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Language or Thought: Which is Affecting Which?
Saman Hassanzadeh, PhD student of TEFL in Esfahan Azad University
Dr. Akbar Afghari, assistant professor of TEFL in Esfahan Azad University
Abstract
The question of whether language affects thought or not is a matter of
controversial debate among linguists and non linguists. A review of the
literature clearly reveals that there are three viewpoints regarding this
relationship. The first one indicates that language heavily influences
thought, the second one argues that it does not influence thought while the
third one shows that language partially influences thought. The present
paper aims to shed some light on these three viewpoints and argue that the
language we speak somehow influences the way we perceive the world, but
it does not regulate reality.
Key words: Language, thought, reality , culture
Introduction
The question of whether or not language affects the way we perceive the
world has ignited a heated debate among linguists and non-linguists,
anthropologists and psychologists for centuries. One cannot give a clear-cut
answer to this question as it seems to be somehow complicated. It reminds
us of the same old chicken-and-egg question: Which one existed first?
Language or thought? If we do not have words for things and ideas then are
we able to think about them? Or do we have no words for them because we
do not think about them? By giving it more thought we can clearly see that
there are other facets involved in the problem besides just language and
___________________________________________________________
Corresponding author: Saman Hassanzadeh,
Email:[email protected] , Tel: (0098 833725 4473
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thought; it cannot be that simple, there must be an extra element affecting
this relationship.
Culture is definitely a defining issue in the relationship between language
and thought. But what do we mean by culture? Our culture is nothing but a
collection of our traditions, lifestyles, habits, and beliefs shared and
accepted by all of us. So what we take as culture and the people we live and
interact with shape the way we think, and also shape the way we talk. Now
, if we speak different languages and our languages are different from each
other , then we should expect to experience the world differently and have
different thoughts and beliefs. The languages we speak represent a specific
worldview; undoubtedly expecting different worldviews because of
different languages being spoken in the world is not far-fetched image or
idea so it is ,therefore, quite safe to claim that speakers of different
languages think about the world in quite different ways.
Does our language affect our way of thinking? Or is it the case that both
our thoughts and our languages are affected by a difference in cultural
habits? If we are trying to answer these questions, then we must look
somewhere else. It is too simplistic to think that culture is affecting our
worldview or vice versa. A different scenario might help solve the problem.
We are viewing the world differently because we are breaking reality into
different categories and we label these categories differently. So a new
dimension could be added to the discussion and that is the role of reality.
Then, exploring the relationship between language, thought and reality
might help find some answers to our questions. Then we need to explore
human history to find out more about this relationship. Plato was probably
the first philosopher who noticed this relationship in his theory of forms.
His theory claims that non-material and conceptual yet significant forms or
ideas, and not the material world of alteration which is known to us through
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our senses, own the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. He
maintained the idea that thought and language have meaning as stemming
from abstract definitions or concepts called “forms” and which all the
“entities and qualities designated thereby can be subsumed” (Gill,
1997). His view is ultimately implying that language is based on reality.
Similarly, John Locke, a more contemporary philosopher, follows Plato in
his quest to define the relationship between language as reality as follow:
Our senses, conversant about particular sensible object, do convey
into the mind several distinct perceptions of things according to
those various ways wherein those objects affect them. And thus we
come by those ideas we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard,
bitter, sweet and all those which we call sensible qualities; which
when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from
external objects convey into the mind what produces those
perceptions (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, book 2,
chapter 1).
A review of related literature clearly shows that there are three viewpoints
argued by most researchers regarding the relationship between language
and thought up to date: Some argue that language heavily influences
thought, others are of the opinion that language does not influence thought
and yet there is a third group who claims that language partially influences
thought. The influential linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
were the first people who introduced this idea (Harley, 2008). In 1940, a
short article, which was published by a popular science magazine, M.I.T,
stirred one of the most generally held beliefs of the time. This article
proved to be quite revealing about the talents of a young author, who was
working as an engineer at an insurance company, and brought him
experience of an overnight sensation. It was Benjamin Lee Whorf who
brought up this appealing idea about the power of language over the mind,
and his stimulating approach to deal with the subject convinced an entire
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generation into accepting as true that our mother tongue restricts what we
are able to think. The language he chose to study was Hopi, a Native
American language spoken in northeastern Arizona. Based on his studies,
Whorf claimed that speakers of Hopi and speakers of English see the world
differently because of differences in their language. Particularly, Whorf
declared that Native American languages oblige on their speakers a picture
of reality that is entirely different from ours, so their speakers would just
not be able to appreciate some of most basic concepts, like the flow of time
or the difference between objects like stone and actions like fall because
they are nonexistent in their languages.
