J Scott Hill's List: linguistic relativity

• Linguistic relativity refers to "the assertion that the speakers of different languages have differing cognitive systems," and that these different systems have an influence on the ways in which the speakers, of the worlds many languages, think about the world (Sternberg, 1999). Most simply, language shapes thought.
• Often referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, it states that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language.
• A more moderate idea is that of linguistic relativity (differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers—thus, thought is the functional equivalent of language.)
• the implications of the above hypothesis are dramatic; "the foundational categories of reality are not ‘in’ the world but are imposed by one’s culture (and hence can be challenged…)."
• • "Languages carve the spectrum into color words at different places,"
   
  • There is a "fundamentally different Hopi concept of time"
   
  • There are "dozens of Eskimo words for snow" (1994)
• These are black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. Some languages, such as English, use all eleven names for colors, while others use only two.
• Secondly, Berlin and Kay discovered that the existence of a color name in a language is arranged according to a hierarchy. This hierarchy contains five levels: (1) black, white; (2) red; (3) yellow, green, blue; (4) brown; and (5) purple, pink, orange, gray. This means that if a language employs only two color terms, then it will only use black and white, and so on down the list until eleven colors have been named (1999).
• Culture: A key to the puzzle?
• although specific languages would affect the part of the brain that one uses, it is not language alone that produces "linguistically" differentiated thought patterns. Rather it is one’s culture.
• , but once an individual has passed a certain age, he/she is less likely to develop new language skills. At that point, culture will use the knowledge of words from education to teach a specific way of analyzing the world. It is the culture, not purely language, which facilitates a different way of thinking. Consequently, this is the extra piece of the puzzle that so many scholars have left out in their research endeavors concerning the relationship between thought and language.

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• As usual in discussions of relativism, it is important to resist all-or-none thinking.
• Linguistic Diversity: 
    Languages, especially members of quite different language families, differ in important ways from one another.   

    Linguistic Influence on Thought: 
    The structure and lexicon of one's language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the world, and they do so in a systematic way.
• subject, verb, object. In Japanese it is subject, object, verb.

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• While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers
• In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.”
• In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

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• 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 subject to universal factors. Current research is focused on exploring the ways in which language influences thought and determining to what extent.^[2] 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,

• A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.
• The effect is powerful enough, she says, that "the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception. "Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect on how people think about things in the world," she says.
• As in that bridge. In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.

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• Focal vocabulary hypothesis

   

  Part of the supposition is that Eskimo languages would have a focal vocabulary with several extra words to describe snow, which is specifically the point of Boas's theory. They deal with snow more than other cultures, just as artists have more words to describe the various details of their profession — what a non-artist calls "paint", the artist identifies as "oil paint", "acrylic paint", "tempera", or "watercolor". This does not mean that these two individuals are observing two different objects, nor does it mean that the artist would be confused by the idea that oil paint and acrylic paint are related. Likewise in English, the words "blizzard", "flurry", "pack", "slush," "drift", "sleet," and "powder" refer to different types of snow, but all are recognized as varieties of "snow" in a general sense.

