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.

1. Week 3 Language and
Culture
DR. RUSSELL RODRIGO

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?

7. Outline
1.Linguistic Anthropology
2.Language and Thought

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.

12. Mandatory Respect Language
Exercise

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.

16. Language and Thought

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?

20. Do we think before we speak? Or do we
need language to shape our thoughts?

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?

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)

37. Color distinction in English and
Tarahumara

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