Language and Thought (1)

Question 1

Who is Chomsky and what did he do/suggest?

Answer 1

• Chomsky posits that ‘all languages share a universal grammar’
• the specific way in which this grammar is expressed may differ across language but all languages share a common set of functionally equivalent structures/rules

Question 2

Who is Piaget and what did he do/suggest?

Answer 2

• Children’s thought passes through an invariant order of cognitive stages
• development driven by thought but refined by language
• thought precedes language (sensorimotor stage occurs before language)

Question 3

Who is Vygotsky and what did he do/suggest?

Answer 3

• Claimed that the relationship between language and thought was complex with language and thought intitially seperate (stage 1) but gradually becoming interconnect (stages 2 and 3 in his theory)

Question 4

Who is Franz Boas and what did he do/suggest?

Answer 4

• 1858-1942
• Anthropologist
• interested in causes of cultural variation (caused by physical geography or diffusion of ideas via migration)
• investigated language and culture of American Northwest Native people in British Columbia

Question 5

Who is Edward Sapir and what did he do/suggest?

Answer 5

• 1884-1939
• A student of Boas
• worked extensively on Native American Languages
• investigated the link between language and modes of thinking (although this was underdeveloped)
• worked on the production of a universal auxiliary language (like/similar to Esperanto)

Question 6

Who is Benjamin Lee Whorf and what did he do/suggest?

Answer 6

• 1897-1941
• Refined Sapir’s work looking at how grammatical mechanisms and the vocabulary of a language influence the thought processes of the speakers

Question 7

What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Answer 7

• Hypothesis has been expressed in 2 ways:

1. Linguistic Determinism:
   - The language that we speak DETERMINES the nature of our cognitive processes
2. Linguistic Relativity:
   - The language that we speak influences the nature of our cognitive processes - usually subdivided into strong and weak form which in turn relate to the types of cognitive processes influenced: strong = lower level cognitive processes and weak = high level cognitive processes

Question 8

What is Whorf’s evidence for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Answer 8

Lexical Differentiation:

• Different languages have differing numbers of words for items in different categories
• a more highly differentiated domain will reflect more finely graded distinctions e.g. colour
• e.g. the Southwest Native American language ‘Hopi’ only has 2 words for things that fly - 1 for bird and the other for everything else

Question 9

An Eskimo language (Yup’ik) has 15 words for snow: English has (at least) 21

Answer 9

• The problem comes from deciding what counts as a word
• if we count only root words (i.e. all words with the same bound morphemes) then we get a different number than if we count all the different affix and suffix forms (many Eskimo languages use a large number of these)

Martin (1986) and Pullum (1991):
- Suggest that many authors (including Whorf) exaggerated the lexical differences between English and Eskimo languages

Question 10

What are the grammatical differences between languages?

Answer 10

• Whorf, (1956) noted that ‘Hopi’ (a/the Southwest Native American language) classes all words with a brief duration e.g. lightning as verbs rather than nouns
• in Nootka (a language on Vancouver island), all words seem to be treated as verbs
• these grammatical differences suggest that speakers of different language(s) must have very different conceptions of time

Question 11

How did Whorf know?

Answer 11

• The only way that Whorf could know how different languages were structured is by translating them
• the German language has a word ‘Schädenfrreude’ (which translates as ‘pleasure taken from someone else’s misfortune’)
• the English language has no single lexical item for this: does it mean that we are unable to understand it?

Question 12

What evidence is their against Linguistic Determinism?

Answer 12

Animal Cognition:

• Evidence suggests that animals do not have anything that approaches syntax and therefore can’t have language (assuming Chomsky is correct)
• work into this topic however, also suggests that animals can solve problems and can learn that signs have some form of representational meaning
• animals appear to have some degree of thought but they don’t have language
• also those animals exposed to language appear to have enhanced cognitive abilities relative to those that are not