Linguistic Relativity Today

Language, Mind, Society, and the Foundations of Linguistic Anthropology

Marcel Danesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000318166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Grammatica e punteggiatura

This is the first textbook on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, presenting it in user-friendly language, yet analyzing all its premises in systematic ways. The hypothesis claims that there is an intrinsic interconnection between thought, language, and society. All technical terms are explained and a glossary is provided at the back of the volume. The book looks at the history and different versions of the hypothesis over the centuries, including the research paradigms and critiques that it has generated. It also describes and analyzes the relevant research designed to test its validity in various domains of language structure and use, from grammar and discourse to artificial languages and in nonverbal semiotic systems as well. Overall, this book aims to present a comprehensive overview of the hypothesis and its supporting research in a textbook fashion, with pedagogical activities in each chapter, including questions for discussion and practical exercises on specific notions associated with the hypothesis. The book also discusses the hypothesis as a foundational notion for the establishment of linguistic anthropology as a major branch of linguistics. This essential course text inspires creative, informed dialogue and debate for students of anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies, cognitive science, and psychology.

1
Overview

Prologue

An anecdote is told about the Polish-American scholar Alfred Korzybski (cited in Derks and Hollander 1996: 58), who founded an interdisciplinary field called general semantics in order to study how knowledge and linguistic habits of mind are constrained by the nervous system (Korzybski 1921, 1933). It is reported that one day, as he was giving a lecture to a group of students, he suddenly stopped talking to retrieve a packet of biscuits from his briefcase, telling the class that he was very hungry and needed to eat something right away. He then asked several students in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few took one, eating in front of him, after which Korzybski asked, “Nice biscuit, don’t you think?” He then ripped off the white paper wrapper around the packet, revealing the picture of a dog’s head and the tagline Dog Cookies. The students who had just eaten the biscuits became visibly upset by this revelation, and a few put a hand in front of their mouths as they ran to the toilets. Korzybski then remarked to the rest of the class: “You see, I have just demonstrated that people don’t just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter.”

This anecdote encapsulates what the subject matter of this book is essentially about, and the type of questions it will attempt to address: Do words affect how we perceive things and influence how we react physically and emotionally? Does the particular native language we learned in childhood shape how we understand the world? Can we think without words? If so, what would thought be like without them? Korzybski’s little mind game was designed to bring out the intrinsic relation that exists between language, thought, and behavior in a nutshell. The formal study of this relation comes under the rubric of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (LRH). A fundamental tenet of this hypothesis is, in fact, that words are not merely arbitrary labels for things; rather, they influence how we think, act, and react. Let us repeat Korzybski’s experiment hypothetically using another illustrative word game. Suppose that this time we prepared a meal consisting of little meat-like pieces for another class of North American students, which they seemingly eat gladly with no adverse reactions. After the meal, we tell them that they had just eaten silkworms. What would their probable reaction be now? It is likely that most would react negatively, as did the students who ate the dog biscuits. However, the same word in Spanish, gusano de seda, would hardly produce this reaction in Mexicans who live in the central valleys of Oaxaca, because they eat cooked silkworms as a delicacy. Again, the negative reaction on the part of our (hypothetical) students had nothing to do with the substance or quality of the meal but with the coded (culture-specific) meanings that the word silkworm evoked.

Discussions and debates on the LRH are replete with anecdotal examples such as these. But is there any empirical support? One of the central aims of this book is to look at relevant studies that have examined the LRH empirically. The objective of this opening chapter is to provide an overview of the origins and underlying premises of the hypothesis, including how it is defined, how it is broken down linguistically and psychologically, and what main critiques have been leveled against it. As we shall see, a common approach to investigating the LRH is comparing specific grammatical and lexical structures of different languages. For instance, in English, the device that marks the passage of time is named a watch, if it is portable or wearable on the human body, usually on the wrist, but a clock, if it is to be put somewhere as, for example, on a table, or on a wall. In Italian, no such conceptual distinction has been encoded lexically. There is only one word in that language, orologio, for designating any device for keeping track of time, wearable or not. This does not mean that Italian does not have the linguistic resources for making the same distinction marked in English by two words, if needed. The phrasal structure da (“at”) + place allows Italian speakers to provide the same kind of conceptual differentiation: orologio da polso (“wrist watch”), orologio da muro (“wall clock”), and so on. But in practice this distinction is not marked overtly in Italian when the topic of time-keeping devices comes up in discourse. Now, the relevant question is: Does the fact that speakers of English and Italian have different ways of referring to time-keeping devices signal a different perception of time in the two cultures? If so, how so?

