The document discusses how language may influence thought and behavior. It provides examples of how different languages categorize concepts like colors differently, using kinship terms to reflect cultural values, and acquiring communicative competence to understand social norms. While early studies by Whorf and Sapir supported the idea that language shapes thought, their work has also faced criticisms over questionable methodology. More recent experiments testing this Sapir-Whorf hypothesis have yielded mixed results.
Local and Global Communication in Multicultural Settings TeacherRichster
This presentation discusses Communication in Multicultural set-up considering not only cultural differences, social backgrounds, biographical diverseness of every individual; but also factors that could help everyone in an intercultural communication setting.
Local and Global Communication in Multicultural Settings TeacherRichster
This presentation discusses Communication in Multicultural set-up considering not only cultural differences, social backgrounds, biographical diverseness of every individual; but also factors that could help everyone in an intercultural communication setting.
These slides are the relationship between language, culture and thought as Ronald Wardhaugh has discussed in "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics". The examples have been provided from the Pakistani context and culture.
One of the most fundamental questions asked in Philosophy of Language is "What is language (in general terms)?"
According to semiotics (the study of sign processes in communication, and of how meaning is constructed and understood), language is the mere manipulation and use of symbols in order to draw attention to signified content, in which case humans would not be the sole possessors of language skills.
These slides are the relationship between language, culture and thought as Ronald Wardhaugh has discussed in "An Introduction to Sociolinguistics". The examples have been provided from the Pakistani context and culture.
One of the most fundamental questions asked in Philosophy of Language is "What is language (in general terms)?"
According to semiotics (the study of sign processes in communication, and of how meaning is constructed and understood), language is the mere manipulation and use of symbols in order to draw attention to signified content, in which case humans would not be the sole possessors of language skills.
Language is more than just a means of communication. It influences our culture and even our thought processes. During the first four decades of the 20th century, language was viewed by American linguists and anthropologists as being more important than it actually is in shaping our perception of reality. This was mostly due to Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf who said that language predetermines what we see in the world around us. In other words, language acts like a polarizing lens on a camera in filtering reality--we see the real world only in the categories of our language.
134 Languages in Contact each other as Aboriginal Australi.docxherminaprocter
134 Languages in Contact
each other as Aboriginal Australia, China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, and
Russia). Boroditsky illuminates the marvelously diverse ways that lan
guages and cultures shape the way we think.
In his article "Death by Monoculture," linguistic anthropologist Stephen
Pax Leonard bemoans the loss of the Polar Eskimos' language and culture, tying
it in part to global warming and, perhaps just as frustrating, a seeming lack of
concern from the very pcpulace whose culture is waning. The Polar Eskimos'
connection to the larger world via other languages, as well as through the Inter
net, is understandable, and it mirrors the desires of many people worldwide who
arc eager to start lives in new places or bring new places into their own lives.
Noc knowing the "right" language presents more than a metaphorical
barrier as James Angelos's article "Passing the Test" demonstrates. Is a re
quired proficiency in a country's official language a helpful step toward" inte
gration," or is it a passive-aggressive deterrent to undesirable immigration?
With well over 1,000 languages spoken in India, multilingualism is the
norm, yet Reshma Krishnamurthy Sharma's article "The New Language
Landscape" reflects both an anxiety to be part of a global economy and a
logistical difficulty of maintaining regional languages in the face of India's
increasing inter-regional marriages. The answer: The new generation is
learning English-the language of rhe former colonizers-exclusively. In
"Operation Mind Your Language," Pallavi Polanki sheds light on the
demand for English reachers in Afghanistan as a result of the American
presence. Indeed, the expansion of English as a global lingua franca has
become a worldwide activity-for both those who want co learn and those
who want to teach; but not without the justifiable ambivalence that Julie
Traves captures in "The Church of Please and Thank You."
As this book goes to print, there aie 6,909 livinglanguages in the world.
1his number, however, is in decline: On average, one language dies every
two weeks. At this rate, according to an article in National Geographic,
"more than half of the world's roughly 7,000 languages will vanish by the
end of rhis century alone."
Access to languages-and the wonder of human cultures rhat shape
and are shaped by chem-is increasingly available, even as that access spells,
for some languages, their imminent extinction. Global languages such as
English, and also Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Hindi, seem to hold
greater promise than a speaker's heritage language-the mother tongue, at
lease in the present, when economic need can make cultural heritage seem
like a luxury. Resolving this conundrum that pits long-term heritage
Boroditsky "How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?" 135
against economic exigency becomes an ethical and cultural dilemma that
we as a global community must work out together.
