Frle 1 .2 Language and Thought

nl FrLE 1 .2 Language and Thought 11.2.1 What ls Linguistic Relativity? As most people who have studied another language know, different languages grammatically distinguish different kinds of things (see File 5.2). Some languages mark the grammatical 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 numbers. 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'perception of women, people with disabilities, and others? Does the grammatical gender of a word influence how we think of it? In some cases, the answer to this question seems to be yes. A study by Lera Boroditsky (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 linguistics 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 speakers, 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 determinism, claims that language determines thought; speakers of a language can think of things only in the way that their language expresses them. Linguistic determinism 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 Franz Boas (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 different ways of classifying the world (e.g. counting systems, tense, spatial relationships), different 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, Edward Sapir (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 language 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 influence 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 influence 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 meaning of the word influenced the workers' actual perception of the world and then their actions. Whorf also studied several Native American languages, including Hopi. 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 experiences 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 Language and Thought 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 relativity 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 different 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 cognition 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 worldview 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.

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