This paper aims to shed some light on those three viewpoints mentioned
above and argue that the language we speak somehow influences the way
we perceive the world, but it does not regulate reality. In order to be able to
do so, first we need to know which features of thought are influenced by
which features of language, then we need to discuss the form and the
strength of that influence. For instance, some features of grammar or of the
lexicon might cause a causal effect on certain features of visual perception
(e.g., on which colors we can discriminate), classification (e.g., on how we
sort things by their color), or long-term memory (e.g., on which differences
among colors we remember most accurately) in clearly specifiable ways. If
there is such an influence we would also like to know what mechanisms
acts as a go-between it, but until we have clearer answers to these
questions, we will not be able to answer this.
Human languages can be thought of as flexible and extensible. Most ideas ;
therefore, that can be said in one language can be rendered approximately
in another language ; if this process is difficult or impossible , words and
phrases can then be borrowed to help facilitate the process . However, what
seems to be easy to say in one language may seem to be harder to say in
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another language, and this may make it more natural, easier or more
common for speakers of the first language to think in some given ways than
let us say for speakers of the second language to do so. A category or a
concept may be more obtainable in some linguistic communities than in
others (Brown, 1956). In short, this discussion could be either considered in
stronger or weaker forms, depending on the assumed forms and the
assumed strength of the assumed influence. So let us start with the
discussion of different features of language.
1. Different features of language and perception
Various features of language could cause different thoughts in different
people; consequently, different perceptions could come to mind.
1.1 Syntax
Grammar of a language is one big distinctive feature of that language and it
can differ from language to language. Some languages have easy to use
syntax and yet some others have very complicated syntactical rules to be
learnt and applied by their speakers. There are, therefore, different areas in
which grammar of a language might be at variance with another language:
the classic word order of a language namely may be different between
languages. In English, the frequent order is subject, verb, and object. But
this order is a little different in Japanese, it is subject, object, and verb. Yet
in other languages this order may vary or may be even more flexible. There
are, however, many minute grammatical differences between languages like
time conception, object conceptions. For instance, languages can differ in
whether they distinguish between intransitive verbs and adjectives. Objects,
for example, are again treated differently simply because of the syntax of
different languages. In English, for example, some nouns like apple are
countable and can be made plural apples while others are uncountable and
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cannot be made plural (Take rice for example, you can have two cups of
rice but not two rices). Other languages, like Japanese, do not make this
distinction; instead, classifiers like cup of are used for all nouns. Whether
or not this property of the language makes English speakers more aware of
the distinction between substances and individual objects is not confirmed
yet and calls for more research.
Take this example from Whorf. He mentioned that due to the fact that the
concept of time is treated differently in English and it is broken up into
large masses that can be counted like: three weeks, four hours, ten minutes,
then speakers of English would like to treat time as a group of concepts
consisting of seconds, minutes, hours instead of a smooth uninterrupted
flow. This, he, believed, enables English speakers to think of time as
something that can be lost, wasted, or even saved. For the Hopi, things are a
bit different. They do not have the same concept of time. For them there is
no concept like week, day, or hour so they think about it differently; for
them time is nothing but an uninterrupted sequence. One, of course, should
not take this to mean that that English language is imposing a unique view
of time on its speakers; it is rather the case that the view of the English
speakers of time is echoed in their language, or it could be that their
language and their thoughts are both responsible to shape the way they deal
with time in their culture. Therefore , one can claim that it is quite possible
that language, thought, and culture outline three threads of a braid, and each
one of them is affecting the others.
In addition, English does oblige us to specify certain types of information,
which could not be understood unless the context is given in other
languages. If somebody, for example, wants to tell you in English about a
dinner he/she had with his/her neighbor, he/she may not have to mention
whether the neighbor was a male or female, but rather he/she does have to
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tell you something about the time of the event: He/she has to specify
whether they had dinner, are going to have dinner, are having dinner, or
will have dinner and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its
speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, and this is
because they use the same verb form for past, present or future actions.
Again, this does not necessarily mean that the Chinese are not able to
perceive the concept of time. But it does mean they are not forced to think
about timing whenever they are describing an action.
When our language habitually forces us to indicate definite types of
information, it is obliging us to be conscientious about certain details in
the world and specific aspects of the experience that speakers of other
languages may not be forced to consider all the time. So there are factors at
work which are quite beyond language itself and they are constantly
affecting our experiences, observations, associations, manners, mind sets,
memories and directions in the world.