The study of time as a cultural construct led, actually, to the establishment of a subfield of anthropology in 1967 by E. P. Thompson, who argued that the observance of clock-time emerged during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, leading to labor practices and behavioral interactions governed by precision in time-keeping—hence the need for clocks and watches. Events that seem so “natural” to us today, such as arranging meetings at specific times, would be literally unthinkable without this nineteenth-century construct. One of the goals of LRH-based research has been, actually, to investigate whether the linguistic categories related to time, such as verb tenses, influence the perception of time in speakers of different languages—a topic that will be discussed in due course.

The Korzybski anecdote bears much more significance than what it might seem at first. It describes in microcosm the kind of experiment that has actually been conducted by linguists and psychologists to test the validity of the LRH, as we shall see. It is also the kind of mind game that has come under acerbic criticism by those who see the LRH as meaningless. Whatever the truth, the LRH is still one of the most interesting ideas in contemporary linguistics, even if it turns out to be nothing more than speculation. This chapter looks at the historical background to the hypothesis and what it has meant for the evolution of linguistics as a science of language. It is based on three questions, which are repeated in the discussion section at the end of this chapter, as part of its pedagogical objectives:

1. What is the notion of linguistic relativity?
2. What are its origins?
3. Is it relevant or useful to understanding the role of language in human life?

Background

The LRH has focused, by and large, on addressing two fundamental questions: Does the particular native language one speaks habitually influence the thoughts a speaker has? Does a specific language affect how its speakers understand reality, known as worldview? To investigate these questions in any meaningful way, a viable theory or model of language is required. In contemporary linguistics, the term grammar is understood (generically) as the system of structural units of a language and the rules for constructing and combining them—it is clearly an important concept in the study of the LRH. The Indian scholar Pāṇini, who lived around the fifth century BCE, was among the first to conduct a scientific analysis of a particular grammar—the grammar of the Sanskrit language. Pāṇini described its minimal units, now called morphemes, in great detail, relating them to how they formed more complex structures with rules of combination, called the syntax. He also showed that the grammar and the lexicon of Sanskrit—the set of items, now called lexemes, that bear meaning in themselves—were interactive components.

Morphemes and Lexemes

Morpheme: a meaning-bearing unit of language that cannot be subdivided further. In English, for example, the word incompletely is made up of three morphemes: in + complete + ly. Two of them (in- and -ly) recur in the formation of other words and are thus considered to be units in the grammar of English, known as affixes; on the other hand, complete has lexical (dictionary) meaning, and is thus part of the lexicon of English.

Lexeme: a unit that has lexical meaning, such as complete above. Other examples are: love in lovely, spread in spreading, live in relive, and so on.

Morphology: the formal study of word-construction in terms of morphemes and how they are combined; the study of lexemes falls more directly under lexicology (the study of lexical categories) and semantics (the study of the meaning patterns of lexemes and their uses).

Syntax: the study of the rules of arrangement of the morphemes and lexemes of a language for constructing complex structures such as phrases and sentences.

Pāṇini identified about 4,000 sutras, in his treatise, the Ashtadhyayi. These are the morphemes and the rules of syntax for combining them into complex structures (Kadvany 2007). He also introduced the notion of mapping, prefiguring current models of language, whereby one set of sutras are mapped onto other grammatical domains (including other sutras) to produce a complete grammar (Prince and Smolensky 2004).

The birth of linguistics as the science of language is traced to the discovery and...