Language & Thought

The notions of iconic and indexical reflex systems raise the question of the relation of language to thought. Do the grammars of specific languages influence or determine how children come to view the world? Do expressions like think up and think over, for example, condition users of English to think in certain ways? The idea that language and thought are interlinked generally falls under the rubric of the Whorfian hypothesis (WH), after the American anthropological linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), even though versions of this notion can be found before Whorf. The WH posits that language structures predispose native speakers to attend to certain concepts as being necessary. But, as Whorf emphasized, this does not mean that innovation in language is impossible. On the contrary, we can use language to invent new categories of reference any time we want. For example, if for some reason we wish, or need, to refer to "adolescent boys between the ages of 13 and 16 who smoke," then by coining an appropriate word, such as groon, we would in effect etch this concept into our worldview, because the presence of the word groon in memory, as Whorf argued, would predispose us to see its meaning as somehow necessary. When a boy with the stated characteristics came into view, therefore, we would immediately recognize him as a groon.

To see how language and thought are intertwined, it is instructive to compare two languages in a specific way to determine how they encode a particular concept, say, "device for keeping track of time." In Italian, for instance, the word orologio is used to encode it. In English, on the other hand, two words exist, watch and clock, which are distinguished in terms of the collocation of the referent: watch, refers to a device that is carried, worn, or put on bodies (on wrists, around the neck, in pockets, etc.), while clock, on the other hand, refers to an object that is placed in specific locations—on a table, on a wall, etc.—and not carried around. This does not mean that collocation distinctions do not exist in Italian. In this specific case they are conveyed by another language structure: da + place, with da meaning approximately "for": orologio da polso = wristwatch ("watch for wrist"), orologio da tavolo = table clock ("clock for table"), and so on. Historically speaking, the emergence of different categories of language to refer to time suggests different perceptions of time. The word watch originated in the 1850s when people started strapping clocks around their wrists. Since then people in the West seem to have, in a sense, become fixated on "watching" time pass. As the psychologist Robert Levine (1997) discovered, this fixation is typical of cultures that distinguish between clocks and watches, less so of others. Burmese monks, for instance, hardly need watches to inform them when it is time to get up. They get up when there is enough light to see the veins in their hands. In Mexican society, showing up "on time" is often cause for ridicule, rendering watches virtually useless. Language reflects such cultural perceptions at the same time that it projects them into discourse and, thus, reinforces them. So, the gist of the semiotic story of "device for keeping track of time" is that keeping accurate time, at least in the past, has been more of a preoccupation in English-speaking cultures than it has been in Italian and other cultures, and that this has been encoded in their respective language systems.

Whorf suggested that the function of language was to allow people to classify experience and that it thus was an organizing grid through which humans came to perceive and understand the world around them. When we name something, we are classifying. What we are naming belongs to no class until we put it in one. For this reason, the WH raises some interesting questions about social inequalities and the structure of the language that encodes them. In English, sexist terms like chairman, spokesman, etc. were often cited in the past as examples of how language predisposed its users to view certain social roles in gender terms. Feminist critics have maintained that English grammar was originally organized from the perspective of those at the center of the society—the men. This is why we still tend to say that a woman marries into a man's family, and why at wedding ceremonies expressions such as "I pronounce you man and wife," are still used by some. In the not-too-distant past, and perhaps still today in many areas of Western society, women were defined in relation to men. Similarly damaging language is the kind that excludes women, such as "lady atheist" or "lesbian doctor," implying that atheists and doctors are not typically female or lesbian.

By the way, in some other societies the reverse is true. Investigating grammatical gender in the Iroquois language, Alpher (1987) found that in this language the feminine gender is the default one, whereas masculine items are marked by a special subject prefix. This is the converse of gender categories in most languages with a gender system. Alpher relates this to the fact that the Iroquois society is matrilineal —traditionally women hold the land, pass it on to their heirs in the female line, are responsible for agricultural production, control the wealth, arrange marriages, and so on. Iroquois grammar too is organized from the viewpoint of those at the center of the society— in this case the women.

One of the more interesting implications of the WH is the view that language models the world in the same way that visual art does. To a semiotician this is a particularly interesting implication because it would not only confirm the notion of an interconnectedness among the various codes of the signifying order, but also assign a much more prominent role to the brain's primary modeling system in language. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), too, saw sentences as representing features of the world in the same way that pictures did. The lines and shapes of drawings show how things are related to each other; so too, he claimed, do the ways in which words are put together in sentences. It is relevant to note, however, that Wittgenstein had serious misgivings about his so-called "picture theory" of language. Before his death he became perplexed by the fact that language could do much more than just construct propositions about the world. So, he introduced the idea of language games, by which he claimed that there existed a variety of linguistic games (describing, reporting, guessing riddles, making jokes, etc.) that went beyond simple pictorial representation.

Source: Analyzing cultures: an introduction and handbook / Marcel Danesi and Paul Perron. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c1999.