Language and thought
LING 400
Winter 2010
Overview
• Language and thought
• Summary of course
• Course evaluations
Please turn off your cell phone.
Concepts
• Every human language is ‘fully expressive’
– translation possible
– exceptions might be pidgins, invented
languages
How concepts expressed
• Concept  morpheme
– How many morphemes required to express a
concept?
• Languages vary
– e.g.
• English
– 2 morphemes, ‘conifer branch’
• Witsuwit’en
– 1 morpheme, [l]
Morpheme  concept
• What concept(s) expressed by a
morpheme?
• Witsuwit’en
– [təstɬ’əs] ‘paper, book, envelope, letter’
• Kinship systems
– Witsuwit’en
• –[aq’əj] ‘maternal aunt’, -[pits] ‘paternal aunt’
Does language affect thought?
• Do speakers/signers of different languages
view the world differently?
• Yes: (Sapir-)Whorf hypothesis/linguistic
relativity
Linguistic relativity
hypothesis
• Franz Boas (1858-1942)
– Race  culture  language
• Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
– “Language is a particular how of thought.”
• Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)
– “users of markedly different
grammars…must arrive at somewhat
different views of the world”
Sapir and Whorf not the only ones
to wonder about this
This stuff is not in my brain.
http://burgersmoke.wordpress.com/
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/D
C1
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”, “yelloworange”, “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”?
• 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”
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”
Summary of Sapir-Whorf
• Intriguing idea
• Inconclusive experimental support
Course summary
• Possible future encounters with language
or linguistics
International Phonetic Alphabet
• Dictionaries
–French ‘eye’
• http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/
Semantics
• Re employee titles in business (‘manager’
vs. ‘director’):
– “It’s just semantics,” says Ben Compton,
president of 10-person architecture firm
Architects BC (Lexington, SC). “We really
don’t put much emphasis on it. What’s more
important is what we can do to help bring (an
employee’s) career along.”
• Same referent (what matters most here),
different sense
AAVE
• a.k.a. African-American Vernacular English
Historical Linguistics
• Dene-Yeniseic hypothesis
– http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/dy.html
• Ed Vajda, Western Washington U.
Endangered languages
• “Last Words: If all languages are equal, why
does it matter when one of them dies?”
– “Why is it a tragedy if Tlingit disappears? …it’s hard to
see why it’s a bad thing if their language disappears.
Why? Because the very thing that made it a mistake
for the missionaries to try to stop people from
speaking Native American languages (it’s not as if
English was better) makes it a mistake to care
whether people continue to speak Native American
languages (it’s not as if English is worse).”
• Why does it matter? Who does it matter to?
ASL
• ASL and L1
– 90%+ deaf children born to hearing parents
• “signers are the only large population that
undergoes delayed exposure to a primary
language” (Meier 1991)
• ASL an endangered language?
– Cochlear implants an issue for the Deaf
community
Thanks to
• All of you