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Maeve Couzens

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and... - 0 views

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...full

shared by Maeve Couzens on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed.
  • which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time
  • [T]he famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers […] is wrong, all wrong. (p. 57)
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The idea that thought is the same as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity[
  • The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works, or even how to study it. Now that scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate[thinking]with language. (pp. 58–59, italics added)
  • Experimental work since Whorf's time has suffered several additional problems. Pinker noted that some apparent behavioral differences between language groups have turned out to be artifacts of clumsy translation.
  • Chinese speakers are less capable of reasoning counterfactually than English speakers because Chinese lacks subjunctives, which serve as counterfactual markers in English
  • The Orwellian idea that people think (mostly or entirely) in the medium of natural language, and therefore that language can be equated with thought, is unsupported empirically and is also problematic in principle, given what is known about language and about thought
  • Languages differ in the extent to which they describe duration in terms of distance as opposed to amount of substance.
  • Is this conflation of distance and duration universal to humans, or does it depend in part on the conflation of distance and duration in language?
  • Why should we continue to do Whorfian research? One possible reason is that cataloging crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be a step toward charting the boundaries of human biological and cultural diversity
  • crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be tools for investigating how thinking works and, in particular, for investigating the role of experience in the acquisition and representation of knowledge: If people who talk differently form correspondingly different mental representations as a consequence, then mental representations must depend, in part, on these aspects of linguistic experience. If discovering the origin and structure of our mental representations is the goal, then crosslinguistic cognitive differences can be informative even if they are subtle and even if their effects are largely unconscious. Whether or not they correspond to radical differences in speakers' conscious experiences of the world, Whorfian effects can have profound implications for the study of mental representation.
Maddi Pescatore

Relativism > The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

plato.stanford.edu/...supplement2.html

linguistic relativism sapirwhorf language

shared by Maddi Pescatore on 21 Feb 13 - Cached
  • Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, after the linguists who made it famous. But the label linguistic relativity, which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf's views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the hypothesis).
  • There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g., between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand, and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.
Maeve Couzens

ScienceDirect.com - Cognitive Psychology - Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and E... - 0 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...S0010028501907480

shared by Maeve Couzens on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world?
  • English and Mandarin talk about time differently—English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical
  • Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin–English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English.
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  • In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin.
  • language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and
  • one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense.
Maeve Couzens

ScienceDirect.com - Cognition - Learning to express motion events in English and Korean... - 0 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...001002779190033Z

shared by Maeve Couzens on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events
  • English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events
  • English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately
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  • Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion.
  • sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months.
  • learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes.
  • suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning.
craiglindsley

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

ehrafworldcultures-beta.its.yale.edu/...dispatchSearch.do

shared by craiglindsley on 28 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • craiglindsley on 28 Feb 13
     
    WE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES ARE A MIXED BREED. WE HAVE COME from all parts of the world; all races of men compose our biological aggregate. We have created an official ideology to fit this condition which declares than men of all races and all cultures are equally precious in the eyes of God and are, therefore, equal,-and here we pause for a long afterthought-"At least, they should be equal, in the thoughts and actions of men." In the second thought we see the ever-present basic conflict that permeates our way of life: a deep faith in the principles of equality which we proudly proclaim, and a fundamental, unofficial, unacknowledged, and almost guilty belief that certain Americans are the "real" ones and superior, while all others are second-class citizens and inferior. Our communities' social systems reflect this conflict when attempting to organize the lives of men who hold these opposing beliefs. Commonsense observation of these communities, buttressed by the more exact findings of social science, demonstrates that despite our equalitarian credo two types of separate and subordinate groups have emerged in the United States. All dark-skinned races with Mongoloid or Negroid ancestry are placed by our social system in subordinate groups, and all deviant cultural groups, speaking different languages, professing different faiths, and exhibiting exotic manners and customs are set apart and classed as inferior.
Michael Daly

eHRAF World Cultures - 0 views

ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/...dispatchSearch.do

shared by Michael Daly on 30 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Michael Daly on 30 Apr 13
     
    One woman of rank has been mentioned, and in the Relation for 1656 another several times appears. Teotonharason was an Onondaga woman who went with the ambassadors to Quebec, and was highly esteemed for her nobleness and wealth. She may have been the one mentioned in the Relation for 1671. "It was one of these principal persons who formerly first brought the Iroquois of Onondaga, and then the other nations, to make peace with the French. She descended to Quebec for this purpose, accompanied by some of her slaves." The influence of the Iroquois women was of great use to the missionaries. In the Relation for 1657 we read, "The women having much authority among these people, their virtue produces as much fruit as anything else, and their example finds as many more imitators."
Stefany Laun

THE AMISH: History in the U.S. and Canada - 0 views

www.religioustolerance.org/amish9.htm

shared by Stefany Laun on 30 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • In his Encyclopedia of American Religions, 6th edition (1999), J. Gordon Melton described four main, currently active Amish groups. In alphabetic order, they are: The Beachy Amish Mennonite Churches split off from the Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania after Bishop Moses Beachy refused to pronounce the ban on some former Old Order members who had left to join a Conservative Mennonite congregation in Maryland. They are the most liberal Amish group: they meet in churches, use automobiles, tractors, and electricity. In 1996, they reported 8,399 adult members in 138 congregations. The Conservative Mennonite Conference was formed in 1910 from a group of more liberal Old Order Amish congregations. They use meeting houses, Sunday schools, and English language services. They are located mainly in the Midwest. No membership data is available. The Evangelical Mennonite Church was organized in 1866 by Bishop Henry Egly in Indiana. They were originally known as the Egly Amish, changed their name to The Defenseless Mennonite Church in 1898, and to their present name in 1948. They stress "regeneration, separation and nonconformity to the world." In 1997, they were reported to have 4,348 adult members in 30 churches. Old Order Amish Mennonite Church congregations are very conservative. Transportation is by horse and buggy. Men are required to grow beards; mustaches are not allowed. Marriage outside the faith is forbidden. They meet in each other's homes for worship every other Sunday. About 8% of their membership is made up of converts from outside the community and their descendents. There were about 30,000 adult members in the U.S. and 900 in Canada in 1995. Including children, the total population was about 139,000.
  • Stefany Laun on 30 Apr 13
     
    Amish and Health Care: current status
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