Language

Question 1

What is language?

Answer 1

Language is a complex system of communication that enables humans to express thoughts, emotions, and ideas structured through symbols, sounds and gestures.
- Comprising vocabulary, grammar, syntax and semantics.

Question 2

Where did language come from regarding the Tower of Babel?

Answer 2

• Everyone spoke a single language which united them to build a city with a tower to reach the sky.
• To limit the power of humans, languages are scattered across the world to ensure unintelligibility.

Question 3

How does language evolve?

Answer 3

Darwin’s theory of evolution states it evolves through natural selection.

Question 4

What did Pinker & Bloom (1990) state about the evolution of language?

Answer 4

• At some point, species evolved ‘a language organ’.
• This organ is subject to the same pressures of natural selection.

Question 5

What did Chomsky state about the evolution of language?

Answer 5

Language is hypothesised to be an innate capacity.

There is a universal grammar that explains universals across human languages.
- This explains how children can learn such a complex communication system and its rules.

Question 6

What does ‘Poverty of the stimulus’ mean? (Chomsky)

Answer 6

There has to be an innate mechanism to help us acquire language.

Question 7

What is Chomsky’s Universal Grammar?

Answer 7

All languages are based on the same innate constraints, so all languages are equal.

Question 8

What is Pinker’s ‘mentalese’?

Answer 8

Thought is independent of language; we do not think with ‘natural language’ but an abstract, pre-linguistic ‘mental language’.

Question 9

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 9

The languages we speak influence how we think and perceive the world.

Question 10

What is the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 10

Linguistic determinism.
- Language determines thought.

Question 11

What is the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 11

Linguistic relativity.
- Language shapes thought.

Question 12

What did Boroditsky (2001) find about linguistic relativity?

Answer 12

• Spatial metaphors for time in English are typically horizontal.
• Spatial metaphors for time in Mandarin are typically vertical.

Question 13

What did Winawer et al. (2007) find about linguistic relativity?

Answer 13

Colour terms in Russian differ from those in English.

Question 14

What is grammatical gender in linguistic relativity?

Answer 14

Many languages assign nouns to a grammatical gender class. A word may be assigned masculine gender in one language, but feminine gender in another.