• (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and
• the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour
• Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent of the hypothesis, because he published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior. Whorf's ideas were widely criticized, and Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg decided to put them to the test. They reformulated Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity as a testable hypothesis, now called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and 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 in to focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favor. A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay showed that color terminology is subject to universal semantic constraints, and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis was seen as completely discredited.
• From the late 1980s a new school of linguistic relativity scholars have examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for weak versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.^[
• A major question of debate is the question of whether human psychological faculties are mostly universal and innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning, and hence subject to cultural and social processes that vary between places and times.
• he universalist view holds that all humans share the same set of basic faculties and that variability due to cultural differences is negligible. This position often sees the human mind as mostly a biological construction, so that all humans sharing the same neurological configuration can be expected to have similar or identical basic cognitive patterns.
• constructivist, holding that human faculties and concepts are largely influenced by socially constructed and learned categories, that is not subject to many biological restrictions. Or it can be described as idealist, holding that the human mental capacities are generally unrestricted by its biological-material basis.
• And it can be described as essentialist, holding that there may be essential differences in the ways the different individuals or groups experience and conceptualize the world. It may also be described as relativist, basically a kind of Cultural relativism, which sees different cultural groups as having different conceptual schemes that are not necessarily compatible or commensurable, nor more or less in accord with the external reality.^[7]
• he looked at Native American languages and attempted to account for the ways in which differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world.
• Whorf was also concerned with how a scientific account of the world differed to such an extent from a religious account, which led him to study the languages of old religious scripture and to write several anti-evolutionist pamphlets^[21]
• Another tradition of interpretation, exemplified in the work of linguists including John A. Lucy, Michael Silverstein and Stephen C. Levinson, points to the many places in Whorf's writings where he explicitly rejects determinism, and where he clearly notes that translation and commensuration between linguistic conceptual schemes is possible. This line of interpretation suggests that a more sympathetic reading of Whorf would lead to a greater understanding of the subtleties in Whorf's use of terminology and consequently to resolving some of the apparent contradictions noted by Whorf's critics.
• detractors such as Eric Lenneberg, Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker have criticized him for not being sufficiently clear in his formulation of how he meant language influences thought, and for not providing actual proof for his conjectures.
• Most of his arguments were in the form of examples that were anecdotal or speculative in nature, and functioned as attempts to show how 'exotic' grammatical traits were connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought.
• indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European
• 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 like snow or water, is not always possible.
• 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 due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed 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 from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg^[26] as not actually demonstrating causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning.
• time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.^[27] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language 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 consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them.
• Universalist scholars such as Steven Pinker often see Malotki's study as a final refutation of Whorf's claim about Hopi, whereas relativist scholars such as John A Lucy and Penny Lee have criticized Malotki's study for mischaracterizing Whorf's claims and for forcing Hopi grammar into a pregiven model of analysis that doesn't fit the data.^[28]

• Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated an actual hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of linguistic relativity in their works. They identified the two tenets of the Whorf thesis as (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure".^[30] These two tenets were later developed by Roger Brown into the so-called "weak" and "strong" formulation respectively:

   

   

  1. 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.
   2. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.^[31]
• This allowed them to correlate the linguistic categorization directly to a non-linguistic task, that of recognizing and remembering colors. In a later experiment, speakers of two languages that categorize colors differently (English and Zuni) were asked to perform tasks of color recognition. 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 in fact found that Zuñi speakers who classify green and blue together as a single category did have trouble recognizing and remembering nuances within the green/blue category.^[32] Brown and Lenneberg's study became the beginning of a tradition of investigation of the linguistic relativity through color terminology (see below).
• • Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
   
  • Eskimo words for snow
   
  • Language and thought
   
  • Linguistic anthropology
   
  • Linguistic Determinism
   
  • Relativism
   
  • Newspeak

• Today many followers of the universalist school of thought still oppose the idea of linguistic relativity. For example, Steven Pinker argues in his book 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."^[38]

   

  Pinker and other universalist opponents of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen put up by themselves.^[39]

• In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a 'neo-Herderian champion'^[40] and in 1982, he proposed his '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'.^[41] Whorf himself had expressed the sentiment thus:

   

   