1.2 Vocabulary
No one can deny the fact that different languages are known by their
different lexicons which are in turn used to express different ideas and
intentions. Languages may classify ideas by use of different vocabularies.
Because of the nature of thoughts, it is sometimes possible to think about
something even if we do not have a word for it, Take colors, for example.
There are an infinite number of different colors, and we are not quite sure
if they have their own names. For example, If you have a container of red
paint and little by little put in blue to it, drop by drop, it will very slowly
turn to a reddish purple, then purple, and then bluish purple. Each drop is
definitely changing the color very faintly, but while you are doing this you
cannot think of a single moment when your new color stops being red and
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becoming purple. The color continuum is uninterrupted. Our language,
however, is not permanent. Our language obliges us to break the color
spectrum up into 'red', 'purple', and so on.
The Dani of New Guinea, for instance, have only two basic color terms in
their language to refer to colors, one is used for dark colors including blue
and green and the other one is used for light colors including yellow and
red. Their language instead splits up the color spectrum in a different way
from English speakers. But this is not to mean that they cannot see the
distinction between yellow and red; There are some studies which have
shown that they do see different colors just as English speakers can
(Winawer , 2007)
Take another example from Russian language. They have just two different
words to refer to light blue and dark blue. This does not make Russian
speakers think of these colors as different specific colors, and yet it does
not cause English speakers to think of them as the same, just because they
have one word for them. If we think of red and pink as different colors,
then maybe we are under the influence of our language.
So what our language does is not just obliging us to perceive only what it
provides us words for, but it can rather influence how we are putting things
into groups. When a child is learning a language, it is his/her job to
discover which things go by the same word. After the child learns that the
family's pet is a dog, he/she may see a cow and say dog, .This is because
he/she thinks that the two things are the same. As we grow up, we learn to
categorize things that have something in common and put them under the
same category, but what is considered as being similar enough to go under
a single category may be different from language to language. There are
innumerable words that cannot be translated and they are used to express
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thoughts and beliefs of the people who use them in their everyday
communications. These words give enough vision and tell us much about
the life of the society and culture to which that particular language belongs.
We cannot even expect to be aware of a different culture if we do not know
the words used in that particular culture because ways of living and
thinking are expressed through language.
1.3 Semantics
Semantically speaking, Languages are different from each other. Two
different views on the relationship between semantics and thought are
presented in the literature: the relativist view and the Universalist view. The
former is often attributed to Whorf (1956), which holds that arbitrary
linguistic conventions largely determine semantic distinctions, causing
languages to vary widely freely and independent of each of each other and
it continues to add that such linguistic diversities do have an effect on
cognition. A relativist argues that there is no such thing as universal
vocabulary of thought and perception, languages are, therefore, free to vary
largely randomly in their semantic division of the world and these linguistic
differences can leave their impression on thought and perception. A
Universalist, in contrast, holds that there is a universal vocabulary of
thought and perception, so languages are constrained to reflect it, and
cannot alter it (Richard S. Cook, Paul Kay, and Terry Regier, 2005). They
summarize their findings regarding role of semantics on perception as
follows:
The traditional framing is simplistic, and hides interesting realities.
One such reality is that at least in the color domain, there are clear
universals governing the semantic distinctions that languages make –
but there may also be some limited element of arbitrariness in exactly
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where category boundaries are drawn. This is an ultimately
universalist finding, but with a relativist twist.
1.4 Pragmatics
There is definitely no doubt that context does play a crucial role in the use
and understanding of language as well as in cognition ( Philip & Aydede,
2008; Swoyer, 2002). So it is likely that distinctions in the way speakers of
different languages use their languages in actual contexts have an effect on
their mental life. It is often the case that an individual may utter out words
clearly with no problems and at the same time use long, complex well made
grammatical sentences, but still not be able to establish the inclined
communication - if he or she has not completely learned to use the rules of
pragmatics. People certainly use language for different purposes. They
might use it to greet people (e.g., hello, goodbye), they might wish to use it
to give informing (e.g., I'm going to get a cookie), they may also express
their demanding by language (e.g., Give me a cookie), still they might
prefer to use language for promising purposes (e.g., I'm going to get you a
cookie), or finally they might like to employ their language to make
requests (e.g., I would like a cookie, please).
