Is it true that the language I speak shapes my thoughts

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Is it true that the language I speak shapes my
thoughts?

• Language and Culture
• Final Report

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Group members
Leader ??? 93210111 Members ???91110611
???89110159 ???87210351 ???87210351
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Job distribution

• References collectors
• ???,???,???,???,??? ,???
• Context editors???,???,???,???
• ???,???
• Summary editor???
• Power-point maker???

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About Whorf-Sapir hypothesis

• Whorf-Sapir hypothesis
• The language we learn in the community where we
  are born and shapes and structures our thoughts,
  world-view, and our social behaviour.
• Reference webside
• http//venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html
• Nowadays, this hypothesis is a controversial
  issue, as the result, we discuss this issue Is
  it true that the language I speak shapes my
  thoughts?

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Summary (1)

• The issue Is it true that the language I
  speak shapes my thoughts?
• Part I. Record of discussing progress
• This is a controversial issue, for this
  reason, there are many kinds of voice in our
  team. However, the whole discuss progress had
  proceeded very smoothly. Described as below.
• (The first vote)
• 1.     the opposition ???
• People often feel that their thoughts arent
  being expressed properly by words the mind has a
  language of its own, independent of the language
  that the mouth uses.
•  

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Summary (2)

• 2.     the undecided ???
• This is really a debated issue. I am not sure
  whether the language is so powerful to our
  thought, it seems to effect our thoughts lightly.
•  
• 3.     the affirmative ???,???, ???, ???
• Maybe the language has tiny influence to our
  thought, but we cannot deny that the language has
  power to shape our thought. It exists in our
  lingual system, we are effected by it insensibly.

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Summary (3)

• (Each party tried to convince the other party
  by their expression.)
• (The second vote)
• 1.     The opposition ???, one vote.
• 2.     The affirmative ???,???,???,???,???, five
  votes.
• (This discussion ended)

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Summary (4)

• Part II. The interflow by Email and Telephone in
  our team (6/5-6/29)
• 1. ??? Tried to provide some references to
  all of team members.
• 2. ??? Had some question to our conclusion,
  and decided to write down different idea to
  complete the whole viewpoint of our final report.
• 3.??? Tried to get information about our
  rate of final report progress and gave some
  suggestions.

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Summary (5)

• 4.???Mentioned that she had some questions about
  our conclusion and difficult in writing our
  report.
• 5.???Mentioned that the whole direction of his
  report and provide some new opinions.
• 6.??? Updated some points of his report and give
  some suggestions in power-point making.

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Summary (6)

• Part III. The conclusion of our team
• This vote outcome just meant that, most of
  our team members cannot deny the language has
  some influence to our thought. It does not mean
  the vote represents a right answer. In fact, all
  of us agreed that the language seems to have tiny
  power to effect our thought. It is like a chicken
  and egg question. Which comes first? We are not
  very sure that, however, we must admit that our
  lingual system is very complicated, everything
  has its own possibility to happen. That is why we
  choose this and prepare more space to handle the
  coming studies in the future.
•  

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Individual response-???(1)

• In the first, we must mention the Sapir-Whorf
  hypothesis, a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf
  had a research about Hopi, a native American
  language spoken in Northeastern Arizona. The
  research was that speakers of Hopi and speakers
  of English see the world differently because of
  differences in their language, and there were
  some important points about the events of the two
  certain speakers see the world differently-focusin
  g events, syntax, their view of time and so on,
  were reflected in their language. That is the
  question- Is it true that the language I speak
  shapes my thoughts?

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Individual response-???(2)

• In this hypothesis, the author claimed that
  language had a strong effect on thought. Our
  culture, the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and
  so on that we pick up from people we live and
  interact with, shapes the way we think, and also
  shapes the way we talk, in general, most likely,
  the culture, thought habits and the language have
  all grown up together. We learn to classify
  things that are similar and give them the same
  label, but what counts as being similar enough to
  fall under single label may vary from language to
  language. For example, we try to find that What
  is dog?, in my thoughts, dog is a noun, and
  belongs to our language. How to definite dog?
  When we think about the word, a clear image
  appears in my brain immediately- a dog, with four
  legs, two ears, gets barks and so on, we gather
  all items and label it dog.

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Individual response-??? (3)

• However, some linguists dont agree all of above
  statements, they bring up some questions. Such as
  the question Do people think in language? The
  answer is, much of the times, but not always.
  None of these thoughts require language,
  therefore, it is possible to think about
  something if we dont have a word for it. The
  other question Learning a different language
  will change the way we think? The new language
  does not really change the way we think, unless
  the new language is totally different from our
  own, but we might get some insight of another
  culture and another way of life.

