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Feldman 188
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Benjamin Lee Whorf and his teacher, Edward Sapir, in the first half oft he twentieth century formulated the traditional basis of linguistic determinism in what is know as the „Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis“.
Whorf proposed that „We cut nature up, organise it into concepts and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are party to an agreement to organise it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
In the words of Sapir: „Human beings… 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.
Several versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypotheses state that language controls thought, some of which are clearly wrong. But it is also clearly true that one cannot talk about (or think about) slam dunks, stock options, or the internet in Mixtec or in most of the world's thousands of other languages.
Thinking about a complex technical or cultural domain requires an extensive vocabulary and conceptual system, and there is usually not enough of a language community to build such a base. Similarly, English has no words for most of the plants of native informants. Why would there be? The Tibetan language has distinct terms for several stages of meditation that most of us can't contemplate at all.
In chapter 8 we discussed universal conceptual schemas that are part of all human experience and introduced the contrasting idea of cultural frames.
A cultural frame is a collection of words, concepts and relationships characterising some domain of human experience that is not universal. Although it is currently not provable, the embodied theory of language suggests that all universal conceptual schemas are expressible in any language, but many cultural frames will not be directly expressible in most languages.
We know that individuals' culture and conceptual systems, expressed through their vocabulary, do have a huge effect on the way they interact with each other and the world. Do any additional effects come from the rules of the native language itself - its grammar? Grammar generally refers to the rules of composition of a language, distinct from the meaning of individual words. Grammar is concerned with linguistic form.
This is the core of the current controversy, mostly because it is part of a larger language war over the separation of grammar from meaning; that is, the autonomy of syntax.
The core unresolved issue is this: does the grammar of language that a person speaks affect the way she or he thinks. Grammatical influences were very important to Whorf. One of his core examples was the Hopi language, which uses verbal prefixes that distinguish different kinds of motion…
The general idea is that, if the grammar of a language requires a certain distinction to be expressed, speakers of that language will tend to be more attentive to that distinction. The interesting cases involve universal schemas of experience such as space, time, and colour. We already know that specific cultural frames and their linguistic expression will cause people to notice and think about different aspects of the situation.
It is quite difficult to assess how grammar affects thought, because it is hard to test a person‘s thinking without using language. Difficult, but not impossible. A number of results from various labs now show language-related differences on some tasks. All of these results are tendencies - no absolute differences are known to arise from variations in the grammatical form of one's language. However, we now know that the language people speak does have a measurable effect on how they think.
Neo-Whorfian studies:
Paul Kay
Steven Levison
John Lucy
Lera Boroditsky
Dan Slobin
Richard Nisbett
Feldman
Cognitive Linguistics
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