They might want to use language differently according to the needs of their
listener or situation, such as when they are talking to a baby , their way of
talking is different from the way they talk to an adult, or when they are
trying to give background information to an unfamiliar listener . They also
know that they need to speak differently in a classroom than on a
playground. People also know that they need to observe some rules while
they are using language. This usually occurs when they are using language
for conversations and they are telling a story. Some rules are always
observed such as, brining up topics of conversation, keeping a close
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distance to someone when speaking , making use of verbal and nonverbal
signals ,taking turns in conversation , restating when misinterpreted ,staying
on topic, and employing facial expressions and eye contact. These rules
may be different across cultures and inside cultures. It is therefore of crucial
importance for interlocutors to understand the rules of their communication
partner if they want to know what they mean. For example, in India you
have to know where a person is from in order to know if he/she is
indicating a yes or no by different shakes of his/her head. Or in Norway, if
you happen to see somebody raising his/her eyebrows to your request, you
should take it as a yes. People would think differently when they are to use
a language in a non native context.
2. Thought
Do we think in language? The answer might be yes, much of the time, but
have you ever experienced situations in which you can easily call upon
mental images and sensations that would be hard or impossible to be
expressed in words. We can think about the sound of a music masterpiece,
the form of a apple, or the smell of pepper none of which needs any
language. Does this mean it is possible to think about something even if we
do not have a word for it? Yes. As it was mentioned in the previous section,
colors would be good examples. Sometimes we see colors we do not even
have a word for. But in some languages depending on the diversity of the
words used, they might have as many as 100 words for colors. Some people
believe that learning a different language will not change the way we think.
But how do we know whether differences in language create differences in
thought, or the other way around? The answer, it turns out, is both—the
way we think influences the way we speak, but the influence also goes the
other way. The past decade has witnessed a host of ingenious discoveries
stating that language does plays a causal role in forming cognition. Studies
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have shown that if you change how people talk it changes how they think.
Introducing new color words to people, for instance, changes their ability to
differentiate colors. And if you teach people a new way of talking about
time, it will give them a new way of thinking about it ( Shai Danziger &
Robert Ward, 2010; Caitlin M. Fausey et al, 2010 and Lera Boroditsky &
Alice Gaby, 2010).
Differences in language might also affect more general styles of thought
(Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). A dual-process explanation of
cognition is what has been suggested by several recent theorists. The basic
idea behind this dual process is that human beings are equipped with two
quite different cognitive subsystems or should we say two types of
subsystems. There is an explicit subsystem which is for the most part
conscious, figurative, verbal, systematic, sequential, flexible and competent
of reflection. But an implicit subsystem could also be thought of which is
mainly unconscious, associative, spontaneous, emotional and that react
involuntarily to stimuli (Chaiken & Trope, 1999; Sloman, 1996). One
feature of language might have an effect on one system at a time or it might
affect both differently.
2.1 Examples of influence of language on thought
Quite recently, different experimentations have discovered that the feelings
and associations of speakers toward objects around them could be shaped
by grammatical genders. In the 1990s, for instance, psychologists compared
associations between German and Spanish speakers. There are many
examples of inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are
reversed. In German, a bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but in
Spanish el puente is masculine; and the same holds true for clocks, pockets,
forks, newspapers, stamps , apartments shoulders, tickets, violins , the sun,
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the world and love. Likewise, an apple is masculine for a German speaker
but Spanish speaker views it as feminine, and the same is also true for
chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and
trash. Spanish speakers considered bridges, clocks and violins to have more
masculine assets like power, but Germans rather deemed them as more slim
or graceful, upon being asked to rate different objects on a scale of
masculine or feminine features. The influence proved to be reversed with
objects like mountains or chairs, which are considered as masculine in
German but feminine in Spanish ( Lord, Nancy, 1996; Wierzbicka, Anna ,
1992).
The most remarkable proof to illustrate the influence of effect of language
on how people think could undoubtedly be that of space, how we use
language to illustrate direction of the world around us. Most languages
would use phrases like left, right, behind, opposite, center, around and etc.