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Individual response-???(4)

• Moreover, I must emphasize that language is
  growing. Because our world is a global village,
  international culture interflow, information
  exchange and so on, all influence our language
  deeply. Because of time passing, the meaning of
  some words become different from the past. For
  instance, the distinction of young person and
  middle-aged person is so different from the
  past. Nowadays, advancement of health-tech makes
  people live older than the past, the definition
  of the two words is growing
• different as well.

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Individual response-???(5)

• At last, my conclusion that it is true the
  language I speak shapes my thoughts. The reason
  is that, although we might not say our thought is
  only effected by language, but must admit that we
  cannot deny language has some influence to our
  thought indeed. Culture, language and thought,
  are very hard to get judgement which comes first,
  that is like a chicken and egg question. We
  cannot use dichotomy to judge them completely.

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Individual response-???(6)

• Reference
• PART I.
• 1.            http//www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Sp
  ring_2002/ling001/thought.html
• 2.            http//www.lsadc.org/faq/index.php?a
  aafaqthink.htm
• 3.            http//orvillejenkins.com/worldview/
  worldvthink.html
• 4.            http//lachaim.blogspot.com/2005/01/
  words-shape-thoughts.html
• 5.            http//www.newscientist.com/article.
  ns?iddn6303
• 6.            http//c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?Programmi
  ngLanguagesShapeThoughts
• 7.            http//www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/
  2004/07.22/21-think.html
• 8.            http//curtrosengren.typepad.com/occ
  upationaladventure/2004/09/does_our_langua.html
• 9.            http//www.ai-forum.org/topic.asp?fo
  rum_id3topic_id13698
• 10.        http//cognitivedaily.com/?p53
• 11.        http//www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Artic
  le/0,4273,4414277,00.html

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Individual response-???(7)

• 12.        http//www.usingenglish.com/speaking-ou
  t/linguistic-whorfare.html?INFOISBN3A_0072822767
  _TITLE3A_Anthropology2C2/e
• 13.        http//www.geocities.com/twocentseltcaf
  e/whorf.html
• 14.        http//www.medicalnewstoday.com/medical
  news.php?newsid12330
• 15.        http//www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer
  y.fcgi?cmdRetrievedbPubMeddoptCitationlist_u
  ids11487292
•  
•  
• PART II. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• 16.        http//venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir
  .html
• 17.        http//www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/nj
  p0001.html
• 18.        http//www.geocities.com/CollegePark/41
  10/whorf.html

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Individual response-???(1)

• Before answer this question, let us know what is
  thought and language.
• 1. What is thoughts
• Thought From Wikipedia, the free
  encyclopedia.
• Thought or thinking is a mental process which
  allows beings to model the world, and so to deal
  with it effectively according to their goals,
  plans, ends and desires. Concepts akin to thought
  are sentience, consciousness, idea, and
  imagination.Thinking involves manipulation of
  information, as when we form concepts, engage in
  problem solving, reason and make decisions.
  Thinking is a higher cognitive function and the
  analysis of thinking processes is part of
  cognitive psychology.In the Myers-Briggs Type
  Indicator, thinking means you tend to put a
  higher priority on impersonal factors than
  personal factors.

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Individual response-???(2)

• 2. What is language
• According to one look dictionary
  search---Quick definitions
• Language is
• the mental faculty or power of vocal
  communication a systematic means of
  communicating by the use of sounds or
  conventional symbols the cognitive processes
  involved in producing and understanding
  linguistic communication a system of words used
  in a particular discipline the text of a popular
  song or musical-comedy number (language)
  communication by word of mouth

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Individual response-???(3)

• From the definition of the Thoughtand
  Language, we can say that thought does not
  equal language. That words and thoughts can't be
  the same thing. Our thoughts are really totally
  free, at least as regards any constraints that
  might be imposed by language -- that whatever
  modifying influences language has, it doesn't
  anywhere impose a constraint on what we can
  think. (from Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove and Professor
  Steven Pinkers speechs)
• Experts agree that the startling result provides
  the strongest support yet for the controversial
  hypothesis that the language available to humans
  defines our thoughts. So-called linguistic
  determinism was first proposed in 1950 but has
  been hotly debated ever since. So what somebodys
  language does not shape his thought. It is a
  very surprising and very important result, says
  Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at
  Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland,
  US, who has tested babies abilities to
  distinguish between different numerical
  quantities.