Works Cited
Basu, Paroma. "What Hap.
Traditional Grammar was in the 19th century that historical language study began to meet the criteria of scientificness and only in the 20th century that the study of contemporary languages became scientific in today’s sense of the word.
Language and Thought The Sapir-Whorf HypothesisOne of the most .docxDIPESH30
Language and Thought: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
One of the most important and long-standing debates in studies of language and
behavior involves the relationship between language and thought processes. This
relationship is particularly important to the cross-cultural study of language
because each culture is associated with a given language as a vehicle for its expression.
How does culture influence language? And how does language influence
culture?
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also referred to as linguistic relativity, suggests
that speakers of different languages think differently, and that they do so because
of the differences in their languages. Because different cultures typically have different
languages, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is especially important for understanding
cultural differences (and similarities) in thought and behavior as a function
of language.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is important to verify, because if correct, it suggests
that people of different cultures think differently, just by the very nature,
structure, and function of their language. Their thought processes, their associations,
their ways of interpreting the world—even the same events we perceive—
may be different because they speak a different language and this language has
helped shape their thought patterns. This hypothesis also suggests that people who
speak more than one language may actually have different thought patterns when
speaking different languages.
Many studies have examined language–cognition issues since Edward Sapir
and Benjamin Whorf first proposed their hypothesis in the 1950s. In one of the
earliest language studies, Carroll and Casagrande (1958) compared Navajo and
English speakers. They examined the relationship between the system of shape classification
in the Navajo language and the amount of attention children pay to
shape when classifying objects. Similar to the Japanese language described earlier
in this chapter, the Navajo language has the interesting grammatical feature that
certain verbs of handling (for example, “to pick up,” “to drop”) require
special linguistic forms depending on what kind of object is being handled. A total
of 11 such linguistic forms describe different shapes—round spherical objects, round
thin objects, long flexible things, and so forth. Noting how much more complex this
linguistic feature is in Navajo than in English, Carroll and Casagrande (1958)
Culture, Language, and Communication 241
suggested that such linguistic features might play a role in influencing cognitive processes.
In their experiment, they compared Navajo- and English-dominant children to
see how often they used shape, form, or type of material to categorize objects. The
Navajo-dominant children were significantly more likely to categorize by shape than
were the English-dominant children. In the same study, Carroll and Casagrande
(1958) also reported that the performance of low-income African American Englishspeaking
children was similar ...
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Read| The latest issue of The Challenger is here! We are thrilled to announce that our school paper has qualified for the NATIONAL SCHOOLS PRESS CONFERENCE (NSPC) 2024. Thank you for your unwavering support and trust. Dive into the stories that made us stand out!
Instructions for Submissions thorugh G- Classroom.pptxJheel Barad
This presentation provides a briefing on how to upload submissions and documents in Google Classroom. It was prepared as part of an orientation for new Sainik School in-service teacher trainees. As a training officer, my goal is to ensure that you are comfortable and proficient with this essential tool for managing assignments and fostering student engagement.
Macroeconomics- Movie Location
This will be used as part of your Personal Professional Portfolio once graded.
Objective:
Prepare a presentation or a paper using research, basic comparative analysis, data organization and application of economic information. You will make an informed assessment of an economic climate outside of the United States to accomplish an entertainment industry objective.
The French Revolution, which began in 1789, was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France. It marked the decline of absolute monarchies, the rise of secular and democratic republics, and the eventual rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. This revolutionary period is crucial in understanding the transition from feudalism to modernity in Europe.
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2. How can the words in a language appear to
influence behavior? Give examples.
Does the way you think and act in your first
language differ from how you think and act in
a second or third language?
3. Concepts
Every human language is ‘fully expressive’.
translation possible
exceptions might be pidgins, invented languages
4. How concepts expressed
Concept morpheme
How many morphemes required to express a concept?
Languages vary
e.g.
English
2 morphemes, ‘happiness’
Filipino
3 morphemes “kaligayahan”
5. Morpheme concept
What concept(s) expressed by a morpheme?
Witsuwit’en
[əstɬ’əs] ‘paper, book, envelope, letter’
Kinship systems
Witsuwit’en
–[aq’əj] ‘maternal aunt’, -[pits] ‘paternal aunt’
6. Does language affect thought?
Do speakers/signers of different
languages view the world differently?
