Linguistic Relativity

John Lucy has identified three main strands of research into linguistic relativity. The first is what he calls the structure centered approach. This approach starts with observing a structural peculiarity in a language and goes on to examine its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The first example of this kind of research is Whorfs observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is the research made by John A Lucy describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by speakers of English.

The second strand of research is the "domain centered" approach, in which a semantic domain is chosen and compared across linguistic and cultural groups for correlations between linguistic encoding and behavior. The main strand of domain centered research has been the research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for studying linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other semantic domains, is known to be hard wired into the neural system and as such subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains. Since the tradition of research on color terminology is by far the largest area of research into linguistic relativity it is described below in its own section. Another semantic domain which has proven fruitful for studies of linguistic relativity is the domain of space. Spatial categories vary greatly between languages and recent research has shown that speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many quotidian tasks. Research carried out by Stephen C Levinson and other cognitive scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics has reported three basic kinds of spatial categorization and while many languages use combinations of them some languages exhibit only one kind of spatial categorization and corresponding differences in behavior. For example the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations — the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. A speaker of Guugu yimithirr will define a person as being "north of the house", while a speaker of English may say that he is "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house" depending on the speakers point of view. This difference makes Guugu yimithirr speakers better at performing some kinds of tasks, such as finding and describing locations in open terrain, whereas English speakers perform better in tasks regarding the positioning of objects relative to the speaker (For example telling someone to set the table putting forks to the right of the plate and knives to the left would be extremely difficult in Guugu yimithirr).

The third strand of research is the "behavior centered" approach which starts by observing different behavior between linguistic groups and then proceeds to search for possible causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. This kind of approach was used by Whorf when he attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word empty to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors. One study in this line of research has been conducted by Bloom who noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. After a study he concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in the Chinese language. Another line of study by Frode Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process where Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker. Other research of importance to the study of linguistic relativity has been Daniel Everetts studies of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Everett observed several peculiarities in Pirahã culture that corresponded with linguistically rare features. The Pirahã for example have neither numbers nor color terms in the way those are normally defined, and correspondingly they don't count or classify colors in the way other cultures do. Furthermore when Everett tried to instruct them in basic mathematics they proved unresponsive. Everett did not draw the conclusion that it was the lack of numbers in their language that prevented them from grasping mathematics, but instead concluded that the Pirahã had a cultural ideology that made them extremely reluctant to adopt new cultural traits, and that this cultural ideology was also the reason that certain linguistic features that were otherwise believed to be universal did not exist in their language.Critics have argued that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary.

More on the Worfian hypothesis and Linguistic Relativity via Wikipedia

And check out the article at the Theory and History of Ontology for a more in-depth and contextualized history with tributaries and distributaries into other related disciplines.

Bowman's "Irony without Irony"

When my oldest son was a Boy Scout in England 20 years ago, I once watched his troop play a game in which the boys formed a circle around a troop leader holding a soccer ball. The leader proceeded to throw the ball to the boys at random, saying as he did so either "head" or "catch." If he said "head," the boy was supposed to catch it; if he said "catch," the boy was supposed to head it. Anyone who slipped up and caught the ball when instructed to catch it or head the ball when instructed to head it, was out and had to leave the circle. Eventually, only one scout was left standing. That boy, as I have often had occasion to think since, must have been one of nature’s ironists. He and the others had certainly had an education in the central principle of all ironic — and, for that matter, non-ironic — discourse, namely that meaning depends on context. A boy who’d said that he would just love to play such a game could have meant either that he’d love to play it or that he’d absolutely hate it, and all but the most literal-minded would have been able to tell which it was on hearing the words spoken in their context.

The ability to read that context, to pick up the cues indicating irony or its absence, depends on a certain degree of social skill and experience in complex social interactions. Irony, that is, belongs to the world of face-to-face communication, even when we encounter it in a book or a movie. If we are able to recognize the irony in fictional contexts it is because we have previously experienced it, or something like it, in real ones. Maybe that’s why, as we have begun to spend more and more of our time interacting with each other remotely and electronically, rather than face-to-face, it seems that our irony-reading skills have tended to atrophy, or else to go haywire, producing, on the one hand, a leaden literalism or, on the other, the sort of paranoia which supposes that everything must mean something other than what it says.

Continue reading James Bowman's article "Irony without Irony."

"What is spoken is never, and in no language, what is said." - Heidegger

Hinzen's "...On names and truth"

The contemporary debate on the nature of semantic content looks, at least from afar, like a battle between two armies. On the one hand, one finds the externalists, who claim that the content of what you have in your head depends on what’s out there in the world. For example, the content of my concept of WATER is determined by the substance in the world that instantiates it, while the content of my thoughts about ARTHRITIS is dependent on the social conventions of my community. Internalists, on the other hand, have ‘pushed the world into the mind’ (to borrow Ray Jackendoff ’s phrase) and hold that it is the compositional and/or inferential nature of conceptual representations that determine their content.

Curiously, the defenders of externalism seem to come largely from a philosophical background, while linguists often opt for the internalist mode of explanation. Wolfram Hinzen, who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Durham, but works within the biolinguistics program, seems to be the ideal person to reanimate this sometimes gridlocked debate.

Hinzen’s latest book, An essay on names and truth, is part of an ambitious venture in which the author aims to invalidate the central intuitions behind externalism, while at the same time arguing for a type of internalism that has next to nothing in common with comparable theories on the market. Hinzen takes as a starting point two traditional strongholds for externalist theories of meaning : names, ‘ the very paradigm of a referential expression ’ (2), and truth, which few theorists would dare suggest have nothing to do with the external world. His central idea is that the judgements of truth we make are dependent on the syntax that underpins thought, and that names, like all other expressions, get their content from their syntactic form...

Fascinating review by Georg Kjøll of Wolfam Hinzen's latest book "An essay on names and truth." Find the article under Reviews here, at the Journal of Linguistics, and read on.