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Individual response-???(4)

• Whether language actually allows you to have new
  thoughts is a very controversial issue. As we
  know babies who can not use words to speak, can
  also expresses their emotion, through cry,laugh,
  and other body posture. Babies clearly are making
  sense of the world, and that's before they're
  saying a word. And dumb persons are shows their
  feelings by body languages. Animals too -- I
  think there's a lot of good evidence that many
  non-human animals engage in some form of thought,
  even though obviously they don't have the words.

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Individual response-???(5)

• I agree with the Traditional descriptions of the
  relation between thought and language take a
  fairly static view.
• ( http//www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring2002/lin
  g001/thought.html)
• It is means "There resides in every language
  a characteristic world-view.... Man lives
  primarily with objects, but he actually does so
  exclusively as language presents them to him."
  (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1836)
• "Users of markedly different grammars are
  pointed by their grammars towards different types
  of observations and different evaluations of
  externally similar acts of observation, and hence
  are not equivalent as observers but must arrive
  at somewhat different views of the world."
  (Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1940)

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Individual response-???(6)

• .
• Experiments suggest that the relevant issue is
  not thought (a static notion) so much as
  thinking, i.e. the specific task one is
  performing (a more dynamic notion). In
  particular, when you're expressing thoughts in a
  particular language, you necessarily have to
  respect the important categories of that
  language, but if you choose you can include
  whatever extra information you want (Slobin
  1996).
• For example, some languages tend to express many
  aspectual distinctions, i.e. information about
  the internal temporal structure of an event.
  English happens to be fairly rich in this domain.
  (from Ling 001 language, culture, and language)
• And language always ambiguous For example,
  Professor Steven Pinker, a member of the
  Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at
  MIT, and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience
  Center at MIT. (THINKING ALLOWED Conversations On
  The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With
  Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove) say,

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Individual response-???(7)

• language is a way of communicating thoughts, of
  getting them out of one head and into another by
  making noise. I think that even if you look at
  language itself, you see that there's got to be
  something underlying the words themselves,
  because words can be ambiguous, the ambiguities
  that exist in language would suggest that they
  can't possibly constrain our thoughts.
• we invent slang, we invent jargon, we invent new
  figures of speech when we need to shows that we
  have the idea first, and we think to ourselves..

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Individual response-???(8)

• Language is obviously very important to supplying
  the actual content of the thoughts. But there is
  a way that we think without language or words.
  Recently there have been a number of techniques
  that scientists have used to try to tap the minds
  of creatures that don't have language.
• So the language we speak dont shape our
  thoughts. There's a reason why people often feel
  that their thoughts aren't being expressed
  properly by words -- that even tiny differences
  in the words can convey very subtle differences
  in meaning, the mind has a language of its own,
  independent of the language that the mouth uses

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Individual response-???(1)

• I believe that language influences thought but
  don't believe that it determines thought, and
  that it is applicable in certain situations but
  isnt in all situations. First, language is a
  powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract
  domains. Second, one's native language plays an
  important role in shaping habitual thought. For
  example, English and Mandarin talk about time
  differently--English predominantly talks about
  time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin
  also commonly describes time as vertical. This
  difference between the two languages is reflected
  in the way their speakers think about time. The
  Sapir-Whorf hypothesis believed that thought and
  language are very closely related.

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Individual response-???(2)

• Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf are
  credited the relationship between thought and
  language, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The
  hypothesis consists of two parts, linguistic
  relativity and linguistic determinism. The
  functions of one's mind are determined by the
  nature of the language which one speaks. In
  simpler terms, the thoughts that we construct are
  based upon the language that we speak and the
  words that we use. In its strongest sense,
  linguistic determinism can be interpreted as
  meaning that language determines thought. In its
  weakest sense, language partially influences
  thought. Whorf was amazed that the Hopi

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Individual response-???(3)

• language has no words for past, present, and
  future (Campbell 3). After further interpretation
  and analysis he concluded that the Hopi have a
  sense for the continuum of time despite having no
  words to specifically describe past, present, and
  future (Campbell 3). Skoyles made an experiment
  to deaf children. The experiment results lead
  Skoyles to believe that the Sapir-Whorf
  hypothesis is correct in its strongest sense.

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Individual response-???(4)

• The language we spoke affected our view of the
  world. George Orwell, a literary scholar,
  realizes that language has the power in politics
  to mask the truth and mislead the public, and he
  wishes to increase public awareness of this
  power. He accomplishes this by placing a great
  focus on Newspeak and the media in his novel
  Nineteen Eighty-Four. Demonstrating the repeated
  abuse of language by the government and by the
  media in his novel, Orwell shows how language can
  be

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Individual response-???(5)

• used politically to deceive and manipulate
  people, leading to a society in which the people
  unquestioningly obey their government and
  mindlessly accept all propaganda as reality.
  Language becomes a mind-control tool, with the
  ultimate goal being the destruction of will and
  imagination. Language can shape peoples sense of
  reality, how it can be used to conceal truths,
  and even how it can be used to manipulate
  history.

