In the thought-provoking sci-fi film, Arrival, we watch as a
brilliant linguist learns the written language of aliens that have
landed on Earth. In mastering their language gradually, she starts to
have flashbacks... or are they flash forwards? I won't spoil the plot,
so suffice it to say that the language of these aliens is non-linear in
terms of the direction of time. In learning it the character's
experience of time itself is profoundly changed with surprising impacts
on herself and those with whom she interacts. Arrival is based on a
short story by Ted Chiang, a philosophical sci-fi writer in the mold of,
say, Borges or PK Dick. Chiang in the original short story, was
largely inspired by anthropological and psycholinguistic work on what is
called Linguistic Relativity or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis-- a misnomer
linguists are stuck with, since neither Sapir nor Whorf proposed an
hypothesis. Anyway, the main focus of such work is to assess the extent
to which different languages influence, shape, or in the "strong
version" determine the structure of thought and experience; notably the
way that space and time are represented and understood by speakers in
disparate linguistic groups. Perhaps no research has yet unearthed a
language that makes time-travel possible, as with some of the
science-fiction, but recent empirical work has led to intriguing
findings that make the once discarded hypothesis impossible to simply
dismiss out of hand.
The idea that language shapes thought was an intellectual taboo during much of the latter half of the 20th century in linguistics and analytic philosophy. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and other Universalists dominated the intellectual landscape. For these thinkers, written and spoken languages are seen as different in only trivial ways. All natural languages are manifestations of a Universal and innate language capacity which Fodor called"Mentalese." Mentalese precedes and is the basis for all spoken and written languages on this view. But in the past few decades interesting experimental work has made linguistic relativity quite a bit harder to brush aside. Perhaps the most important researchers have been Stephen Levinson in the 1990s, and more recently Lera Boroditsky. Boroditsky espouses the view that language influences the manner in which we think and the way we understand such basic categories as time and space. She holds to a "weak" version of relativity in which language has considerable influence on us but does not determine our modes of thought and understanding. In her own words: "It is concluded that (1) language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and (2) 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; 2001)
Understanding Time In Different Cultures:
In the 90s, Stephen Levinson studied an Aboriginal Australian language
called Kuuk Thaayore. Subsequently Boroditsky expanded on Levinson's experimental work focusing on speakers' understandings of spatial and temporal relations. Before describing the Kuuk Thaayore, it's important to describe our own ways of making sense of time. According to Levinson and Boroditsky we do so by building up models of time that are based on spatial metaphors . Our (Western) framework for grasping time is based on the metaphor of journeying through space. Wherever "I" (any given speaker) happen to be, the future is understood as that which is in front of me and the past as that which is behind me. We naturally point forward when indicating the future, and when we talk and think about the past it seems intuitively right to say it is "behind" us. If we gesticulate while speaking, we indicate these directions literally. Our sense of temporal orientation depends on this cognitive framework relative to the bodily position of each speaker. But the system gets more complex than that.
Suppose someone tells you that an appointment for next Wednesday has been "moved forward two days?" What day, then, is the new appointment being changed to? Stop and think. What is your answer? Most likely, some readers will say "Friday" and others will say "Monday." This has been shown experimentally. But why this ambiguity? Well, if I consider the term "move forward" as a reference to (my) self or ego journeying forward (a metaphor of course), that is, me moving forward two days from next Wednesday, then I will end up moving 2 days and thus terminate my journey forward "on" Friday (as in the game "Hopscotch"). However, suppose I imagine the appointment itself moving forward by 2 days in my direction. In such a case we picture the appointment, as the saying goes, "approaching me." "I" am static and the event moves forward towards me,as it were. In that case, the appointment moves forward from Wednesday to Tuesday and ends up "on" Monday. Boroditsky claims that the cognitive metaphor of movement through time can be thought of in terms of a) ego movement or b) event movement. If I move into the future, I go forward toward the event in front of me. If the future is "approaching" then I am stationary and it moves toward the front of my body. Those who thought the appointment was changed to Friday in the above example were employing the agentive metaphor of the ego moving forward, while those who chose Monday employed the passive metaphor of being approached by the event (the appointment), much as we sometimes say "the deadline is approaching" or "the holidays are approaching."
