Cultural Context of Communication-Linguistic relativity

Conceptualization of time Standard Average European (SAE)

A concept developed by Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe with shared common features

What is cultural relativism?

Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs, values, and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture, rather than be judged against the criteria of another

Chen (2013)

Does the language that we speak (strong- or weak future time reference) have any impact on our future-related actions?

What is absolute orientation based on and who uses it?

GY use north, west, etc. instead of left, next to, behind,...

Which languages did Benjamin Lee Whorf investigate?

He investigated Hopi languages

Which languages did Franz Boas study?

He studied Inuit languages

Future events (esp. predictions) can be expressed in the following two ways

In the future or in the present

Conceptual metaphor theory

Lakoff and Johnson: understanding one domain of experience (that is typically abstract) in terms of another (that is typically concrete)

Boroditsky (2001)

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.

Boroditsky and Ramscar (2002)

People's representation of and thinking about their spatial experience is what influences their thinking about time.

Sapir‒Whorf hypothesis

Strong version: the language we speak determines the way we think Weak version: the language we speak influences the way we think

What are Mezoamerican Ls (Hopi) languages?

They are a family of indigenous languages of the Americas found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico.

What did Levinson say about visual perception and processing?

Visual perception and processing is universally viewpoint dependent, or relative in nature

What are the origins of linguistic relativity?

Wilhelm von Humboldt (early 19th century) Studied the relationship between language and thought and how it is impossible to determine which affects which

What are Inuit languages?

a closely related group of indigenous American languages

Pro relativity: color terms-

can cut color spectrum up arbitrarily

Language is a means through which we are able to express our ____

conceptualizations

Universalism

language is universal, it works the same for everyone, we are all born with the same ability, language acquisition. we switch off linguistic features we don't use, the ones we do use are switched on

Egocentric or relative view

left/right; in front of/behind, you are the center, the focus of your position

German and Finnish (weak-future time reference)

present and future are not necessarily differentiated grammatically - the future is an adjacent (or even equivalent) time frame to the present.

English and Hungarian (strong future time reference)

present and future tense are grammatically differentiated - the future is a remote time frame independent of the present.

Berlin & Kay (1969)

proposed that the basic color terms in a culture, such as black, brown, or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has

civilization is a______ and not an ______ concept

relative, absolute

Generativism

syntactic structure, the mind is like a machine, we are able to create sentences like a programmed hardware

Linguistic relativity

the language that we speak also structures the way we think and act

Language shapes ____

thought

Language reflects ____

thought via linguistic structures that are available to us