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Individual response-???(1)

• 'He gave man speech, and speech created
  thought,Which is the measure of the universe'
  - Prometheus Unbound, Shelley
• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as we know it
  today can be broken down into two basic
  principles linguistic determinism and linguistic
  relativity.
• Linguistic Determinism A Definition
• Linguistic Determinism refers to the idea
  that the language we use to some extent
  determines the way in which we view and think
  about the world around us. The concept has
  generally been divided into two separate groups -
  'strong' determinism and 'weak' determinism.
  Strong determinism is the extreme version of the
  theory, stating that language actually determines
  thought, that language and thought are identical.
  Although this version of the theory would attract
  few followers today - since it has strong
  evidence against it, including the possibility of
  translation between languages - we will see that
  in the past this has not always been the case.
  Weak determinism, however, holds that thought is
  merely affected by or influenced by our language,
  whatever that language may be. This version of
  determinism is widely accepted today.

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Individual response-???(2)

• Wilhelm von Humboldt The 'Weltanschauung'
  Hypothesis.
• Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was the first
  European to combine a knowledge of various
  languages with a philosophical background he
  equated language and thought exactly in a
  hypothesis we now call the 'Weltanschauung'
  (world-view) hypothesis, in fact a version of the
  extreme form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
  Humboldt maintained that language actually
  determined thought
• Der mensch lebt mit den Gegenständen
  hauptsächlich, ja...sogar ausschliesslich so, wie
  die Sprache sie ihm zuführt."
• Humboldt viewed thought as being impossible
  without language, language as completely
  determining thought. On closer inspection, we can
  see that this extreme hypothesis leads to a
  question how, if there was no thought before
  language, did language arise in the first place?
  Humboldt answers this by adhering to the theory
  that language is a platonic object, comparable to
  a living organism which just suddenly evolved one
  day entirely of its own accord.

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Individual response-???(3)

• Linguistic Relativity A Definition
• Linguistic relativity states that
  distinctions encoded in one language are unique
  to that language alone, and that "there is no
  limit to the structural diversity of languages".
  If one imagines the colour spectrum, it is a
  continuum, each colour gradually blending into
  the next there are no sharp boundaries. But we
  impose boundaries we talk of red, orange,
  yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. It takes
  little thought to realise that these
  discriminations are arbitrary - and indeed in
  other languages the boundaries are different. In
  neither Spanish, Italian nor Russian is there a
  word that corresponds to the English meaning of
  'blue', and likewise in Spanish there are two
  words 'esquina' and 'rincon', meaning an inside
  and an outside corner, which necessitate the use
  of more than one word in English to convey the
  same concept. These examples show that the
  language we use, whichever it happens to be,
  divides not only the colour spectrum, but indeed
  our whole reality, which is a 'kaleidoscopic flux
  of impressions', into completely arbitrary
  compartments.

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Individual response-???(4)

• The Notion of Translatability
• Closely related to the notion of
  codability is the notion of translatability.
  Although different languages may have different
  ways of dividing up their spectra of experience
  into verbal forms, we find it is still quite
  possible to translate from one language into
  another. Although someone translating from one
  language into another may find it necessary to
  use a whole phrase in the target language to
  communicate the concept expressed in the original
  language with only a single word, this is
  achievable. In the Australian aboriginal language
  Pinupti, the word 'katarta' refers to the hole
  left by a goanna when it has broken the surface
  of its burrow after hibernation. It takes
  seventeen words to translate that concept into
  English, but the result is fine, lacking perhaps
  some of the conciseness but none of the subtlety
  of the Pinupti word.Of course inter-language
  translatability again offers evidence against the
  strong version of determinism. The differences
  between the lexicons of individuals would carry
  great import. I know the meaning of the word
  'saltatoria' the person sitting next to me
  word-processing a dissertation on paediatrics
  would probably not know the meaning of it. This
  does not, of course, mean that I would be unable
  to explain to him what it meant. Of course
  another thing to bear in mind is the fact that
  words are often borrowed from one language into
  another, for instance the French borrowing 'le
  weekend' from English. This sort of borrowing
  would be impossible if language determined
  thought completely. And if we look just a little
  further, it becomes obvious that if it was true
  that language dictated thought, and that concepts
  were untranslatable, then children would be
  incapable of learning language at all for how
  would a child learn its first word?

