Language & thought s w hypothesis

Presentation made by the students :
FELLAH Brahim.

Historical Overview:
 The relationship between language, thought and reality has
occupied philosophers, linguists, anthropologists and
psychologists for centuries.
 Dating back to Plato and his theory of forms, in which Plato
described the idea of thought and language having meaning as
stemming from abstract definitions or concepts called “forms”
and which all the “entities and qualities designated thereby can
be subsumed” (Gill, 1997:132).
 Along with the standard western thought Plato ultimately
describes language as being based on reality. Similarly John
Locke of a more recent time describes the relationship between
reality and language:

 Our senses, conversant about particular sensible object, do
convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things
according to those various ways wherein those objects affect
them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow,
white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet and all those which we
call sensible qualities; which when I say the senses convey into
the mind, I mean, they from external objects convey into the
mind what produces those perceptions (Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, book 2, chapter 1).
 Locke exemplifies in this statement what many philosophers and
psychologists felt about how we think and how we perceive
reality and how that is then reflected in our language.

 Contrary to these common beliefs among philosophers
concerning language, a well-known German scholar and
diplomat from the 18th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt
equated language and thought as inseparable, as language
completely determining thought, in a hypothesis known as
the Weltanschauung (world view) hypothesis (Brown,
1968). Humboldt also emphasized “profound semantic”
differences between languages which lead to varying
“cognitive perspectives,” an idea commonly known as
cultural relativity (Wierzbika, 3).
 Although little attention was given to this extreme view at
the time, this same idea drew much interest and criticism
in the 1930’s in the emergence of a hypothesis known as
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity).

Biography
Edward Sapir: Benjamin Lee Whorf:

 Edward Sapir(1884-1939):
 American anthropologist-
linguist; a leader in
American structural
linguistics
 Author of Language: An
Introduction to the Study of
Speech
 Born in Lauenberg,
Germany.
 Pupil of Franz Boas,
teacher of Benjamin Whorf
 B. Lee Whorf (1897-1941):
 He graduated from the MIT
in 1918 with a degree in
chemical engineering and
shortly afterwards began
work as a fire prevention
engineer (inspector).
 Although he met, and later
studied with Edward Sapir,
he never took up linguistics
as a profession.
 Whorf's primary area of
interest in linguistics was the
study of native American
languages.

Mold & Cloack Theories
 To understand the S-W Hypothesis, it helps to be aware of the existence of
two opposing ideas about language and culture:
 1)- Cloack theory:
 Language reflects reality: People have thoughts first, then put them
into words. Words record what is already there. All humans think the
same way, but we use different words to label what we sense.
 2)- Mold theory:
 Language determines our thought: The vocabulary and grammar (structure)
of a language determine the way we view the world (“worlds shaped by
words”).
 * - The S-W Hypothesis is in line with the Mold theory.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
 Introduction :
 In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that there are certain
thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by
those who live in another language and that the way people think is
strongly affected by their native languages.
 It revolves around the idea that language has power and can control
how you see the world. Language is a guide to your reality, structuring
your thoughts. It provides the framework through which you make
sense of the world.
 This hypothesis was rooted in Sapir’s study of Native American
Languages, which later drew the particular attention of Sapir’s student
Benjamin Lee Whorf.

 What caught the attention of many scholars and non-scholars
alike and has stimulated comparative research among many
different languages was a paragraph that Sapir read to a group
of anthropologists and linguists in 1928:
 “Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor
alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood,
but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which
has become the medium of expression for their society… The
fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent
unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No
two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality. The worlds in which
different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same
world with different labels attached “(Salzmann, 1993:153).


 This statement and similar ones by Whorf, attempting to illustrate
that language is the medium by which one views the world, culture,
reality and thought have aroused an intense desire in not only
scholars but also for non-scholars to validate of disprove this
hypothesis.
 Most researchers today currently argue one of the following two
positions in relation to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or Linguistic
Relativity:
 Language heavily influences thought (strong version),or
Linguistic Determinism.
 Language does not influence or partially influences thought (weak
version), or Linguistic Relativity.