to illustrate the locations of things around them. Speakers of these
languages seem to be relying on an egocentric system of orientation
descriptions. They would like to see things according to where their bodies
are. There is, however, a distant Australian indigenous tongue, Guugu
Yimithirr, in north of Queensland which does not seem to utilize any of
egocentric coordinates at all. But geographical coordinates are used instead
by the speakers of this particular language to describe locations. A recent
study showed that people who speak Guugu Yimithirr have a better
appreciation of the space. When they were left on their own in a desert they
were able to find their way back home just because they were thinking in
their native tongue which in turn enabled them to navigate much easier
compared to other people who did not speak their language. (Levinson,
Stephen C. 2003)
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Yet another startling example is the way English speakers lean their bodies
forward or backward when they are talking about future or past. Because of
the structure of their language they believe past is behind and future is up
ahead. But in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes, the past is said to
be in front and the future behind. The way people in Andes and England
see the past and future was compared in a study and the results showed
English people believe past is past and they tended to work toward their
future while people from Andes never forgot their past and future was not
that much important for them (Raphael Núñez & Eve Sweetser , 2006)
After considering different features of language, thought and the influence,
it is time to go back to the three viewpoints mentioned at the beginning of
the paper. As it was mentioned earlier three different viewpoints regarding
Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf theory could be thought of. The first
viewpoint claims language strongly influences thought, the second one
states language does not influence thought and the last one argues language
partially influences thought. These three viewpoints are discussed in the
light of the discussions made earlier in this paper, in the next section.
3. Three viewpoints about the relationship between language and
thought
3.1 The first viewpoint
Benjamin Whorf, like Sapir also studied Native American
languages. Whorf resorts to several examples from the Native American
language, Hopi, to help him support his assumption that thought is strongly
based on language. According to Whorf the Hopi language does not
contain any words, grammatical constructions or expressions that refer to
the English concept of ‘time.’ Whorf goes on to elucidate that it is likely in
the Hopi language to illustrate the world or reality in ways quite bizarre and
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odd in other languages. The way in which reality is viewed in Hopi is
specific to this specific language and can only be best expressed if one is
familiar with the language (Carroll, 1956). In this example, where Whorf
believes language powerfully affects thought, he is often condemned with
circularity because he conjectures cognitive diversities between two
speakers from an inspection of their respective languages, Hopi and
English. His evidence of cognitive diversity is only “based on recurrence
of the linguistic differences” (Harre, 1990 ).
A whole lot of researchers followed his theory which was later on called
strong determinism and it is used to refer to a firm outlook that states what
is said is straightforwardly accountable for what is seen by the mind. Two
Australian scientists Peterson and Siegal, tried to support this view of
determinism in their experiment. For their experiment, deaf children
viewed a doll, which was placed next to a marble in a box. Then the
marble was removed and placed in a basket and in the end the doll was
taken away, too. The deaf children were later asked where they thought the
doll would search for the marble when it comes back. Tremendously, the
deaf children from deaf parents responded correctly (that the doll would
search for the marble in the box). The deaf children whose parents were
not deaf responded mostly incorrectly. The experiment demonstrated
obviously the relationship between deaf children with deaf- parents who
used to communicate by using a complex sign language system and their
being able to answer the question correctly. They got the answer right
because they were brought up in a place where they used American Sign
Language to relate to their parents. However, the other children, who had
not been brought up in a similar linguistic environment (their parents were
not deaf and thus they were not fluent in ASL) were not able to answer the
question correctly and see the relationship. These results persuaded the
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experimenters to deem that the Sapir-Wharf Hypothesis was acceptable
according to strong determinism.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has continued to be a troublesome issue for
long years now and this is just because many scholars believe that Whorf’s
examples could not reveal a genuine connection between language and
thought while others are consistent with Whorf and argue that thought is
beyond doubt reliant on language and are not at ease with this
idea. Although these restrictions remain to make it complicated for
scholars, many still hope to look for ways to confirm or contradict the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
3.2 The second viewpoint
Translatability, differences between linguistic and non-linguistic events and
universals are three main points used by researchers to argue against the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Translatability is a frequent dispute used by
researchers to stand against the hypothesis, because although languages
may be different significantly in the way they convey specific details, it is
still quite likely to translate those details from one language to another.
The second argument made by Eric Lenneberg against the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis relies on the differences between linguistic and non-linguistic
events and it goes like this “linguistic and non-linguistic events must be
separately observed and described before they can be correlated” (Carroll,
1956). He bases his argument on the fact that no one can find a way to
describe language as affecting thought when there is no difference between
these two events and that the proof which supports language as affecting
thought is merely based on linguistic variations.
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The third dispute that proves that language does not affect thought is the
idea of universals. One can trace back the idea of universals to the Port
Royale:
There are grammar observations that apply to all languages; these
observations constitute what one calls general grammar. Grammar,
which has for its object the expression of thought by the help of speed,
spoken or written, thus admits of two sorts of rules. One kind is
immutably true and universally followed, it applies to the form of
thought itself, it follows from the analysis of it and is only the
consequence of it…(Cowie, 1999).