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Individual response-???(5)

• Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf
• 'Human beings do not live in the objective
  world alone, nor alone in the world of social
  activity as ordinarily understood, but are very
  much at the mercy of the particular language
  which has become the medium of expression for
  their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine
  that one adjusts to reality essentially without
  the use of language and that language is merely
  an incidental means of solving specific problems
  of communication and reflection. The fact of the
  matter is that the "real world" is to a large
  extent unconsciously built up on the language
  habits of the group.'
• This famous passage from the American
  linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir
  (1884-1936)'s 'The Status Of Linguistics As A
  Science', written in 1929, demonstrates the
  dominating thought of what has come to be called
  by all sorts of names including the 'Sapir-Whorf
  hypothesis', the 'Whorfian hypothesis' and more
  plainly the 'Linguistic Relativity hypothesis'.
  We can see the reason for the variety of titles
  for the hypothesis - as well as the influence
  Sapir must have had on his pupil Benjamin Lee
  Whorf (1897-1941) - if we look at the following
  passage from Whorf himself, which propounds much
  the same viewpoint

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Individual response-???(6)

• 'We dissect nature along lines laid down by
  our native languages. The categories and types
  that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do
  not find there because they stare every observer
  in the face on the contrary, the world is
  presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions
  which has to be organised by our minds - and this
  means largely by the linguistic systems in our
  minds. We cut nature up, organise it into
  concepts, and ascribe significances as we do,
  largely because we are parties to an agreement
  that holds throughout our speech community and is
  codified in the patterns of our language. The
  agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated
  one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory we
  cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the
  organisation and classification of data which the
  agreement decrees.'
• Surprisingly, though, neither Sapir or
  Whorf made it very clear whether they were
  arguing for strong or weak determinism. At times
  we are "at the mercy of" whatever language we
  speak, while at others our linguistic habits
  simply "predispose certain choices of
  interpretation".
• Whorf, originally a 'fire prevention
  engineer' by trade, spent a lot of his time
  studying the language of the Hopi Indians of
  Arizona, who make no distinction in their
  language between past, present and future tenses
  where in English it seems natural to distinguish
  between 'I see the girl', 'I saw the girl' and 'I
  will see the girl', this is not an option in
  Hopi. This apparently made quite an impression on
  Whorf, who imagined that the scientists of the
  day and the Hopi must see the world very
  differently...although the philosopher Max Black
  considers that 'they may be expected to have
  pretty much the same concept of time that we
  have' in spite of this. And Whorf himself
  notices, 'The Hopi language is capable of
  accounting for and describing correctly all
  observable phenomena of the universe'. Another
  characteristic of the Hopi tongue is that there
  is just a single word - 'masa'ytaka' - for
  everything that flies, including insects,
  aeroplanes and pilots.

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Individual response-???(7)

• Freud
• 'The question 'How does a thing become
  conscious?' could be put more advantageously
  thus 'How does a thing become pre-conscious?'.
  And the answer would be 'By coming into
  connexion with the verbal images that correspond
  to it'.
• This quotation from Freud's book 'The Ego
  and the Id' helps us make what I consider to be a
  helpful distinction when talking about the
  influence of language on thought whether we are
  talking about conscious or unconscious thought. I
  have suspected for a long time that language
  actually gives rise to consciousness, to thought
  that is available to conscious introspection
  thought of an unconscious nature takes place, I
  believe, from the day we are born, as the
  cognitive faculties exercise themselves upon the
  world of the child. But it is only when the child
  learns the meaning of words, learns to associate
  them with concepts, that he or she becomes
  'conscious', in the sense of becoming aware of
  his/her existence as the object of other's
  thoughts and judgements, and exercising upon
  him/herself the internalised critic Freud calls
  the Superego. The child learns the words 'good'
  and 'bad' thought processes become their own
  objects for the first time.

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Individual response-???(8)

• I think perhaps the answer might be that
  conscious thought is thought that has been given
  a verbal symbol to coexist alongside it. Thus
  thought that occurs below a conscious level, both
  the 'simple' thought of cognitive processes and
  the complex thought of say, repressed ideas and
  affects, remains unconscious until verbal
  correspondences are found. More importantly,
  conscious thought may be thought of as
  unconscious thought that has been given access to
  consciousness through the use of verbal symbolia
  thus words bring concepts from the conscious mind
  into the unconscious. But there is a price to be
  paid what I believe to be an unlimited variety
  of concepts that could be brought to
  consciousness have but a limited number of words
  in which to clothe themselves.This, of course,
  relates to the question of whether language
  determines thought. I think it fair to say in the
  light of Freud's theory, which seems to me to be
  undoubtedly correct, that yes, language does
  determine conscious thought, for conscious
  thought is by Freud's definition thought that has
  been made conscious through language but since
  the majority of thought is unquestionably
  unconscious, we cannot say that language
  determines thought wholly.