  But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness.^[42]
• 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.
• George Lakoff. He argued that language is often used metaphorically and that different languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think. For example, English employs metaphors likening time with money, whereas other languages may not talk about time in that fashion. Other linguistic metaphors may be common to most languages because they are based on general human experience, for example, metaphors likening up with good and bad with down. Lakoff also argues that metaphor plays an important part in political debates where it matters whether one is arguing in favor of the "right to life" or against the "right to choose"; whether one is discussing "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers".
• In his book Women, Fire and Dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind,^[29] Lakoff reappraised the hypothesis of linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's views about how linguistic categorization reflects and/or influences mental categories.
• A second parameter is whether conceptual systems are to be seen as absolute or whether they can be expanded or exchanged during the lifetime of a human being.
• third parameter is whether translatability is accepted as a proof of similarity or difference between concept systems or whether it is rather the actual habitual use of linguistic expressions that is to be examined.
• John Lucy has identified three main strands of research into linguistic relativity.^[48] The first is what he calls the "structure centered" approach. This approach starts with observing a structural peculiarity in a language and goes on to examine its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The first example of this kind of research is Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is the research made by John Lucy 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 speakers of English.^[49]
• The second strand of research is the "domain centered" approach, in which a semantic domain is chosen and compared across linguistic and cultural groups for correlations between linguistic encoding and behavior. The main strand of domain centered research has been the research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for studying linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is known to be hard wired into the neural system and as such subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains.
• Another semantic domain which has proven fruitful for studies of linguistic relativity is the domain of space.^[50] Spatial categories vary greatly between languages and recent research has shown that speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many quotidian tasks. Research carried out by Stephen C. Levinson and other cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has reported three basic kinds of spatial categorization and while many languages use combinations of them some languages exhibit only one kind of spatial categorization and corresponding differences in behavior. For example the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions.
• A speaker of Guugu yimithirr will define a person as being "north of the house", while a speaker of English may say that he is "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house" depending on the speaker's point of view. This difference makes Guugu yimithirr speakers better at performing some kinds of tasks, such as finding and describing locations in open terrain
• English speakers perform better in tasks regarding the positioning of objects relative to the speaker (for example telling someone to set a round table putting forks to the right of the plate and knives to the left would be extremely difficult in Guugu yimithirr).^[51]
• The third strand of research is the "behavior centered" approach which starts by observing different behavior between linguistic groups and then proceeds to search for possible causes for that behavior in the linguistic system.
• This kind of approach was used by Whorf when he 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. One study in this line of research has been conducted by Bloom who noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. After a study he concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in the Chinese language.
• Another widely-publicized project with relevance to linguistic relativity is Daniel Everett's work on the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon.^[53] Everett observed several peculiarities in Pirahã culture that he interpreted as corresponding to linguistically rare features, such as a lack of numbers and color terms in the way those are normally defined, and a lack of certain types of clauses.
• That is, these critics argue, the lack of need for numbers and color discrimination explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of color vocabulary.^[55]

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• There are potentially eight different  cousin terms.
• They are  generally correlated with societies that have substantial class  divisions.
• The Hawaiian system is the least descriptive and merges many different relatives  into a small number of categories. Ego  distinguishes between relatives only on the basis of sex and generation. Thus there is no uncle term; (mother's and father's brothers are included in the same category as father). All cousins are classified in the same group as brothers and sisters.
• people in these societies make  behavioural, if not linguistic, distinctions between their actual parents and  other individuals they may call "father" or "mother".
• Hawaiian kinship semantics are now thought to be related to the presence and influence of   ambilineal descent  systems.
• Because of predominant marking of immediate family members,  Eskimo terms usually occur in societies  which place a strong emphasis on the nuclear family  rather than on extended kin or larger kinship groups.
• This terminology occurs in societies that are organized on the basis of   unilineal descent, where distinctions between father's kin and mother's kin are critical.
• Parallel cousins are merged with siblings, however cross-cousin terms are  quite peculiar and cut across generational divisions. Ego uses the  same terms  for his mother's brother's son as he does for his mother's brother (F)  and the same term for mother's brother's daughter as for his mother (B)
• This pattern has the effect of stressing common membership of relatives in  patrilineal lines;
• Omaha terminologies are associated with societies that have a strong patrilineal emphasis in their social organization.
• This system is generally found in societies with strong matrilineal kinship  emphases.

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• finding broad support for weak versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts.^[3]
• 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 subject to universal factors.

• Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:

   

   

  The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.^[6]
• The American linguist William Dwight Whitney for example actively strove to eradicate the native American languages arguing that their speakers were savages and would be better off abandoning their languages and learning English and adopting a civilized way of life.^[7
• Boas always stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages, and argued that there was no such thing as primitive languages, but 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 being studied, and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original language.
• attempted to account for the ways in which differences in grammatical systems and language use affected the way their speakers perceived the world
• Steven Pinker have criticized him for not being sufficiently clear in his formulation of how he meant languages influences thought, and for not providing actual proof of his assumptions.
• where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages
• 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 like snow or water, is not always possible.
• 1. 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.
   2. The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language.^[19]
• Pinker and other universalist opponents of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen put up by themselves.^[27]
• But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English […] is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the 'plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. […] We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness.^[30]
• Fishman's 'Whorfianism of the third kind' proposes that language is a key to culture.
• metaphorically and that different languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think.
• or example, English employs metaphors likening time with money, whereas other languages may not talk about time in that fashion. Other linguistic metaphors may be common to most languages because they are based on general human experience, for example, metaphors likening up with good and bad with down. Lakoff also argues that metaphor plays an important part in political debates where it matters whether one is arguing in favor of the "right to life" or against the "right to choose"; whether one is discussing "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers".

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