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What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? Discuss the motivations for and predictions of such a view, with particular reference to cognitive semantics.

Cognitive semanticists are particularly interested in the relation between language, culture and cognition. Because of this, they have paid special interest to theories that make claims in this regard. One of the best known is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which has been named after its two main proponents Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This theory claims that language is 'a mould in terms of which thought categories are cast.'[i] The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is composed of two different views. The first is known as Linguistic Determinism, because it claims that ‘…people’s thoughts are determined by the categories available to them in their language.’[ii] This can be broken up into strong determinism, i.e. that thoughts are completely determined by language (in some cases that thought and language are identical), and weak determinism, which claims that thought is somehow affected by language. In comparison, the claim of Linguistic Relativity is that people who speak different languages will think about the world in different ways. For example the way we divide or ‘carve’ up the world is arbitrary, and this ‘carving’ is different by each language. So, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is claiming that language itself affects our perception and categorisation of the world, and that languages will vary in this respect.

In order to properly discuss the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis we must consider what has been said in reference to it. For the purpose of this essay I shall consider the work of one half of the aforementioned pair, that of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf stated:

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 organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.[iii]

So, we can see that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis claims that in some way our language is a tool>[iv] Thus, these three languages can all be seen to be ’carving-up’ the world in a way that is different from that of English. Although this has often been used to show that they have a fundamentally different world-view from our own, as far as these differences in vocabulary are concerned, this is arguably not the case. In fact, these examples seem to suggest that our experience of the world shapes our language. It could be argued that we do not have many words for snow because we do not need them. In England snow is rare, and presumably for the Aztecs it was rarer. This would seem to suggest that we carve up nature in ways that are productive to us depending on our environment, needs and specialities. The reason for such examples not being effective, according to George Lakoff, is that:

Snow is not fundamental to a conceptual system; it is isolated and doesn’t affect much else. And it is not a part of the grammar. There are no great conceptual consequences of having a lot of words for snow… Anybody with an expert knowledge of some domain of experience is bound to have a large vocabulary about things in that domain – sailors, carpenters, seamstresses, even linguists.[v]

Whorf was not just concerned with differences in vocabulary, but also with major differences in structures. Whorf studied the Hopi Indians of Arizona, and claimed that they perceived the world differently from speakers of other languages because the structure of their language was completely different from that of European ones. He was particularly interested in grammaticalized concepts because such concepts are used ‘unconsciously, automatically and constantly.’[vi] His view was that the fundamentals of our grammatical structure affect our thoughts because the underlying concepts are used frequently and automatically. This particular claim can be seen to lead to some strange conclusions:

In the grammar of Hopi, there is a distinction between ‘animate’ and ‘inanimate’, and among the set of entities characterised as ‘animate’ were clouds and stones. Whorf concluded that the Hopi believe that clouds and stones are animate (living) entities and that it is their language which leads them to believe this.[vii]

This seems strange, because such a claim would entail that French speakers believe that tables are female, when they say la table. This does not seem to be the case, as George Yule points out, because he has confused the grammatical category of animate, in Hopi, with the concept of ‘living’: ‘While the Hopi language has a particular linguistic category for ‘stone’, it does not mean that a Hopi truck driver thinks he has killed a living creature when he runs over a stone with his truck.’[viii]

Whorf’s claims went even further, however. He claimed that the conceptual framework of the Hopi was literally ‘untranslatable’ without a loss of meaning. He noticed that the Hopi Indians make no distinction in their language between past, present and future tenses. In English it seems natural to distinguish between tenses, for example ‘I saw the girl’, but this is not an option in Hopi, according to Whorf. Whorf thought this showed that the Hopi had a fundamentally different conception of time from our own. He discussed the potential result that European scientists and Hopi scientists must see the world very differently, since in Western physics the notion of time is extremely important. He went on to develop an idea of what Hopi physics might look like. By doing this, he ruins his own claim when he states that English speakers cannot conceive of what Hopi physics would be like, since he then formulates a theory of what it would be like. If he can, there is no reason why other people cannot.

A more recent study of the Hopi language by Ekkehart Malotki, contrary to Whorf's claims, shows that it contains a variety of tenses and words for units of time and that their culture has sophisticated methods for recording events:

…Whorf was wrong about many aspects of Hopi. Hopi is replete with metaphor, especially in its temporal system. Whorf was also wrong about the Hopi concept of time. As Malotki documents in great detail, Hopi does have a concept of time – and a rich system of temporal metaphors.[ix]

Proponents of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis would claim that translation between one language and another is difficult (if not impossible). However, it has been maintained that there is loss of meaning, whilst retaining truth-value, in translation between languages. This is best shown in literature where writers and poets have often complained about a loss of meaning in translation. The Spanish poet Pablo Neruda commented that ‘in many of the translations into French… my poetry escapes, nothing remains; one cannot protest because it says the same thing that one has written. But it is obvious that if I had been a French poet, I would not have said what I did in that poem, because the value of the words is so different. I would have written something else.'[x]

The notion that it may not be possible to directly translate one language into another has been of great interest to cognitive semanticists, however, since traditional linguistic theories have claimed that all languages should be ultimately translatable into one another. Such a view asserts that we can say whatever we want to say in any language, and that whatever we say in one language can always be translated into another. For example, although ‘there is no easy translation in English for the Somali>maddooyeyso, except the approximation: ‘to play the children’s game called maddooyamaddooyo, where an object is hidden in the hand and a special kind of rhyme is recited’,’[xi] it is possible. Although long-winded, we would want to say that the concept of maddooyeyso is explained by that sentence.

