Language, Cognition and Culture
Language and Perception: (How can language affect perception and behavior?)
Most sociolinguists believe that language influences
our perception of reality. (Explanation of example 2):
This is a text written by a male medical doctor to his
students. It talks about a surgery that is done to women. It says that the
doctors should explain to the women that it has no side effects, because women
wrongly believe that such an operation undermines their sexual urge.
the most obvious feature to be noticed in such a text
is its impersonal and detached tone which is achieved by the use of agentless
passive constructions such as “surgery is indicated”, and impersonal nouns like
“the doctor, the patient”, and formal devices like nominalization. The opening
sentence of the text presents an insulting saying as a common knowledge.
Such a text affects the perception of the students,
and influences their behavior towards their women patients.
Verbal hygiene:
· A term used by Debora Cameron.
· It describes how people discuss matters of language.
· It covers a wide range of activities from writing
letters of complain over the abuse of language to prescribing what is regarded
as acceptable, correct and proper in different contexts. It also covers how
language can be used as political weapon.
· The discussion of sexist language is a proof that
women engaged actively in verbal hygiene that reflected their belief that
making a change in language use is worthwhile.
· The deliberate adoption of non-sexist forms like
“chairperson” often leads to accusations of political correctness. The debate
of political correctness has often focused on linguistic terms. For example,
the term “crippled” is not acceptable any more to the extent that the Crippled
Children Society in New Zealand is now being referred to by its acronyms only.
The term was then substituted with disabled, and now to the phrase “person with
a disability”. Therefore, linguistic interventions challenge taken-for-granted
offensive assumptions.
· Maoist China is also an example of the co-option of
language as a political purpose. Mao paid attention to language to widen his
revolutionary goals. He controlled public communication and the education
system. “Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong” was published in 1964, and the
quotations dominated everyday life. Quotation and counter quotation became
heard in good-bargaining in the markets, and newspapers were also full of
extracts from Mao’s works. Mao believed in the role of language in educating
people, and shaping their values attitudes. To achieve this goal, powerful
groups were established called Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams. Critics
suggest that Mao’s quotations provided an ideal method of brain-washing huge
populations of illiterate people. They consisted of short formulae which were
easy to remember and repeat. They encoded a particular position which was that
of the dominant party, and which were reinforced by material used in the
educational system, making it difficult to take or express an opposite
position. Mao’s revolution was due to his skills as a propagandist as well as
his military and political prowess. He also used formulaic language to promote
conformist attitudes and thinking. (This approach also suggests that here is a
relation between language and thought.)
Vocabulary and cognition: (how the use of certain words affect the behavior of people’s
thinking and attitude).
The relationship between language, thought and reality
has fascinated linguists. The linguist whose name was associated with such
investigation was Benjamin Lee Whorf. He was an anthropological linguist who
worked for a fire insurance company. He investigated the American English as a
hobby at the beginning. In processing insurance claims, he noticed that
particular words influenced the behavior and perception of people. for example,
a person may throw cigarette butts near a gasoline barrel just because he/she
finds the label “empty” on it.
Linguistic determinism:
This term is made by Sapir-Whorf.
It means that people of different cultures think
differently because of their language differences. A native speaker of Hopi
would perceive reality differently than a native speaker of English because
they use different languages.
Linguistic relativity:
A claim that is less strong than linguistic
determinism.
It means that language influences thought, perception
and at least behavior.
The main problem in assessing Whorf claim is the danger
of inescapable circularity. Languages and thoughts of their speakers as well
differ. But the only evidence we have for this difference in thought is the
fact that the languages used are different. This is why investigating the
relationship between thought and language is very challenging, because we want
to know how language can influence thinking without taking language as an
evidence of thought processes. Many
experiments were devised to test this Whofer-Sapir hypothesis.
If this hypothesis is right, then the colors which are
not identified in one’s language shouldn’t be having names. (Why it is wrong?)