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Individual response-???(9)

• Conclusion
• As regards linguistic determinism, it seems
  that most contemporary thinkers are quite content
  to accept the weaker version of the theory, that
  thought is indeed influenced by the linguistic
  systems available to us, but not much more
  certainly not there are not many linguists today
  who would support Wilhelm von Humboldt's
  'Weltanschauung' hypothesis.It can hardly be
  argued, either, that there is any limit to the
  structural diversity of languages. There are
  plenty of languages available for us to study,
  and each one divides the world up into
  compartments in different ways from other
  languages.To me it seems as if it would be
  profitable if some thought were given to the link
  between language and consciousness, the conscious
  coding of thought via verbal symbols and the way
  in which conscious thought is encoded in them.

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Individual response-???(10)

• Reference
• Black, M.1962. Models and Metaphors. New
  York Cornell University Press.Brown, R.1958.
  Words and Things. Illinois The Free
  Press.Brown, Roger L.1968. Wilhelm von
  Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic Relativity.
  Paris Mouton.Ellis, A. and Beattie, G.1986. The
  Psychology of Language and Communication. New
  York Guilford Press.Freud, S.1927. The Ego and
  the Id. London The Hogarth Press.Lyons, J.1981.
  Language and Linguistics. Cambridge Cambridge
  University Press.Penn, J.1972. Linguistic
  Relativity versus Innate Ideas. Paris
  Mouton.Rossi-Landi, F.1973. Ideologies of
  Linguistic Relativity. Paris Mouton. Slobin,
  D.1974. Psycholinguistics. London Scott,
  Foresman and Compa
•  

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Individual response-???(1)

• Steven Pinker I call language an "instinct," an
  admittedly quaint term for what other cognitive
  scientists have called a mental organ, a faculty,
  or a module. Language is a complex, specialized
  skill, which develops in the child spontaneously
  without conscious effort or formal instruction,
  is deployed without awareness of its underlying
  logic, is qualitatively the same in every
  individual, and is distinct from more general
  abilities to process information or behave
  intelligently. (One corollary is that most of the
  complexity in language comes from the mind of a
  child, not from the schools or from grammar
  books.) All this suggests that language is caused
  by dedicated circuitry that has evolved in the
  human brain. It then raises the question of what
  other aspects of the human intellect are
  instincts coming from specialized neural
  circuitry.
• I'm interested in all aspects of human
  language. I'm an experimental psychologist who
  studies language for a living how children learn
  language, how people put sentences together in
  their minds and understand sentences in
  conversation, where language is situated in the
  brain, and how it changes over history.

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Individual response-???(2)

• My work concentrates on what science has
  discovered about language since 1950. In
  answering those questions, other questions
  repeatedly come up. Why is the hockey team in
  Toronto called the Maple Leafs instead of the
  Maple Leaves? Why do we say, "He flied out to
  center field" in baseball why has no mere
  mortal ever "flown out" to center field? Why do
  immigrants labor with lessons and tapes and
  homework and English classes, while their
  four-year-old kids learn the language so quickly
  that they can make fun of their parents'
  grammatical errors? What language would a child
  speak if he was raised by wolves? I also look at
  what we know about how language works, how
  children acquire it, how people use it, and how
  it breaks down after injury or disease of the
  brain.
• I unify this knowledge with three key
  ideas. One responds to the fact that what people
  do know about language is often wrong. The view
  of language that suffuses public discourse that
  people assume both in the sciences and in the
  humanities is that language is a cultural
  artifact that was invented at a certain point in
  history and that gets transmitted to children by
  the example of role models or by explicit
  instruction in schools. The corollary is that now
  that the schools are going to pot and people get
  their language from rock stars and athletes,
  language will steadily deteriorate, and if
  current trends continue we're all going to be
  grunting like Tarzan. I argue instead that
  language is a human instinct.

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Individual response-???(3)

• The second idea comes from the following If
  language is a mental organ, where did it come
  from? I believe it came from the same source as
  physical organs. It's an adaptation, a product of
  natural selection in the evolution of the human
  species. Depending on how you look at it, this is
  either an incredibly boring conclusion or a
  wildly controversial conclusion. On the one hand,
  most people, after hearing evidence that language
  is an innate faculty of humans, would not be
  surprised to learn that it comes from the same
  source that every other complex innate aspect of
  the human brain and body comes from namely,
  natural selection. But two very prominent people
  deny this conclusion, and they aren't just any
  old prominent people, but Stephen Jay Gould,
  probably the most famous person who has written
  on evolution, and Noam Chomsky, the most famous
  person who has written on language. They've
  suggested that language appeared as a by-product
  of the laws of growth and form of the human
  brain, or perhaps as an accidental by-product of
  selection for something else, and they deny that
  language is an adaptation. I disagree with both
  of them.

