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Linguistics 545

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{Linguistic Determinism Intro Edit}

Linguistic determinism is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people who speak different languages as their mother tongues have different thought processes.

Linguistic determinism is the strong form of linguistic relativity (popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), which argues that individuals experience the world based on the structure of the language they habitually use. Guy Deutscher is a great example of a linguistic relativist.

One of the main supporters of linguistic determinism is Friedrich Nietzsche who is credited with the term "Language as a prison". Alfred Korzybski also supports the hypothesis inadvertently through general semantics.

The language that served as the basis of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is Hopi. People later made connections between the Pirahã language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as well.

Though linguistic determinism played a considerable role historically, it is now discredited among mainstream linguists. Eric Lenneberg, and Roger Brown, as well as Steven Pinker have provided evidence in opposition the the hypothesis. The idea, however, does continue to play a role in literature and popular media. It appears in George Orwell's 1984, in the 2016 movie Arrival, and other science fiction pieces.

Supporting Arguments

Nietzsche

Nietzsche said "We cease to think if we do not want to do it under linguistic constraints". Originally translated incorrectly, these words became the source of the phrase "prison-house of language," used to describe the extreme position regarding linguistic determinism. For Nietzsche, language acts as the building blocks of thought, fundamentally shaping and influencing it. This was his explanation as to why cultural differences exist: because the language is different, the thought process is therefore different. Nietzsche also wrote that there is the "will to power and nothing besides," and this is another way Nietzsche expresses that language is a fixed structure that is responsible for the desires, thoughts, and actions of humans. This is a very strong take on linguistic relativism, literally making language the "prison" that our minds are trapped in. According to Nietzsche we could not comprehend things like table, or rain without the words being present in our language.

Guy Deutscher

Guy Deutscher is a supporter of linguistic relativity, the weaker counteroart of linguistic determinism. Relativity holds that language influences thought, but avoids the "language as a prison" view. In Deutscher's book Through the Language Glass, the chapter Where the Sun Doesn't Rise in the east discusses the language of the Guugu Yimithirr and how it reinforces linguistic relativity. Deutscher initiates his argument by introducing the Guugu Yimithirr, which describe everything geocentrically based on its cardinal direction (the chair is to the East) rather than egocentrically (the chair is to your right). It is clear how this system of expressing position and location influenced the Guugu Ymithirr's conceptualization of space. Their description of objects' locations within media would change based on the rotation of a picture or a television because they described things using cardinal directions. For example, if there was a photograph with a tree on the left side of the photo and a girl on the right side, the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr would describe the tree as West of the girl. If the photo was then rotated 90 degrees clockwise the tree would now be described as North of the girl. The implications of this for Deutscher were that the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr have a "perfect pitch" for direction and that their sense of direction is completely non-egocentric. In one experiment, speakers were asked to recall a very recent event and describe it. The people recalled their own placement, as well as the placement of important people and objects around them perfectly, even accounting for their own position in the retelling. Many years later, the same people were asked to recall that same event, and it was shown that over time, they were still able to accurately recall the directionality of objects and people. Deutscher argues that this example illustrates that geocentric direction is encoded into the memories of Guugu Ymithirr because their language requires it. More broadly, they see the world differently due to their unique conceptualization of space.

Pirahã

In the same way that Hopi prevents its speakers from thinking about time and space, the Pirahã language prevents its speakers from thinking about quantity and numbers. The speakers of Pirahã are also, for the most part, incapable of math. Peter Gordon has recently taken an interest in studying the speakers of the Pirahã language. He has conducted a number of experiments on a small amount of these speakers. Gordon highlights eight experiments involving seven Pirahã speakers. Six of the experiments were all related in that the speakers were instructed to match groups of items to the correct number displayed elsewhere. The other two experiments had them recall how many items had been placed into a container, and lastly differentiate between various containers by the number of symbols that were pictured on the outside. Gordon found that the speakers of Pirahã could distinguish between the numbers one, two, and three relatively accurately , but any quantity larger than that was pretty much indistinguishable to them. He also found the larger the number involved the worse the results became. Gordon concluded that speakers of Pirahã are restricted to thinking about numbers through symbols or other representations. These speakers think of things as small, larger, or many. The speakers showed no ability to learn numbers, even after being taught in the Portuguese language for eight months, not one individual could count to ten.Daniel Everett found that the Pirahã language also lacks recursion or nesting which was previously thought to be a feature of all languages. This opens up the possibility that thoughts of the speakers are influenced by their language in other ways as well. Although wether or not Pirahã actually lacks recursion is a topic of intense debate.

General Semantics

General Semantics was a therapy program created by Alfred Korzybski for the purpose of altering behavior. It has been regarded as a reliable method, and produced effective results concerning altering behavior. The methodology of creating these changes in behavior is heavily influenced by language. The methods used for behavior alteration are based on the idea that language influences our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Language commands clarity which makes thing clear or unclear, and this clarity creates a mental representation, which in turn creates an emotional response. So the idea with general semantics is to alter your language in order to change the feelings created within the mind-space, and elicit the intended response. According to Korzybski there are different silent, and verbal levels. On the nonverbal levels there exists feelings, thought, and nervous system responses and on the verbal level there are language systems. He instructs people to take any given word as "it" and to react accordingly. This is to avoid misappropriation of thoughts and feelings attached to any one thing. Because this program has been shown to produce effective results, this also has implications that language influences thought, supporting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Criticism

Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown (1954)

Psycholinguists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown were among the first to refute Whorf's ideas of linguistic determinism. They identify Whorf's major ideas as a) the world is experienced differently by speakers of different languages and b) language is causally linked to these cognitive differences. They explore the two types of evidence Whorf uses to argue for the existence of cognitive differences between linguistic communities: lexical differences and structural differences.

