Week 1 Flashcards
What is the Whorf–Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis?
a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ worldview or cognition, and thus people’s perceptions are relative to their spoken language
What did Sapir believe humans are at the mercy of?
the particular language which has become their medium of expression
What two factors did Whorf believe interact with each other constantly?
language and culture
Why did the Sapir-Whorfian position on language diminish in academic favour?
- due to the emergence of the universalist position of Chomskian linguistics
- due to controversies elicited by a series of experimental studies during the 1960s and 1970s, documenting the independence of hue and brightness perception from linguistic color-naming
practices
What did Li and Gleitman (2002) invastigate in their paper?
whether linguistic differences in spatial mapping onto language impacts the ways that members of a linguistic community conceptualise the nonlinguistic world
what are deictic or “relative” egocentric descriptors?
spatial expressions referring to directions and locations relatively
e.g., the tree to the left of the mountain
What are externally referenced or “absolute” allocentric descriptors?
spatial expressions referring to directions and locations externally to the viewer
e.g., the tree to the North of the mountain
What are subtypes of allocentric descriptors?
- refering to the intrinsic properties of external objects
- refering to local or global landmarks and regions
What does Whorf mean by “fashions of speaking” and what is their importance?
They are the preferred ways of analysing and reporting experience which have become fixed in the language.
Languages that share semantic and structural resources often still differ in these fashions, which might affect the speaker’s everyday modes of thought
What is the PDWLKS man and tree test?
The Director and Matcher sit side by side facing the same direction. In front of each person is a set of 14 identical photographs, arrayed differently. Eight pictures show a toy girl in some position relative to a toy umbrella. The remaining pictures (distractors) are of scenes in which spatial relations between objects are not the crucial contrasting factor. A screen divides Director and Matcher. The Director chooses a photograph and describes it for the Matcher to find, e.g. “the girl with her back to the umbrella”. The spatial language used is analysed.
Do English and Dutch speakers primarily use relative egocentric, or absolute allocentric descriptors?
relative egocentric descriptors
in landmark-poor conditions, speakers of a language community that favours ____ terminology overwhelmingly chose the ____ solution of the tabletop spatial task
relative/egocentric, body-centred
in landmark-rich contexts, there is a ____ of scores, where the distribution of absolute and relative descriptors is ____ among speakers
U-shaped distribution, split
do visible landmarks make people more or less aware of the availability of two possible spatial frameworks?
more - the presence of landmark cues weakens bias toward egocentric responses
What do Li and Gleitman (2002) conclude about the selection of relative or absolute linguistic strategies?
that the choice may be a function of the cues made consistently available in the environment, rather than a result of culture or linguistically learned nature
