact determine one's ability to categorize the world.l Some scientists, how- ever, have questioned the validity of the training techniques or elicitation methods used. Moreover, this example is far outweighed by evidence that speakers can learn new concepts and classifications not present in their native language. Thus, very few people take the idea of linguistic determinism seriously today. In addition, if linguistic determinism were true, it might be possible to modify so- cial attitudes by forcing changes in language. That language can in fact be changed at all in some ways undermines this entire idea: clearly, introducing new concepts (and subse- quently words for them) is quite possible (see Chapter 13 on language change). However, although underprivileged or disadvantaged have been substituted for poor, and mentally chal- lenged for retarded, social attitudes have not changed much; in time, the substitutions ac- quire most of the unpleasant connotations of the original term. If the linguistic relativity hypothesis is true, another possible extension would be the idea that it is possible to interpret a culture simply by looking at the language people speak. Generally, because linguistic anthropologists focus on the relationship between lan- guage and culture, they study the details of the language, the culture, and the way in which the two interact. Occasionally, however, anthropologists have tried to describe a culture's worldview by examining only their language and not looking more deeply for additional behavioral, cultural, or cognitive evidence. While most scientists today realize the futility of such attempts, these attempts have added to the debate and confusion about what lin- guistic relativity is and whether it should be accepted as true or not.

1It should be noted that Everett himself believes that linguistic determinism is not quite the right ex- planation here, and he prefers to appeal to some larger cultural constraint: see Everett (2005). File 1 1.2 Language and Thought 467

'11.2.6 ls Linguistic Relativity True?

At this point, it seems relatively uncontroversial that language does have some influence on how we think about the world; if you speak a foreign language, you have probably noticed times when the classification or description of things is different in one iurg.rug" than in another. But what exactly is the relation between language and thought? The results of some of the studies discussed in this file, such as the Levinson-Brown experiment on spatial rela- tionships, make it clear that language and thought are not completely separate. While the influence of language ort thought and culture may be considered very slight, some influ- ence does seetn to be present. Nevertheless, the validity of linguistic relativity remains very much in question, especially if one wants to pin down exactly how much influence lan- guage has or call have on thought and culture. Dan Slobin (1996) has expressed the idea that perhaps we should be concerned not with "language and thought" but with "thinking and speaking.,, That is, we should accept the fact that it-t order to speak a particular language, a speaker must use particular language- specific classifications atrd therefore perhaps take note of different aspects of the world around him. For example, some languages tend to encode the manner of motion in verbs, such as specifying whether someone is walking, running, clhnbing, being throwl, etc., while other languages telld to encode the path or direction of motion in verbs, such as cross or sscend. Although both path and manner can be expressed in any language, speakers of lan- guages that focus on the manner of ntovement, such as English, German, and Russian, will almost certainly pay attention to the manner in which movement is performed, but they may or may not think about the path of the movement. Speakers of languages that focus on the path, such as Greek, Hindi, and Spanish, on the other hand, are more likely to pay attention to the path of tnovement but may not consider the manner of movement while speaking. Thus, Slobin says, we have to learn to "think for speech,,-the things we need to think about are influenced by the language we speak. This is essentially a soft view of lin- guistic relativity. The question remains whether there is some deeper level of non-linguistic reasoning that all humans share and that remains unaffected by particular languages.