Linguistic Determinism and
Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic Determinism
 Language entirely
determines the range of
possible cognitive
processes of an individual.
 It is now generally agreed
to be false,but weaker
forms of correlation are
being still studied by many
researchers often
producing positive
empirical evidence for a
correlation.

 speakers of different
languages perceive and
experience the world
differently, that is, relative
to their linguistic
background.
 Which says that the
resulting cognitive
systems are different in
speakers of different
languages.

 If one is to believe the strong
version of linguistic determinism,
one also has to agree that thought is
not possible without language.
What about the pre-linguistic
thought of babies? How can babies
acquire language without thought?
Also, where did language come
from? In the linguistic determinist's
view, language would have to be
derived from a source outside the
human realm because thought is
impossible without language and
before language there would have
been no thought.
- Criticism:Merits and drawbacks-

 Yet another problem with the
hypothesis is that languages and
linguistic concepts are highly
translatable. Under linguistic
determinism, a concept in one
language would not be understood
in a different language because the
speakers and their world views are
bound by different sets of rules.
Languages are in fact translatable
and only in select cases of poetry,
humor and other creative
communications are ideas "lost in
the translation."

 The HOPI language:
 Benjamin Whorf, like Sapir studied Native
American languages. Whorf sites several
examples form the Native American
language, Hopi, to support his hypothesis
that thought is strongly based on language.
According to Whorf the Hopi language does
not contain any words, grammatical
constructions or expressions that refer to the
English concept of ‘time.’ Whorf goes on to
explain that it is possible in the Hopi
language to express the world or reality in
ways other than what many languages refer to
as ‘time.’ The Hopi view of reality is specific
to the language and can only be best
expressed if one is familiar with the language
(Carroll, 1956:57).

 Brown (1958) and
Lenneberg (1953) pointed
out that Whorf never met
an actual Indian, so his
assessments of their
character must be
somewhat vague, and also
that his translations of
Hopi sentences were done
to seem as different as
possible, to emphasise the
‘different system of
thinking’.

 A common argument for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the
perception of color across languages. According to the
hypothesis, if one language categorizes color differently than
another language, then the different groups should perceive it
differently also. In a study done in the 1970’s a group of
researchers studied the difference in perception of color in
English compared with a small tribe from Papua New Guinea
called Berinmo. The Berinmo were given a sample of 160
different colors and asked to categorize them. The Berinmo
not only had less categories, they did not differentiate
between the English colors blue and green, however, they did
draw a category between colors in their language nol and wor
which in English would both be perceived in the category of
yellow. The researchers found that the Berinmo speakers
were better at matching colors across their nol, wor categories
than across the English blue and green categories and English
speakers were better at matching colors across blue and green
than across the Berinmo nol and wor (Sawyer, 1999).
According to the researchers by showing that the color
perception of the two language groups is dependent on the
categorization in the language the results support the Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis.

 In the later 1960s, two American scholars,
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay conducted a large
cross-linguistic investigation of basic color
vocabulary, which involved 98 languages in the
world. The most striking finding in this research
is that color' word systems in different languages
are not like what has been assumed by the Sapir
and Whorl hypothesis, being culturally
determined and hence absolutely different from
one another. Contrary to this assumption,
Berlin and Kay showed that different languages
might well undergo a universal evolutionary
process of development which, in turn, made the
basic color system in one language different
from that in another only in terms of the stages
of their evolution.

 One infamous example Whorf
used to support his theory was the
number of words the Inuit people
have for ‘snow.' He claimed that
because snow is a crucial part of
their everyday lives and that they
have many different uses for snow
that they perceive snow differently
than someone who lives in a less
snow-dependent environment.
Pullum has since dispelled this
myth in his book The Great Eskimo
Vocabulary Hoax (1991). He shows
that while the Inuit use many
different terms for snow, other
languages transmit the same ideas
using phrases instead of single
words.