8. What is Linguistic Anthropology?
The American Anthropological Association defines anthropology as “the study of
humans past and present”. Since possessing the language faculty is fundamental part
of being human, it may come as no surprise that one of the four traditional branches
of anthropology concerns itself with the study of human language.
Linguistic anthropology is the study of how human language interacts with
shapes, social structure, and culture.
Speakers use language to represent their natural and social worlds; thus, looking at
a certain language is like looking at the world through the lens of the
language’s speakers, and much can be understood about culture through
language.
9. For instance, in English there are a number of
metaphors equating time and money.
Time and money
Spending time
Wasting one’s time
Investing time in a project
Budgeting out one’s time
10. Activity
Refer to metaphors given previously. What other metaphorical
relationship exists in your native language?
List at least four metaphors linking two concepts and briefly
explain what you think they say about the culture (to get you
started, think of metaphors for love, life, work, etc.).
11. Kinship Terms
One way cultural values are reflected in language is through kinship
terms.
For instance, kinship terms in English are organized by gender (brother
vs. sister, father vs. mother), generation (daughter, mother, grandmother, great
grandmother), and line (direct lineage: mother, son, vs. collateral lineage: aunt,
nephew).
There is also emphasis on blood relation versus relation in marriage,
with terms like step-sibling, half-sibling, mother-in-law, and so on.
13. Activity
Choose a language and culture and research the kinship terms used
in that culture.
How are kinship terms organized in this culture?
How is the organization of kinship terms similar to and different from
American English?
14. Communicative Competence
When and how do you think children acquire communicative
competence?
What specific rules do we need to know as part of our communicative
competence in order to participate in an American English conversation?
Give at least four rules. When did we learn each of these things?
15. Communicative Competence
Researcher Dell Hymes argued that knowing a language means more than just knowing
how to produce grammatical utterances. For example, in day-to-day interactions in the
U.S., “What’s up?” and “How are you”? Are often used as greetings rather than requests
for information.
Speakers must have this cultural understanding in order to supply the appropriate
response. Without this understanding, it would be quite logical to respond these questions
with long descriptions of how the speaker’s day went or how the speaker was feeling.
Communicative competence is the ability to interact and communicate according to
cultural norms. Some examples of things one must know to be communicatively competent
in a certain language are politeness strategies, speaker roles, turn-taking, and greetings.
17. Linguistic Relativity
LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor
of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic
systems at Stanford University, who looks at
how the languages we speak shape the way
we think. From WHAT'S NEXT? ... For a long
time, the idea that language might shape
thought was considered at best untestable
and more often simply wrong
18. Language and Thought
Explain how the words in a language can appear to influence behavior, giving at
least one concrete example.
Watch the video in the next slide.
Summarize what is the talk all about.
How does language shape the way the subjects think?
19.
20. Do we think before we speak? Or do we
need language to shape our thoughts?
21.
22. Linguistic Relativity
The Linguistic Relativity hypothesis argues that the language someone speaks affects
how she perceives the world.
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”.
German speakers: “Key” is described as hard, heavy, metal, shiny. On the other hand,
bridge, for which the German word is feminine and the Spanish is masculine. Germans called
it pretty, peaceful, elegant, beautiful, and fragile, while Spanish speakers called it strong,
dangerous, sturdy, and towering.
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.
23. Early Studies in Linguistic Relativity
1. Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
2. Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
24. Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
1. Franz Boas (1858-1942)
Race culture language
Language could be used to describe or articulate how a person saw the world, but
it would not constrain that view.
2. Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
“Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a
particular how of thought.”
3. Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
“users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward
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”
This means that the language someone speaks affects how he perceives the
world.
25. Criticisms of the Early Studies
Refutation towards Whorf’s Hopi studies made by Ekkehart Malotski (1983).
Whorf is simply projecting his ideas about their culture from what he understood of the
Hopi Grammatical structure. This would make his argument 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 do not have tenses.
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 concepts like day, night, month, and year. Unfortunately, his
methods of collecting data were very questionable, and thus any conclusions drawn from
this data are equally questionable.
Does this mean that the principle of linguistic relativity is wrong?
26.
27. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
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.
The hypothesis states that the way people think is strongly affected by
their native languages.
It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his
student Benjamin Whorf.
28. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis I
1. Linguistic relativity:
Structural differences between languages are paralleled by nonlinguistic
cognitive differences (the structure of the language itself effects cognition).
The number and the type of the basic colour words of a language
determine how a subject sees the rain bow.
29. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis II
2. Linguistic determinism = extreme "Weltanschauung" version of the
hypothesis:
The structure of a language determines someone’s World View
A World View describes a (hopefully) consistent and integral sense of
existence and provides a theoretical framework for generating, sustaining
and applying knowledge
E.g. The Inuit can think more intelligently about snow because their
language contains more sophisticated and subtle words distinguishing
various forms of it, etc.
30. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis II
Arbitrariness
The semantic systems of different languages vary without
constraint.
This hypothesis must be tacitly assumed, because otherwise the
claim that Linguistic Relativity makes is rather undramatic.
For each decomposition of the spectrum of the rainbow a natural
system of colour words is possible.
31. Testing Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
“The Whorf Hypothesis can be difficult to test, because it can be difficult
to identify tasks that really are language- and culture-neutral.”
Pirahã tribe (Brazil)
the language lacks numbers
attempts to get Pirahã to count unsuccessful
because the language lacks numbers, or problems with teaching technique?
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1094492/DC1
32. Color experiments
Infinite number of ways to carve up colors
Lenneberg and Roberts 1956
English speakers and monolingual Zuni speakers presented with colors ranging
between yellow and orange
What was the task? to name the colors presented?
“the English speakers, who have two basic color terms for this range (namely, yellow and
orange), were highly consistent in naming the colors, where the Zuni, who have a single
term encompassing yellow and orange, made no consistent choice.”
“These results seem to support the Whorf Hypothesis.”
English speakers could have said: “yellow”, “orange”, “yellow-orange”, “orange-
yellow”, “mostly yellow with a touch of orange” etc.
Or simply show (1) preference to answer with monomorphemic words, (2) English speakers
agree on meanings of “orange” and “yellow”?
33. Another experiment
Which direction does the arrow on left point?
Turn 180°.
Which arrow points same direction as original arrow?
Results
English speakers
“consistently choose arrow B”
Tzeltal speakers
“consistently choose arrow A”
34. Spatial relationships in English vs.
Tzeltal
English
right, left, front, back are relative terms
the chair is to the left of the table
Tenejapan Tzeltal
“uses absolute terms similar to north, south, east and west
instead”
“the chair is to the north of the table”
35. Tests of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Kay
& Kempton )
Two experiments:
Experiment 1: Tests whether linguistic relativity exists.
Experiment 2: Tests whether ‘name strategy’ can be
used as the explanation for the underlying cognitive
mechanism in experiment 1.
36. Tests of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
Paul Kay & Willett Kempton (1984)
Experiment 1
Distinctions in color terminology
English: distinction between ‘blue’ and ‘green’
Tarahumara: siy?name is blue and/or green
Subjective distance between colors
Discrimination distance (“real” scale of psychological distance)
Blue-green lexical category boundary (that wavelength at which an equal mixture of
green and blue is perceived - based on English speakers)
38. Stimuli and method
Eight color chips
in different shades of green and blue (at two different levels of brightness)
Triad technique
Three chips at a time are shown which of the 3 chips is most different from
theother 2?
56 triads
39. Conclusions of experiment 1
Kay & Kempton concluded that a Whorfian effect is shown by
this experiment:
English speakers tended to exaggerate the
discrimination of colors close to the lexical category boundary,
while Tarahumara didn’t.
What cognitive mechanism may have caused this difference?
40. Name Strategy
Kay & Kempton hypothesized that the English
speakers used a ‘name strategy’, by discriminating
between colors according to their lexical category.
E.g., if chips C and D are called ‘blue’ and chip B is
called ‘green’, then chip B must be the odd member in
this triad
41. Experiment 2
To test whether this hypothesis is true, Kay & Kempton
conducted a second experiment in which they eliminated the
‘name strategy’.
If the Whorfian hypothesis isn’t found in this experiment, it
supports the use of the ‘name strategy’ in experiment.
42. General conclusions
Experiment 1 seems to show a Whorfian effect; English speakers show
a tendency to discriminate colors based on the lexical category
boundary, while Tarahumara speakers didn’t show this effect.
Kay & Kempton hypothesized that a ‘name strategy’ was the cognitive
mechanism that was used by the English speakers. To test this possibility
they conducted another experiment.
In experiment 2 the ‘name strategy’ was ruled out. No Whorfian effect
was found.
43. Summary of Sapir-Whorf
Intriguing idea
Inconclusive experimental support
The extreme ("Weltanschauung") version of this idea, that all
thought is constrained by language, has been disproved
The opposite extreme – that language does not influence
thought at all – is also widely considered to be false