Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Language shapes thought

Linguistic determinism is considered to be untenable

1. Non-verbal thought (e.g. spacial reasoning)

Linguistic relativism itself is almost a truism

• Knowing new words certainly affect how you think
  BBC: The ‘untranslatable’ emotions you never knew you had

• Verbalizing thought processes can help think, memorize, etc.

Overview

1. Color
2. Time
3. Space-time
4. Number

Basic color terms

Different numbers of basic color terms in different languages

• English: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, etc.
• Dani: mili (cool, dark), mola (warm, light)
• Bambara: dyema (white-beige), fima (dark), blema (red-brown)

Criticisms

• What are basic color terms?

  • monomophemic (so not light blue or space gray)
  • no broader basic color term (so not scarlet or crimson)

• What about: teal, turquoise, beige, silver, etc.

Memory effects of basic color terms

• Brown & Lenneberg 1954: English speakers remembers colors more easily if they are decribable by simple words

• Davidoff et al. 1999: Similar memory effects in Berinmo, which has nol (blue-green) and wor (yellow-green)

Discrimination task

Winawer et al. 2007

• Russian speakers descriminate голубой-blue and синий-blue faster than two hues that'd be described by the same word (1,164 vs. 1,288 ms on ave.)
• No such effect for English speakers (900 vs. 914 ms on ave.)
• The effect disappears in Russian with a verbal dual task

Linguistic variation

• Obligatory tense marking
  • Yes: English, French, Finnish, Korean, etc.
  • No: Mandarin Chinese, Hopi, Hawai'ian, etc.

Obervations

Chen 2013: Speakers of obligatory future marking languages (English, French, etc.) are less likely to take future-oriented behavior

National savings (Chen 2013: 715)

% of households with saving (Chen 2013: 709)

After controlling for country, sex, age, income-level, education, religion, etc., following effects are found for obligatory future-marking languages

• 30% less likely to save

• retire with 25% less in savings

• 20-24% more likely to smoke

• 13-17% more likely to be obese

• 21% less likely to use condoms

Theoretical interpretation

Chen claims: These behavioral differences arise because:

• for speakers of obligatory future-marking lanauges (e.g. English), future feels distant
• since future feels distant, they are less atuned to potential benefits of behavior that has positive returns later

Related studies

• Chen et al. 2017: Firms in areas with obligatory future marking languages have less cash holdings

• Mavisakalyan et al. 2018, Essi et al. 2023: Speakers of obligatory future marking languages are less likely to behave pro-environmentally

• He & Zhang 2018: Firms in areas with obligatory future marking languages pay higher dividends

• Lien & Zhang 2020: Countries where obligatory future marking languages are spoken have lower suicide rates

Related studies (cont.)

Critical discussion: causation

• Data is correlational in nature, not directly showing causation

• To infer causation, we need more theoretical justification

Critical discussion: causation (cont.)

The explanation could well go in the opposite direction, contradicting data

• For speakers of obligatory future marking languages always have to pay attention to the distinction between future and present

• Therefore future is more cognitively prominent in their mind, and they are more likely to take future-oriented behavior

Critical discussion: language classification

Japanese is classified as a non-obligatory future marking language

• Does not have an obligatory future tense morpheme like will

• But obligatorily marks the present interpretation with progressive (like English; unlike German), similarly to It is raining

According to Chen's reasoning, what should matter is whether or not grammar distinguishes the present and future interpretations

Critical discussion: data analysis

Roberts, Winters & Chen 2015: When geographic and historical relatedness among languages is taken into consideration, the correlation disappears but the correlation remains in other statistical tests

Relative and absolute spacial terms

• Relative (egocentric): left, right, front, etc.
• Absolute (geocentric): north, south, uphill, etc.

Spacial metaphors for time

Common to use spacial metaphors for temporal concepts

• For English speakers, time often flows from left to right

• What about speakers of other languages?

Boroditsky & Gaby 2010

Comparison b/w (American) English and Kuuk Thayorre

Task: Chronologically arrange pictures of the same man taken at different times

Boroditsky et al. 2010

Mandarin Chinese uses more vertical metaphor than English (e.g. 上个月 'up month' = last month)

• Two pictures of the same person are presented one by one; answer if the second one was taken later or earlier
• Two keys: black = earlier, white = later
• Four key arrangements: , , ,

Front-back axis

Crosslinguistic variation

• English: future = front, past = back
• Aymara: future = behind, past = front
• Yupno: future = uphill, past = downhill

Number cognition

Pre-linguistic infancts and many animals (e.g., chimpanzees, dogs, horses, crows, toads, guppies, spiders, bees, etc.) 'count' using analog magnitude estimation, instead of discrete counting

Pirahã

Pirahã has no nominal number marking; very few number words, which all have non-exact meanings (Everett 2005, Gordon 2004, Frank et al. 2008)

• hói = roughly one
• hoí = roughly two
• baagiso/aibaagi = many

Frank et al. 2008: Experiment 1

Presented spools of threads and asked 'How much/many is this?' in Pirahã for each quantity from 1 (increasing) or from 10 (decreasing)

Frank et al. 2008: Experiment 2

Non-verbal matching task: Presented spools of threads and asked to give the same number of baloons

Frank et al. 2008: Experiment 2

When memory is involved, performance gets worse

Frank et al. 2012

Verbal shadowing (while listening to radio news, and repeat the words)

• Exp 1: Verbal shadowing while the experimenter places spools. English speakers do the five tasks better than Pirahã speakers (e.g., 54% correct vs. 32% correct for nuts-in-a-can)

• Exp 2: Verbal shadowing while the experimenter places spools (Encoding), while the participant answers (Retrival), or both. Worse performance when encoding is interfered (66% vs. 87% vs. 53%)

Concluding remarks

• Very small effects of crosslinguistic variation

• In particular, having access to (frequent) words seems to help memory (color, number) and perceptual categorization (color)

• Economic and other effects of tense marking are open to question

• Boroditsky's time-space effects could be cultural, rather than grammatical effects