Abstract
Linguistic Relativity
Hypothesis is the hypothesis that the structure of our language determines the
way we perceive the world. This hypothesis is mainly linked with Edward Sapir
and Benjamin Lee Whorf because they studied this issue dominantly but this
phenomena attracted the attention of many other linguists , philosophers
,psychologists including Hamann and Herder , Wilhelm von Humboldt , Franz Boaz
and so forth. This hypothesis has two versions indeed ; one is strong and the
other one is weak aspect. In this article historical background of linguistic
relativity , Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis , the two versions of this hypothesis will
be discussed and as a writer I will state my position to this issue.
Key Words: Linguistic
Relativity , Sapir , Whorf , Sapir&Whorf Hypothesis.
INTRODUCTION
In this article Sapir & Whorf Hypothesis about linguistic relativity will be covered. Sapir & Whorf Hypothesis simply suggest that there is a great relationship between the properties of language a person speaks and how this person perceive the world and behave accordingly. In other saying does language shapes our thinking? In fact this hypothesis is a coin which has two sides. One side is ‘ the Strong Sapir & Whorf Hypothesis’ and the other side is ‘the Weak Sapir & Whorf Hypothesis’. Strong version claims that language we speak strongly determines how we perceive the world. It is also called as Linguistic Determinism. On the other hand , the weak version of hypothesis claims that language shapes our thinking. Not fully but partly affect our perception of world.
I am in favor
of the weak version of the hypothesis. In my opinion language only shapes our
thougt. From my standpoint, this less deterministic approach towards linguistic
relativity is much more plausible than the other one. In the following parts of
the article I will try to support my
opinion about Linguistic Relativity.
BACKGROUND
INFORMATION OF LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
We can distinguish the history of linguistics into four periods. Respectively ; Traditional Grammar , Historical Linguistics , Structuralism and Generative Linguistics. In the Structuralism we see two movements ; one is European Structuralism and the other one is American Structuralism (Descriptivism). The former was led by Ferdinand de Saussure while the latter was led by Frans Boas. The encounter of ‘native’ languages began in the 1700’s, that is to say from the Historical Linguistic Period European linguists analyzed the Native American Languages. Frans Boas, originally as an anthropologist, did the same. He analyzed ‘alien’ languages spoken by Indic people. And Boas stated that there is a linguistic relativity. That is , there are a lot of diferent languages and a linguist’s task is to compose different schemas for these languages. Before Boas , especially in Enlightenment language and thought were not seen as a correlated units. These two units were seen as seperate entities. So we can clearly see that the idea of Relativism lies in the thought of Franz Boas. His mentalist approach to linguistic studies was shared also by his student Edward Sapir. Before we come to Sapir & Whorf we will look at some earlier period .
In contrast to the view adopted in Enlightenment towards language and thougt , we
can find several traces of linguistic relativity in the work of Hamann ,
Kreuzzüge des Philologen. He states that while some similarities among
languages can be found, there are also differences. And those differences among
languages parallel differences in thought. Language did not originate from
thought, but its origin had been prior to thought, for thought presupposes a
language in which it might manifest itself. Hamann may thus be seen as the
first one to hold such relativistic views in a strongly articulated fashion.
In the works of Hamann and Herder there had been no
extensive study of different languages. The views of Hamann were mere opinions
based on intuition and not in the least backed by a sufficient study of
language differences. The views of Herder were based on a shallow understanding
of language diversity, many of his sources being unreliable, and his stance was
more molded into his larger theory of spontaneity then it was fitting the
facts. Humboldt however revitalised the discussion by basing the various
relativistic claims upon a broad range of evidence from various non-western
languages. He was therefore the first one who sought to provide an extensive
body of evidence regarding the principle of linguistic relativity. Humboldt is
often considered to have maintained what would later come to be known as the
strong version of linguistic relativism. He however never states explicitly
that he considered language and thought to be equivalent in the strict logical
sense, so care should be exercised in the attribution of the strongest version
of relativism to him. But he surely saw the two components as strongly related.
Now we can talk about Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee
Whorf seperately. Sapir studied languages of the Pacific coast of North
America. In his descriptivist studies he adopted rationalist approach. Having
faced with different languages and diffirent cultures he developed his
relativist claims. Whorf’s life is different than any other linguists because
he is not a linguist. He was an outsider to the fields of linguistics , he was
a fire-prevention inspector with an insurance company. Still he was interested
in language and language studies and especially interested in Hopi Language , a
language of Arizona. After this brief historical information about
relativism we can present Sapir &
Whorf Hypothesis in detail.
