Linguistic Relativity

Тема 8.

Any idea can be symbolically expressed in any language. Nevertheless, the vocabulary and grammatical variations of different languages do have an impact on which things speakers habitually notice, label, and think about, and how speakers will ordinarily organize their expression of the relationships between these things (Sapir). The idea that language influences thought processes is expressed in the theory of linguistic relativity, sometimes called the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” after two of its originators. According to linguistic relativity, what a people habitually think about is a reflection of what the current vocabulary of their language encourages them to notice, and at least some aspects of how people think will be affected by the grammatical relationships demanded by their language. Most anthropological linguists today agree that linguistic relativity should not be understood to mean that language structure determines how we think, but that language does have some effect on what we think about most readily and on how we think much of the time.

Effects of Morphology.

Benjamin Lee Whorf was an originator of the idea that the superficial and arbitrary grammatical patterns that distinguish one language from another influence the ways in which its speakers habitually think about the world. His strongest argument is that the morphology of a language can have an effect on its speaker’s tendency to notice some things readily while failing to pay attention to others. For example, Whorf pointed out that one place in which industry fires frequently begin is the room in which so-called “empty” containers are stored. The word empty is a symbol that refers to two somewhat different concepts: it is used to mean 1) “containing only residues, gases, vapor, or stray rubbish,” and also, in a more basic sense, to mean 2) “vacuous, inert, or containing nothing.” Managers who label the room as a storage area for “empty containers” understand the word in its more specialized association with the first concept; workers are likely to behave around these containers of sometimes volatile residues and gases as if they were inert and vacuous. A worker, for example, who would never consider lighting a cigarette near a ‘full’ gasoline drum might casually do so near an “empty” one, never stopping to think that the volatile gasoline fumes that remain in the empty containers are much more likely to ignite explosively than is the liquid gasoline of the full containers. According to Whorf, the use of a single symbol that represents two different concepts is not uncommon in hazardous situations.

Whorf (1971) argued that people’s names for things often influence how they behave around those things even more than the physical traits of the things themselves. He cited the blower as an example. Physically, a fan is a machine that simply causes air to move. Yet when it is used to make air pass through a room – such as a room for drying materials – because it is called a blower, workers are likely to install it so that it blows air into the room instead of pulling air out of it. The former method of installation is no more efficient and is much more hazardous than the latter, since an electrical fire in the machine itself will be blown into the room. Once begun, the fire will be fanned by a blower installed in this way as long as it continues to function.

Sometimes labels are changed either to avoid undesirable conditioned responses or to produce a specific result. Thus, unpopular wars are called “pacification programs,” and the US War Department was renamed the “Defense Department”. Similarly tuna did not become a popular food in the US until one company began to label it “Chicken of the Sea”. And those who wished to support what they called “decriminalization” of drug use or prostitution soon recognized that it was better to use that label rather “legalization” for their legislative proposals. Western science provides a further example of the conditioning effects of verbal symbolic labels: European scientists noted that when they “added heat” to an object, its weight did not change. So for years they searched for evidence of other “weightless substances” before they realized that heat, even though it is labeled by a noun, is actually a process rather than a substance.

Effects of Syntax.

Syntactical processes also may affect how speakers of a language think about the world and how they behave, although the influence of syntax is probably not as great as the effects of morphology. Nevertheless, one finds numerous examples of correlations between a society’s way of thinking about what reality is like and the grammatical characteristics of its language. For instance, if the English sentence “The dog was kicked by the man” is translated literally into Navajo, it becomes

(dog) hastiin (man) biz tat (the former by the latter was - kick). However, this Navajo sentence has two problems: it is ungrammatical (Creamer, 1974), and to native Navajo speakers it is also absurd. The absurdity occurs because the Navajo passive implies that the object allows itself to be acted upon (a meaning not implied by the English passive), and in the Navajo worldview the human, being more intelligent than a dog, would be responsible for the dog being kicked. The passive construction, by implying that the dog “allowed” itself to be kicked by the man, portrays the dog as the more intelligent and responsible party!

Rom Harre cites examples of Inuit grammar, that parallel Inuit ideology. If the Inuit respond to the question “Who is preparing dinner?” their answer uva-nga, does not translate as “I am” but as “The being here mine”. The English ‘I hear him’ becomes in Inuit tusarp-a-ra, literally ‘his making of a sound with reference to me.’ In general, where English grammar portrays a person as an “entity” who has attributes and intentions and who initiates actions Inuit designates a person as the “location” at which qualities and relations occur. This characteristic of Inuit grammar mirrors and supports Inuit social life, in which one'’ position within the group is much more important than one’s characteristics as an individual. Responsiveness to others is the hallmark of Inuit social interaction: when one person laughs, all laugh, when one cries, everyone cries. According to Harre, “At least with respect to a large and varied catalogue of public performances, individual feelings, intentions, and reasonings play a very minor role.”

Such parallels between syntax and culture are best viewed as systems like that of the chicken and its egg: it is not clear which came first. Syntax may change to reflect the culture in which the language is spoken, but the habits of thought embodied in that syntax may help to maintain conformity to the rules of the culture by making those rules feel very natural to those who speak the language.

Language, then, seems to have an effect on the way people relate to the world. It is a conscious vehicle of habitual thought. The vocabulary of any language selects segments of reality that its speakers must become aware of when they learn to use their language. And the grammar is a built-in logic system that leads its users to relate the parts of the world to one another in the same way that the grammar organizes the relashionships between the words that stand for those parts of the world.

And now some more examples from Russian and English. In Russian as in most European languages we have two personal pronouns ты и вы when addressing people. In English we have only one pronoun you. It can’t be used as an equivalent of ты, вы in all cases. In Russian the choice between вы used for second person singular (and usually with capital letter) expressing respect for the person and вы used for plural influences on the people’s relationships and their characters. Russian ты can be offensive, e.g. Вы мне не тыкайте. But sometimes it can bring happiness: Пустое «Вы» сердечным «ты» она, обмолвясь, заменила (А.С. Пушкин). И у А. Ахматовой

И как будто по ошибке

Я сказала: «Ты…»

Озарила тень улыбки

Милые черты.

От подобных оговорок

Всякий вспыхнет взор …

Я люблю тебя, как сорок

Ласковых сестер.

A student from India experienced a cultural shock when she heard a small boy playing in the park, calling his mother by ты. It was striking for her that if we use Вы for our close relatives the latter might even feel insulted. In India, if a person is older than you, you always have to use the equivalent form of вы.

One more example from morphology. It is well known that there are a lot of diminuative suffixes in Russian: -очк (-ечк), -оньк (-еньк), -ушк (юшк), -ик and others. An average Englishman who almost doesn’t have such suffixes (birdie, girlie are rare exceptions) even can’t imagine the number of such suffixes in Russian, by means of which the Russians can express a lot of shades of meaning. Of course, this creates a lot of difficulties for translators, e.g. the word старушка from a line of Esenin’s poem: Ты жива еще моя старушка, is translated with 4 words: are you still alive my dear old woman? In Russian we can say about animals: кот, котик, котишка, коток, котишечка; собачка, собачушка, собаченька; about inanimate objects: домик, домишечка, домичек, домок, домушка. In English the same meaning we can express only using word combinations with “little” or “dear little”, e.g. little cat or dear little dog. But it’s very difficult to imagine such word combinations as dear little fork| spoon.