44
Individual response-???(4)

• The third idea comes from the question, "Why
  should we be so interested in the details of
  language in the first place?" Language is
  interesting because, of course, it's distinctly
  human, and because we all depend on it. For
  centuries, language has been the centerpiece of
  discussions of the human mind and human nature,
  because it's considered the most accessible part
  of the human mind. The reason people are likely
  to get exercised by technical disagreements over
  the proper syntax of relative clauses in Choctaw,
  say, is that everyone has an opinion on human
  nature, and lurking beneath such discussions of
  language is the belief that language is the
  aspect of science where human nature is going to
  be understood first.
• Why do I call language an instinct? Why not
  a manifestation of an ability to acquire culture,
  or to use symbols? There are four kinds of
  evidence that have been gathered over the last
  century.

45
Individual response-???(5)

• One of them is universality. Universality, by
  itself, doesn't indicate that the ability in
  question is innate. For all I know, VCRs and fax
  machines are now close to universal across human
  societies. But universality is a first step to
  establishing innateness, and it was a remarkable
  and unexpected discovery early in the century,
  when anthropologists first started exploring
  societies in far-flung parts of the globe that
  without exception, every human society has
  complex grammar.
• The final bit of evidence is that language
  seems to have neurological and perhaps even
  genetic specificity. That is, the brain is not a
  meatloaf, such that the less brain you have the
  worse you talk and the stupider you are, but
  seems to be organized into subsystems. Using
  brain damage and genetic deficits as tools, we
  can see how the brain fractionates into
  subcomponents.

46
Individual response-???(6)

• The argument from Chomsky and Gould is that
  maybe language was an unavoidable physical
  consequence of selection for something else,
  perhaps analytical processing, hemispheric
  specialization, or an enlarged brain. No one who
  was around when language evolved is here to tell
  us about it, and words don't fossilize, so the
  arguments have to be indirect. However, there's a
  standard set of criteria in biology for when to
  attribute something to natural selection that
  is, when it may be called an adaptation and
  when to look at it as a by-product, or what Gould
  and Lewontin call a "spandrel." Ironically, what
  Gould and Chomsky have not done is apply these
  standard criteria to the case of language.
  They've noted the logical possibility that
  language doesn't have to be an adaptation, but
  they haven't said, "Let us now pull out the test
  kit, apply it to language the way we apply it to
  any other biological system, and see what the
  answer is."

47
Individual response-???(7)

• Brain shape is another possibility that we
  can rule out as the ultimate source of language.
  Could it be that a generally spherical brain with
  a certain kind of neuron packing, through complex
  laws of physics we don't understand, somehow
  gives rise to language? Again, over the range of
  normal variation and of pathology, there are
  reports of grotesquely distorted brains, usually
  from hydrocephalus, sometimes cases in which the
  brain lines the inside of the skull like the
  flesh of a coconut. It's possible for a person to
  have that condition and nonetheless develop
  language on schedule. One reported case was an
  undergraduate student at Oxford.
• The impression from anthropology that
  humanity is a carnival where anything is possible
  came in part from a tourist mentality when you
  come back from a trip, you remember what was
  different about where you went, otherwise you
  might as well have stayed at home. That is, many
  anthropologists exaggerated

48
Individual response-???(8)

• the degree to which the tribes they
  studied were exotic and strange, both to justify
  their profession and to raise people's
  consciousness about human potential. But many of
  their claims have turned out either to be
  canards, like Margaret Mead's claims about Samoa,
  or to miss the forest for the trees the
  anthropologists spent so much time looking for
  differences that they didn't notice basic
  categories of human experience that are found in
  every culture, like humor, love, jealousy, and a
  sense of responsibility. Language is simply the
  most famous example of a human universal. Donald
  Brown, an anthropologist at UC Santa Barbara,
  wrote a book called Human Universals, in which he
  scoured the archives of ethnography for well
  substantiated human universals. He came up with a
  list of about a hundred and fifty, covering every
  sphere of human experience. That's my
  interpretation of the main lessons of
  anthropology. The interesting discoveries aren't
  about this kinship system or that form of
  shamanry. Underneath it all just as, in the
  case of language, there's a universal design
  Chomsky called universal grammar there is in
  the rest of culture what Donald Brown calls the
  universal people. He characterized the human
  species much the way a biologist would
  characterize any other species.