The theory of Universals, which is generally attributed to Chomsky and
generative grammar, is trying to prove that there are deep structures that are
common to all languages (Fishmann, 1976). The theory claims that all
cultures are related and have similar realities, which is quite in deep
contrast with Whorf’s thoughts who believed all cultures perceive the world
in a different way because of their language.
3.3. The third viewpoint
Works of Sapir and Whorf caused an enormous revolution in the way
researchers analyze language and thought. Scholars hurried to find proof
that would give the hypothesis strength. Although the research is
undemanding to devise, the problem is in coming across a number of
variables that precisely test the hypothesis. It is a little difficult if not
impossible to believe that language determines thought, however through
the same examples from Whorf’s studies in Hopi and other explanations
from other scholars it is convincing to put forward that language does to
some extent determine thought. In determining linguistic relativity, it does
not seem to pay off to think whether a language affects ones thoughts but it
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would be much more fruitful to discuss and determine to what degree it
affects ones thought. (Wierzbicka, 1992).
A quick research in the literature can find numerous examples that hold up
for a weaker interpretation of linguistic relativity, which is the main focus
of our third viewpoint. One good example is that of Linda Rogers which
quite precisely gives proof to support a weak interpretation of linguistic
relativity. In her experiment, she chose some bilingual children as the
subjects of her study and read a short story for them while their brain-wave
patterns were being recorded as they were listening to the story. At first,
they listened to the English version of the story and she noticed their left
hemisphere was more active and then for the second time, she let the
children listen to the story being read in Navaho and this time she observed
their brain was more active in the right hemisphere. She concluded that the
children processed the English story in their left hemisphere because
English is a noun- centered language and their right hemisphere was more
active in the second experiment because Navaho is a verb-centered
language. This proved the fact that even though the same story was read to
the same children they processed the story in a different way based on
which language it was told in (Gill, 1997).
Another example is a study done by Agnes Niyekawa-Howard in 1968
which compares and contrasts English and Japanese passive
constructions. It is explained in the study that Japanese language has two
kinds of passive constructions in which when one is merged with the other
one the meaning changes so that the subject of the sentence is taken to take
the action that is found in the verb. This construction was not seen while
the subjects were translating stories from Japanese to English; however, the
Japanese translators incorporated this construction in the translation from
English to Japanese. Likewise, when they were asked to deduce cartoons
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that mostly dealt with interpersonal inconsistency, they attributed
responsibility for the negative results to others. In other words, they shifted
the blame to others. (Salzmann, 1993).
Codability is yet another evidence to support our third viewpoint. It can be
seen as the capability to render a word, phrase or idea from one language to
another. No one can argue against the fact that bilinguals find it easier to
express some ideas in one language than another one. There are times when
an idea, thought, emotion or a location could be easily expressed by using a
few words, while it would take at least a paragraph to explain the same
ideas in another language. This concept demonstrates the idea that language
partially influences thought because it is possible for a speaker in one
language to be able to recognize a lexical category better than another one
but one needs to keep in mind that this does not mean language limits ones
thought in perceiving the same idea.
The arguments made by researchers and scholars in proving or disproving
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the implications that surround the claims
made by Sapir have created a whole big challenge for linguists and
anthropologist . There seems to be no single proof that shows which
version of language relativity theory is definitely the best so researchers
and those interested have no choice but to observe small samples of
particular registers in which language can be seen to influence thought and
reality. However, more research in this area does seem to prove the weak
interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
4. CONCLUSION
The relationship between language and society is so close that one cannot
think of them as two separate beings. The existence of one quite depends on
the other one. There is no human society that does not depend on, is not
20
shaped by, and does not itself shape language” (Chaika, 1989). A close
look at this statement clearly reveals the relationship between language,
thought and reality. Their relationship could be described best as a
reciprocal one in which language not only forms the mode through which
reality is identified but reality can also shape language. How language is
viewed by many people has completely changed because of the Sapir-
Whorf Hypothesis. As it was discussed in this paper, it has produced many
debates and research in the field .There are, therefore; scholars on both
frontiers including Sapir and Whorf and their advocates who are of the
opinion that that language strongly influences thought and yet , there are
others who put forward the idea that language does not influence thought.
The confirmation from research, however; points out that language does
influence thought and awareness of reality but language does not rule
thought or reality. There is still room for more research on this argument,
and the debate is followed by the researchers to the date.
21
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