· But this was not the case in Dani, a tribe in New
Guinea, where the people used only two color terms corresponding to Dark and
Light, but they could distinguish between subtle shades of colors that their
language had no names for (pale blue VS turquoise). This means that the
hypothesis is wrong.
· Other experiments suggest that people remember colors
which are coded in their language more easily than those which are not.
· Some languages have linguistic categories which take
account of the shape of the object. E.g.
The form of Navaho verbs is sometimes
determined by the shape of the object. Navaho children are therefore faster
than the English speaking children in categorizing blocs by shapes, and also
ten to group them according to shape, whiled English speaking children group
things according to color.
Grammar and Cognition:
Grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, and
gender encode aspects of reality differently in different languages.
In studying the Hopi verb system, Whorf found out that
Hopi conception of time is different than that of the western culture.
Hopi
|
European languages
|
They conceive time as cycles of events and sets of
processes rather than units of time.
Conjugating Hopi verbs requires an analysis of
events in terms of dynamic motion expressed by aspect markers rather than
tense markers.
|
They conceive time as a road with future ahead and
past behind.
|
Hopi was better equipped to deal with processes and
vibrations of modern physics. These concepts of physics were coded in the
verb morphology of Hopi, and this forced the Hopi to notice the vibratory
phenomena.
|
indo-European languages have tense systems.
|
Later studies showed that Hopi has tenses and words
for time units, most sociolinguists consider Whorf suggestion is an
interesting one to indicate how speakers of different languages filter
reality.
|
The areas of experience which are important to
cultures tend to be grammaticalised in their languages. Something is
grammaticalised when it s functions less and less like an independent item, and
more and more in the grammatical system such as an affix or an auxiliary verb.
Linguistic categories and culture
Language provides a means of encoding a
community’s knowledge, believes, values. (culture). It was believed that the
primitive languages are simple in grammar, but this is not true.
Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language
is a very grammatically complex language. The culture of this region goes back
to thousands of years. Every noun belongs to one of four classes. Particular
types of experience establish associations which determine the class membership
of some items. The system can be summarized to the following categories, which
are unlike the western tradition.
·
(Human)
males, some animals.
·
(Human)
females, birds, water, fire, fighting
·
Non
flesh food.
·
Everything
else.
Even at the lexico-semantic level aboriginal
languages challenge western preconceptions about primitive languages. In
Kunwinjku, there are more terms to distinguish the kangaroos and wallabies than
English. This is because the fact that kangaroos are a very important factor in
the environment of the aboriginal people.
Tahitians don’t make a distinction between
sadness and sickness. Both words can indicate the same meaning. However,
western medical practice regards depression as an illness, and expresses it
with terms that may sound odd to the non-European speaker such as he is feeling
blue, in low spirits, and so on.
In Maori:
-
the
word “mate” covers a wide range of meaning that begins with sick and reaches to
dead.
-
Maori
kinship terminology is also different as it distinguishes between siblings in
different ways.
-
In
Maori culture relative age is very important. Even the status of the tribe
“iwi” which you belong to will be identified in “teina” and “tuakana” terms
relatives to other tribes.
-
The
importance of the extended family as an important social unit is also reflected
in the kinship system. Kinship labels reflect the mutual rights and obligations
of different members of the family towards each other. In rural areas of New
Zealand, Maori children grow up in close contact with their grandparents,
aunties and uncles. They use the same term for the mother and the mother’s
sister “whaea” and they use the same term for the father and the father’s
brothers “papa”. The same pattern holds for terms used to refer to the child’s
siblings and cousins. In these cases, gender and relative age are semantically
marked, but degree of kinship is not lexically distinguished. So the lexical
labels identify those with similar social rights and obligations in relation to
the speaker. Clearly, linguistic terminology reflects cultural relationships.
Discourse
Patterns and Culture
The intertwining of language, culture and
perception is evident when we examine research on patterns of interaction too.