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Individual response-???(9)

• Reference
• About the book Language Instinct
  (web-site)
• ????? Steven Pinker/? ??/?
• ???,??????(Language, Society and Identity)
• ???. ???? (John Edwards) / ? ???/?
• The Language Instinct is a book by Steven
  Pinker, published in 1995, in which he argues the
  case for the belief that humans are born with an
  innate capacity for language. In addition, he
  deals sympathetically with the still stronger
  claim of Noam Chomsky that all human language
  shows evidence of a universal grammar. In the
  final chapter Pinker dissents from the apparent
  skepticism shown by Chomsky that evolution by
  natural selection is equal to the challenge of
  explaining a human language instinct.

50
Individual response-???(10)

• About the author
• Steven Pinker (born September 18, 1954, in
  Montreal, Canada) is professor of Psychology at
  Harvard University and author of a number of
  popular books. He was a professor in the
  Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT
  for 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003.
  He received a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from
  McGill University in 1976, and a Doctor of
  Philosophy (Experimental Psychology) from Harvard
  University in 1979.
• Pinker has written about language and
  cognitive science for both specialist and popular
  audiences. He is most famous for his work on how
  children acquire language and for his skillful
  popularization of Noam Chomsky's work on language
  as an innate faculty of mind, though he and
  Chomsky differ on other issues. Pinker has
  suggested an evolutionary mechanism for this
  faculty, but this idea remains controversial and
  is rejected by Chomsky. Pinker also argues that
  many other human mental faculties are evolved,
  and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard
  Dawkins in many evolutionary disputes.
• His most recent book The Blank Slate was
  a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and The Aventis
  Prizes for Science Books. In 2004, he was named
  one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential
  People.
• In Jan. 2005, Pinker defended Harvard
  president Lawrence Summers after his comments on
  the gender gap in math and science sparked
  outrage among Harvard faculty.

51
Individual response-???(11)

• Language may shape human thought. (My reflection)
• Experts agree that the startling result
  provides the strongest support for the
  controversial hypothesis that the language
  available to humans defines our thoughts.
  So-called linguistic determinism was first
  proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever
  since.
• It is a very surprising and very important
  result, says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental
  psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in
  Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies
  abilities to distinguish between different
  numerical quantities. Whether language actually
  allows you to have new thoughts is a very
  controversial issue.
• Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia
  University in New York City who carried out the
  experiment, does not claim that his finding holds
  for all kinds of thought. There are certainly
  things that we can think about that we cannot
  talk about. But for numbers I have shown that a
  limitation in language affects cognition, he
  says.

52
Individual response-???(12)

• Babies and animals
• Gordon says this is the first convincing
  evidence that a language lacking words for
  certain concepts could actually prevent speakers
  of the language from understanding those
  concepts.
• Previous experiments show that while babies
  and intelligent animals, such as rats, pigeons
  and monkeys, are capable of precisely counting
  small quantities, they can only approximately
  distinguish between clusters consisting of larger
  numbers. However, in these studies it was unclear
  whether an inability to articulate numbers was
  the reason for this.
• Above all, language instinct is the ability
  for the human beings. I truly believe what
  language you speak shape your though.
•  

53
Individual response-???(1)

• Culture is something with which we identify
  ourselves in a society. It gives us a sense of
  belonging, membership, compatriotism. We could go
  so far as to say that it give us a way to define
  ourselves. In other words, it can tell people who
  we really are, in terms of our culture of course.
  So most of our ideas, thoughts, opinions,
  behavior etc are shaped through our culture. It
  is true that language is an important component
  part of culture. So we could say that language is
  one of the ways we express our culture. There is
  no question that he lexicon of specific language
  mirrors whatever the

54
Individual response-???(2)

• non-verbal culture emphasizes (Whorf). In
  other words, if we speak a very comprehensive,
  creative language, then we are able to express
  our thoughts very creatively and comprehensively.
  Therefore, if our language locks creative
  capabilities, then our thoughts will lock
  creative capabilities. So our thoughts can only
  be truly expressed by the capability of the
  language we speak. the differences in language
  reflect the different views of different people
  (Whorf). Therefore, our thoughts are shaped by
  the language we speak.

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Individual response-???(3)

• Reference
• 1.http//www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/cultural/language/wh
  orf.html
• 2.http//www.cultsock.ndirect.co.uk/MUHome/cshtml/
  introductory/sapirw.html
• 3.http//venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html
• 4.http//www.geocities.com/CollegePark/4110/whorf.
  html