Lexical differences

Lenneberg and Brown analyze the example of Eskimo snow terms. They claim that Eskimo's three distinct terms for what English speakers would simply call "snow" does not indicate that English speakers cannot perceive these differences, but rather that they just do not label them. They go on to point out that, on occasion, speakers of English do in fact classify different types of snow (i.e. "good-packing snow" and "bad-packing snow") but do so with phrases instead of a single lexical item. They conclude that English speakers' and Eskimo speakers' worldviews cannot differ in this way, given that both groups are able to discriminate between different types of snow.

Structural differences

To refute Whorf's notion that structural categories correspond to symbolic categories, Lenneberg and Brown point out that structural categories rarely have consistent meanings. When they do, these meanings are not necessarily evident to speakers, as the case of grammatical gender in French illustrates. All French words with feminine gender do not reflect feminine qualities, nor do they share any common attributes. Lenneberg and Brown conclude that the existence of structural classes alone cannot be interpreted as reflective of differences in cognition.

Conclusions

Lenneberg and Brown ultimately conclude that the causal relationship between linguistic differences and cognitive differences cannot be concluded based on the evidence Whorf provides, which is solely linguistic in nature. They do, however, appear to find the proposition worthy of study, and pursue the study of color terms in order to supplement linguistic evidence with psychological data.

Steven Pinker

Another outspoken critic of linguistic determinism is linguist Steven Pinker, known for his alignment with Chomsky's universalist ideas. In his book, The Language Instinct, Pinker dismisses linguistic determinism as a "conventional absurdity," instead proposing a universal language of thought - termed Mentalese. He echoes Lenneberg and Brown's criticism that Whorf relied too heavily on linguistic data alone to draw conclusions regarding the relationship between language and thought. He also dismisses the idea that Eskimo has more words for snow than English as simply untrue, calling it the "Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," perpetuated and exaggerated by textbooks and popular books. As for the color terminology debate, Pinker argues that although different languages label colors differently, this variation in language cannot change human's biological process of color perception; he also points out that there are universal tendencies in the color labels that languages possess (i.e. if a language has two terms, they will be for white and black; with three terms, add red; with four, add either yellow or green). Pinker's final criticism of linguistic determinism is with regard to the Hopi concept of time: he asserts that Whorf was completely mistaken in his characterization of the Hopi as having no concept of time, and that the Hopi do in fact have tense, units of time, temporal metaphors, and a complex system of time-keeping. Pinker concludes that linguistic determinism derives from the tendency to equate thought with language, but evidence from cognitive science now illustrates that thought precedes language. In his eyes, humans think not in individual languages, but in a shared language of thought. In turn, knowledge of a particular language constitutes the ability to translate this Mentalese into a string of words for the sake of communication.

Other Criticism

Linguistic determinism has been widely criticized for its absolutism and refuted by linguists. For instance, Michael Frank et al. continued Daniel Everett's research and ran further experiments on the Pirahã published in "Numbers as a cognitive technology," and found that Everett was wrong, the Pirahã did not have words for "one," or "two," but instead had words for "small," "somewhat larger," and "many."

With regard to the color debate, one may perceive different colors even while missing a particular word for each shade, like New Guinea aborigines can distinguish between the colors green and blue even though they have only one lexical entry to describe both colors. In communities where language does not exist to describe color it does not mean the concept is void – rather the community may have a description or unique phrase to determine the concept. Everett describes his research into the Pirahã tribe who use language to describe color concepts in a different way to English speakers: “[…] each word for color in Pirahã was actually a phrase. For example, biísai did not mean simply ‘red’. It was a phrase that meant ‘it is like blood’.”

Thus, in its strong version ‘Whorfian hypothesis’ of linguistic determination of cognition has been refuted. In its weaker form, however, the proposal that language influences our thinking has frequently been discussed and studied.

In Literature and Media

George Orwell's 1984: Newspeak

In Orwell's famous dystopian novel, 1984, the fictional language of Newspeak provides a strong example of linguistic determinism. The restricted vocabulary and grammar make it impossible to speak or even think of rebelling against the totalitarian government, instead aligning its speakers with the ideology of Ingsoc. Newspeak highlights the deterministic proposition that if a language does not have a means to express certain ideas, its speakers cannot conceptualize them. Orwell devotes the Appendix to a description of Newspeak and its grammar:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods.

It is worth noting that main character Winston Smith, and others, were able to both conceive and speak of rebellion, despite the influences of Newspeak. 1984 does, however, take place before the full imposition of Newspeak; characters spoke both a combination of Newspeak and Oldspeak (standard English), which may have allowed for heretical thought and action.

Arrival (2016)

Based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, the science-fiction movie Arrival rests on the notion of linguistic determinism. It follows linguist Louise Banks as she is recruited to decipher the messages of extraterrestrial visitors to Earth. As she learns their language of complex circular symbols, she begins to see flashes of her daughter's life and death. It later becomes evident that these flash back-like visions are glimpses into her future. By acquiring the alien language and its nonlinear notion of time, Banks is able to see both past and future. The award-winning movie illustrates an example of the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis since it presuppposes that language determines thought. Learning an extraterrestrial language affected Banks's worldview so drastically that it completely transformed her perception of time.

Experimental languages in Science Fiction

The possibility of linguistic determinism has been explored by a variety of authors, mostly in science fiction. There exist some languages, like Loglan, Ithkuil and Toki Pona for instance, which have been constructed for the purpose of testing the assumption. However, no formal tests appear to have been done.