Language and Culture
Prof. R. Hickey
SS 2006
Language and Thought
Martin Oberließen
Miriam Grigo
Anthony Ajunwa
Nina Delvos
Grundstudium TN
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 differently
one idea in one language – different phonetic groups in another (Eskimos and Snow)
3. Linguistic phenomena are unconscious in character
use 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 incommensurably
Comparisons 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
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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
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separation of structure and meaning in a language
assigning structure to grammar and meaning to lexicon
relationship between language and culture
i.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
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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 languagesystem is a part of culture
Approaches in comparative
psycholinguistics:
Experimental studies on the
lexical coding of color
Introduction/ structure of the topic
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The problem
Information to the underlying text
General approach
Three kinds of snow- differences between
Eskimos and the English
Why color?
Conclusion
The problem
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Certain speakers of different languages
are different from each other according to
their psychological potentials
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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
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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
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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
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In order to come to a comparability of
data across languages it seems to be
necessary to invent some sort of
descriptive metalanguage.
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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?
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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.
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The existence of the lexeme color, which suggests that
there is a referential experience that has some unity for
English speakers.
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The color space is simply an ordering device that allows us
to assign every possible color a specific position or point.
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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
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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:
Yellow piece
of string
Blue cloth
Blue rope
Expectations:
Navaho-dominant children: shape or form-based choices in line with
their grammatical pattern
English-dominant children: sort by color or size
Casagrande’s experiment:
Results were in the expected direction:
Navaho-dominant children preferred verb-form and
shape as a basis of classification whereas Englishdominant 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 welldefined 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)
References
Bloom, 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.