Cultural differences between the majority and the minority cultures can lead to
serious consequences as a research by Diana Eades clarifies when comparing
aboriginal and non-aboriginal Australians. When both groups use the same
language culturally different patterns of interaction can be a source of
misunderstanding. Aboriginal societies in Australia place a great importance on
indirectness: it is important to avoid being intrusive. This is done by giving
people interact- ional privacy which is a crucial mechanism in a society where
there is frequently little physical privacy. In discourse, this socio-cultural
norm is reflected in a number of ways:
1-
If you
want info from an aboriginal person regarding factual information like
location, time, and how people are related, you must use a statement with a
rising intonation like: “you were at the store?”
2-
To have
substantial information, less direct statements are used to gather the info.
Direct questions are not used, and they are likely to be responded with “I
don’t know” or “I don’t remember”. The information seeker volunteers some of
his/her knowledge on the topic and then waits patiently for the other speaker
to answer. Ex: “I heard there was a big argument at the store”.
3-
In
aboriginal societies some kinds of information are not freely shared, and
silence is much more acceptable as a component of interaction.
Since Non aboriginal norms dominate the
Australian society, aboriginal people are often disadvantaged and misunderstood
or misinterpreted as evasive or as evidence of guilt.
Cultures described as “positive politeness”
or “solidarity oriented cultures” value involvement with others, while negative
politeness cultures emphasize respect and minimize intrusion. On such a basis,
aboriginal society seems a negative politeness culture. In fact however, aboriginal
society is characterized by high international involvement, on-going serial,
open-ended conversations, and places great value on group activities which
build solidarity. The analysis of interaction patterns in
aboriginal communities raises questions about the adequacy of the simple
negative/positive politeness framework.
Research on aboriginal communities suggests
that a feature such as preference of indirect ways of conveying information
reflects a distinctive perception of socio-cultural relationships. Aboriginal
interactions give personal relationships priority over information-oriented
goals. They prioritize the affective over the referential dimension. Indirectness
is an obligatory aspect of respect, and long non-intrusive silences are
tolerated.
It seems that preferred discourse patterns
and linguistic usages may reflect and even influence a particular view of
society reality and socio-cultural relationships.
Language, social class and cognition
Basil Bernstein was interested in the fact
that there are possible cognitive implications where groups use different
varieties of the same language. Bernstein was concerned with the British
students who belong to the working class who were not progressing in school.
But rather than deducing that school teachers preferred student who used more
standard varieties, the researchers began to examine the features of the
working class students’ speech, and they mistakenly assumed that the kind of
language they used in the interviews represent their actual linguistic
competence, where they used short monosyllabic responses, the thing that made
the researchers think that their linguistic resources are restricted.
Bernstein also suggested that a restricted
code would constrain the cognitive ability of the working class students, and
argued that the language they used have affected their perception and thinking
abilities. There is no evidence to support this claim but unfortunately it had
great appeal in accounting for the failure of low class students in school, and
placed the blame on the children rather than on the teachers.
Benefits of Bernstein’s hypothesis: It made
the sociolinguists examine Whorf’s claims of the relationship between language,
thought and society more thoroughly, leading to a more detailed study of
vernacular varieties and a very clear recognition that dialect differences were
comparatively superficial aspects of language which could not lead to thinking
differences.
His research however was simplified and
mis-interpreted, as the linguistic variation like choosing from the pronouns
(me-i) in “between you and i/me” or marking explicitly the past tense in
sentences can not be taken as evidence of linguistic or cognitive deficit in
speakers.
Glossary:
Cognition الإدراك العقلي
Perception الإدراك الحسي
Verbal hygiene علم الصحة الكلامي
Linguistic
determinism الحتمية اللغوية
Linguistic
relativity النسبية اللغوية
Discourse
patterns أنماط الخطاب
Deficit عجز ونقص
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