Asmat, hamid, sana, noor-ul-sahar Relationship Between Language And Thoughts

outlines. Introduction: Views of some theorists: Two opinions for the prior discussion: Language determines thought: Thought determines language: The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis: Linguistic determinism: Linguistic relativity: Examples and experiment on language and thought relationship:

INTRODUCTION : Our everyday life involves the use of language. Language and thought are deeply interlinked with each other, whatever comes in our mind comes out as a language. Language is what people express there feelings through. Language is a regular part of the process of thinking.

Cont. We tell our ideas to others with language ,we “read” their responses and understand their meanings with language, and very often, we “speak” internally to ourselves when we process this information and make logical conclusions. Classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle argued that the categories of thoughts determines the categories of language language and thought is related but a flexible sense. Sometimes language drives our thought process and again sometime we construct the language with our thoughts.

Cont.. If think , we cannot think without language language and thought is related but a flexible sense. Sometimes language drives our thought process and again sometime we construct the language with our thoughts. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis proposes that language determines thought; therefore they are identical in nature. This argument in fact implies that thought is impossible without language.

Over to Hamid…………..

Views of some theorists Classical theorists like Plato and Aristotle argued that the categories of thoughts determine the categories of language. Plato: Thought and language were identical. Aristotle: Mankind could not have the same languages (because all don’t think the same). J. B. Watson: Thought is language; sub-vocal speech. “think aloud” = speech; “speak covertly”= thinking.

Two opinions for the prior discussion The notion of language and thought and their relation subsequently got divided into two groups mainly: 1. Whether thoughts are formed in advance of the words that we utter. 2. Or whether ideas are formed in terms of the words themselves.

Language determines thought The Eskimo language for snow: apun= “snow on the ground”, qanikca= “hard snow on the ground”, utak= “block of snow” etc. An Eskimo child -> more cognitive categories.

Thought determines language Those who believe this would say that cognitive development comes earlier in the life of children. Cognitive categories they develop determine the linguistic categories that they will acquire.

Over to Sana Bibi………

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis The hypothesis in linguistics has two versions: The first is called linguistic determinism (the strong version) The second part is called linguistic relativity (the weak version)

Linguistic determinism: It is the idea that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought. Whorf states that language does not only voice ideas but also shapes them. [The child’s knowledge is socially constructed in interaction with adults, so child logic develops only with the growth of child’s social speech.]

Linguistic relativity: Speakers of different languages - perceive the world differently. - resulting cognitive systems are different. Accordingly the mental universe of an English speaker may be different from that of a Chinese speaker because they happen to speak different languages.

Over to Noor-ul-Sahar…….

Examples and experiment on language and thought relationship Take “rainbow” as an example perception of colors come from color naming influence of the language. All the languages do not divide the colors into the same number of basic categories. Hence the speaker of a language will not describe in the same way as English speakers do. B.Berlin and P.kay’s experiment in 1969 concerned with how speakers of different languages divide up the color of spectrum. They used an array of 329 colors presented to speakers of 20 diverse languages.

Cont.. First, Berlin and Kay found basic color terms in each language. They then presented to the speaker of a language and asked to name the colors and draw lines around distinguishable ones. After that , all 20 were asked to mark with an ‘X’ the most typical example of each color in their basic color vocabulary. This was called focal color.

Observations: The basic color terms were restricted to a small set of numbers. The focal colors are the same across all 20 languages. Like if A had 4 and B had 6 , these these 4 closely corresponded to 4 out of the 6 colors chosen by B.

Another example: Color perception: Languages differ in the way they split up the range of possible colors by means of possible colors by means of color terms. Possible effect of color vocab on perception… English and Tarahumara English: green and blue Tarahumara: single term for both colors , siyoname. Experiment 1: Subjects were shown three close colors in the blue- green range, and asked to choose the one that’s most different from the other two.

Cont.. English speakers biased to group colors according to the words “green” and “blue”. Tarahumara speakers were not , even when the middle color B was objectively closer to A than to C , an English speaker often would identify BC as the closest pairing if they both could be described by the same word. This happened only when the differences were subtle.

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