One immediate problem is that if we can borrow words and concepts from other cultures, then some level of translation must be possible. This undermines Linguistic Determinism in its strong form, since such ‘borrowing’ would not be possible. In addition ‘If thinking and perception were totally determined by language, then the concept of language change would be impossible,’[xii] since concepts outside of our own conceptual system would be impossible. Another difficulty for Linguistic Determinism, is that if it were true that language dictated thought, and that concepts were untranslatable, then it would appear that language-learning would be impossible, since children would be unable to learn without having a language in place already. With respect to Linguistic Determinism, it is also the case that I have had thoughts that I could not adequately express in language, but since my thoughts are determined by my language, then I must be mistaken about the thoughts I'm having. These arguments, and many like, them serve to undermine linguistic determinism in its strongest form.

Despite all of this, the view that our language determines the way that we conceive the world is an appealing one. It has also proved difficult to establish or disprove. Under ideal circumstances researchers would need to find two culturally identical groups using language that differs in only one way, which also affects a testable cognitive ability. Kay and Kempton have commented that: 'Until a technique is developed for assessing the world view of a people independently of the language they speak, no direct test of [linguistic determinism] is possible.'[xiii] So, instead researchers have investigated Linguistic Relativity, since cognitive ability should vary when language varies. The majority of this work has been done on colour terms in language. One example is the Kay-Kempton experiment, which showed that in some non-linguistic tasks having an extra colour word in your lexicon could make the task easier. For more details on this refer to their essay entitled ‘What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?’ which can be found in American Anthropologist 86 no. 1, p65-79.

However, colour perception has a biological aspect, which might be salient to any testing of this area of cognition, and could arguably be make it immune to the effects of language. Eleanor Rosch has argued that ‘colours appear to be a domain suited to demonstrate just the opposite of linguistic relativity, namely, the effect of the human perceptual system in determining linguistic categories.’[xiv]

George Lakoff has attempted to reclaim the notion of Linguistic Relativity, whilst severing it from Linguistic Determinism. He has suggested that our conceptual systems are not ‘monolithic’ in the sense that is normally presumed. He says: ‘Human beings do not function with internally consistent, monolithic conceptual systems. Each of us has many ways of making sense of experience…’[xv] He goes on to detail the fact that we often use more than one conception of the same thing whilst acting in the world. For example:

…There are two prevalent ways of metaphorically understanding electricity: as a fluid and as a crowd made up of individual electrons. Both conceptualisations are needed… Understanding electricity, at a certain level of sophistication, requires metaphors, more than one.[xvi]

To be effective in understanding electricity, we need to be able to think of it as both a crowd and as a fluid. Thus our conceptual system is not ‘monolithic’, Lakoff argues, since we are using mutually exclusive metaphors. His view of Cognitive Semantics is that languages do vary in conception (a mild form of Linguistic Relativism) but that Linguistic Determinism is misguided at best, insofar as it is our experience of the world that ‘motivates’ our cognition:

…Since experience does not determine conceptual systems, but only motivates them, the same experiences may provide equally good motivation for two somewhat different conceptual systems.[xvii]

To conclude then, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in its ‘strong’ form would seem untenable, but a weaker form, that claims that the way in which we see the world may be influenced by the kind of language we use, is often accepted. With respect to experiments, such as that of Kay and Kempton, it has been shown that the existence of linguistic categories, such as colour, can influence our cognitive ability. In addition, it would seem that the world affects our language just as much as language affects our perception of the world, as we can see from examples such as the often-discussed Eskimos. Lakoff has argued that the differences between languages, and even within languages are a perfectly normal symptom of our being a part of the world.

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[i] J. Bruner, J. S. Goodnow & G. A. Austin, A Study of Thinking, John Wiley & Sons 1956, p11
[ii] John Saeed, Semantics, Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997, p41
[iii] Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. J. Carroll, MIT Press 1956, p213-4
[iv] George Yule, The Study of Language, Cambridge University Press 1996, p248
[v] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press 1990, p308
[vi] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press 1990, p308
[vii] George Yule, The Study of Language, Cambridge University Press 1996, p247
[viii] George Yule, The Study of Language, Cambridge University Press 1996, p248
[ix] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press 1990, p325
[x] G. Plimpton, Writers at Work: The 'Paris Review' Interviews, Vol. 5, Penguin 1981, p63
[xi] John Saeed, Semantics, Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1997, p41
[xii] George Yule, The Study of Language, Cambridge University Press 1996, p248
[xiii] P. Kay and W. Kempton, ‘What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?’ American Anthropologist 86, 1984, p66
[xiv] Eleanor Rosch, ‘Linguistic Relativity’, Human Communication: Theoretical Explorations, Ed. Albert Silverstein, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 1974, p119
[xv] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press 1990, p305
[xvi] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press 1990, p305
[xvii] George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, University of Chicago Press 1990, p310

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thankyou so much for posting up this essay.. i have an essay due on language and whether it extends limits or directs thought and this is so useful.. thankyou!
it's easy to understand, not bogged down in too much technical talk *Applause* thankyou

mel on March 28, 2004 12:27 PM