Sapir & Whorf Hypothesis
comes in many forms but they all involve the testing for correlations between
language and thought. Also we should keep in mind that theory tries to
establish the relation between language and thought. In a way this theory
states that language differences reflect differences in conceptual structure
and language differences affect our daily, automatic thinking, rather than what
we are capable of thinking about. Sapir and Whorf argued that :
“Meanings are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it, because
of the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation to the
world.” (Sapir) and
“We cut up nature—organize it into concepts—and
ascribe significances as we do,largely because of absolutely obligatory
patterns of our own language.” (Whorf) . From this quotations we clearly see
the opinion of Sapir and Whorf on Linguistic Relativity.
Now in this part I will present some empirical proof
regarding the presence of Linguistic Relativity.
The Kay-Kempton experiment in 1984 was one of the
first emprical evidence to Linguistic Relativism.
This experiment involved a
green-blue discrimination task. Subjects saw three color chips in the
green-blue range. This test involves two language community one is English
speakers and the other one is Tarahumara speakers ( for whom there is a single
word for green / blue , siyname.) In the experiment subjects are asked: Which
of the three chips is most different from the other two? English speakers
picked Chip C while Tarahumaran subjects chose A or split evenly.
The color domain
has been of central interest in research on the relationship between language
and thought. In the 1970s, such research cast a pall over the possibility that
language might influence thought with the findings that inventories of color
terms shared significant commonalities across languages and that any linguistic
differences did not correspond to differences in categorization behavior.
Several recent studies indicate, however, that language may have an influence
on color cognition. Work with the Berinmo, a small tribe in New Guinea whose
language has 5 basic color terms (compared to 11 in English),
is a case in point. Controlling for a confound in previous research,Roberson
and colleagues found that the Berinmo’s recognition memory was better for the
focal colors of their own language than for those of English In a similar line
of research, Winawer et al. found that an obligatory color distinction in Russian
between siniy (dark blue) and goluboy
(light blue) led to differences in color discrimination. Russian speakers,
but not English speakers, performed faster on a matching task when the
colors belonged to different linguistic categories than when they belonged to
the same category. Moreover, these cross-linguistic differences disappeared
under conditions of verbal interference. similar effect was found for English
by Gilbert et al.; participants were faster to locate a target when its
linguistic category differed from that of the surrounding distractors (e.g., a
green among blues), and slower when the target and distractors shared
the same linguistic
category (e.g., a green among other shades of green), but only when the target
was presented in the right visual field. This lateralization effect was
presumably due to the fact that presentation in the right visual field entails
that the stimulus will initially be processed in the left hemisphere, the side
of the brain where language processing typically occurs. Further, as in the
study by Winawer et al., the effect was eliminated by a verbal interference
task.
Another way to get at
this question is to study people who are fluent in two languages. Studies have
shown that bilinguals change how they see the world depending on which language
they are speaking. Two sets of findings published in 2010 demonstrate that
even something as fundamental as who you like and do not like depends on the
language in which you are asked. The studies, one by Oludamini Ogunnaike and
his colleagues at Harvard and another by Shai Danziger and his colleagues at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, looked at Arabic-French bilinguals
in Morocco, Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. and Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals
in Israel, in each case testing the participants’ implicit biases. For
example, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals were asked to quickly press buttons in
response to words under various conditions. In one condition if they saw a
Jewish name like “Yair” or a positive trait like “good” or “strong,” they were
instructed to press “M,”; if they saw an Arab name like “Ahmed” or a negative
trait like “mean” or “weak,” they were told to press “X.” In another condition
the pairing was reversed so that Jewish names and negative traits shared a
response key, and Arab names and positive traits shared a response key. The
researchers measured how quickly subjects were able to respond under the two
conditions. This task has been widely used to measure involuntary or automatic
biases—how naturally things such as positive traits and ethnic groups seem to
go together in people’s minds. Surprisingly, the investigators found big shifts
in these involuntary automatic biases in bilinguals depending on the language
in which they were tested. The Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals, for their part, showed
more positive implicit attitudes toward Jews when tested in Hebrew than when
tested in Arabic.
CONCLUSION
In brief , all these
experiments and findings above clearly indicates that there is a close relationship
between language and thougt. In contrary to the beliefs that language and
thougt are two seperate entity , these findings present concrete proof of
linguistic relativity. But we must emphasize that we cannot say that language
determines thought because this is very assertive assessment. This is called
also linguistic determinism but it is refuted already. For instance Mandarin
speakers more likely to construct vertical timelines to think about times ,
while English speakers are more likely to construct horizontal timelines. But
in another experiment native English speakers were thought to talk about time
using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. This group of
English speakers showed the same bias to think about time vertically.This
suggests that language shapes our thought but not determines it completely.
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