 Studies that supported Linguistic
Relativity
 In 1954, Brown and Lenneberg tested
for color codability, or how speakers of
one language categorize the color
spectrum and how it affects their
recognition of those colors. Penn writes,
"Lenneberg reports on a study showing
how terms of colors influence the actual
discrimination. English-speaking
subjects were better able to re-recognize
those hues which are easily named in
English. This finding is clearly in support
of the limiting influence of linguistic
categories on cognition" (1972:16).
Schlesinger explains the path taken in
this study from positive correlation to
support for linguistic relativity: "...if
codability of color affected
recognizability, and if languages differed
in codability, then recognizability is a
function of the individual's language"
(1991:27)

 Kay and Kempton's
language study (1984) found
support for linguistic
relativity. They found that
language is a part of
cognition. In their study,
English speakers' perceptions
were distorted in the blue-
green area while speakers
from Tarahumara–who lack a
blue-green distinction–
showed no distortion.
However, under certain
conditions they found that
universalism of color
distinction can be recovered.

 Peterson and Siegal's "Sally doll"
test (1995) was not intended to test
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
specifically, but their findings
support linguistic relativity in a
population who at the time had not
yet been considered for testing–deaf
children. Peterson and Siegal's
experiment with deaf children
showed a difference in the
constructed reality of deaf children
with deaf parents and deaf children
with hearing parents, especially in
the realm of non-concrete items
such as feelings and thoughts.

 Wassman and Dasen's Balinese
language test (1998) found
differences in how the Balinese
people orient themselves spatially
to that of Westerners. They found
that the use of an absolute
reference system based on
geographic points on the island in
the Balinese language correlates to
the significant cultural importance
of these points to the people. They
questioned how language affects
the thinking of the Balinese people
and found moderate linguistic
relativity results.

 Studies that disputed Linguistic
Relativity:
 Berlin and Kay's color study (1969)
found universal focus colors and
differences only in the boundaries
of colors in the spectrum. They
found that regardless of language or
culture, eleven universal color foci
emerge. Underlying apparent
diversity in color vocabularies, these
universal foci remain recognizable.
Even in languages which do not
discriminate to eleven basic colors,
speakers are nonetheless able to sort
color chips based on the eleven
focus colors.

 Osgood's common
meaning system study
found that "human
beings the world over, no
matter what their
language or culture, do
share a common
meaning system, do
organize experience
along similar symbolic
dimensions" (1963:33)

 In his universalism
studies, Greenberg came to
the conclusion that
"agreement in the
fundamentals of human
behavior among speakers
of radically diverse
languages far outweighs
the idiosyncratic
differences to be expected
from a radical theory of
linguistic relativity"
(1963:125).

 Davies' cross-cultural color
sorting test (1998) found an
obvious pattern in the
similarity of color sorting
behavior between speakers
of English which has eleven
basic colors, Russian which
has twelve (they distinguish
two blues), and Setswana
which has only five
(grue=green-blue). Davies
concluded that the data
showed strong universalism.

CONCLUSION
 In his introduction to Whorf's body of work, John Carroll suggests
a reason why so much attention and controversy surround the
theory of linguistic relativism. Carroll states, "Perhaps it is the
suggestion that all one's life one has been tricked, all unaware, by
the structure of language into a certain way of perceiving reality,
with the implication that awareness of this trickery will enable one
to see the world with fresh insight" (1956:27). The world is getting
smaller with the diffusion of computers and new communications
technology. Interaction between members of different cultures is
becoming easier and more prevalent. On a global scale, the
hypothesis could be taken as a possible rationalization why foreign
nations fail to communicate successfully. Awareness of linguistic
relativity, however, should lead to a better understanding of
cultural diversities and help to bridge intercultural communication
gaps.

Language & thought s w hypothesis

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