It is important to remember that in our own culture and language forward and backward are not absolute or cardinal directions, but relative to the body of each speaker. So whether I face east or west does not matter. What is in front of me (the future) adjusts to my position. If I "look forward to seeing you" the spatial metaphor does not in any way hang on notions like "north" or "east." But things are very different for the Kauuk Thaayore. They represent time, like the apparent movement of the Sun, as moving from the East to the West. If I speak of the future in their language, I will gesture to the West no matter which way my body is facing. The words used to make such future reference are encoded in the memories of native speakers in terms of east and west and 14 other cardinal directions.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardi... The role of cardinal directions is central to the entire language which carries a set of 16 such directions https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... To make sense of which events in my memory happened before or after other ones, I must have the memories stored in such a way that I would be able to know which way I was facing at any given time. These speakers can "dead reckon" or immediately point in any of sixteen absolute directions. When they request that you move they specify not left, right, up or down but southwest or northeast perhaps. All of this is rooted in the profoundly basic mode of cognizing time important for understanding time. Even the word for "hello" is itself inclusive of one's direction of heading... literally. This means that you must know which way you are facing (north, south, east, west etc.) to communicate in this language.
The fact that these people can "dead reckon" like birds that "know" how to fly South or North is a striking empirical finding. In the past scientists supposed accurate dead-reckoning to be biologically impossible for human beings https://en.wikipedia.org/wi.... Apparently, if one's language requires the skill then it can be cultivated. This raises the question, "What other skills and cognitive capacities do different languages engender?" Language, it appears, is not just a window on the world, but a tool for augmenting and refining latent cognitive abilities and skills. But Boroditsky's claim is not that you would have to speak that language to be oriented in terms of absolute space. Rather, we all could be aware of our absolute spatial position without GPS if we practiced this orientation from early childhood because of some social
function that makes it necessary. It would not have to be an ancient Australian language. That is why her relativity is "weak" and not strong. Linguistic constructions influence but do not determine our modes of thought and understanding.
Writing Systems & Time:
When it comes to representing time graphically, the general rule is that the
direction of time follows the direction of the writing system. Indo-European languages usually run from left to right. Studies show that if you lay pictures of a baby, child, teenager, adult, old person down on a table and ask, say, a speaker of English to "put it in the right order" it will be arranged chronologically from left to right, i.e. baby, child, teen, adult and old person in that order. If you ask a speaker of Arabic or Hebrew to put the same pictures in "the right order" that order will be reversed, as those languages go from right to left. I have a print of Hieronymus Bosh's famous triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, on the wall, and have occasionally wondered whether Arabs, for example, would have a more optimistic interpretation of it. Would they tend to see it as "moving" towards a future Garden of Eden rather than Hell? https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... If any one whose first tongue is Arabic or Hebrew is reading this, please let me know! The point is that writing systems also influence our perception of time and direction.
Borodotsky also did research showing that speakers of Mandarin are far
more likely to think of the direction of time as vertical (up= earlier, down = later) due to the frequency of such spatio-temporal metaphors in the language. Like most East Asian languages, Mandarin originally was written and read from top to bottom and started at the upper right side moving down and then left. However, like other East Asian scripts it can be oriented vertically or horizontally, and from left to right or the opposite direction, since the language as written is made up of disconnected syllabic units and/or ideographic units each occupying a block of space. Today it is seldom oriented right to left. So, speakers of Mandarin, when asked, tended to arrange chronological pictures left to right like English speakers . But sometimes they also employed the up to down scheme which was not found in speakers of English. When bilinguals were given items to arrange "in right order" those who learned English at a younger age were less likely to think in terms of vertical patterns, indicating plasticity of cognition resulting from acculturation. Finally, speakers of English who were given exercises that reinforced associations of vertical time patterns had similar results to the bilinguals, even though they only spoke English. That last point is important. It shows that language does not determine the structure of thought, but rather influences it (again, the "weak" linguistic relativity thesis). If we were to practice exercises for orienting ourselves in terms of "up=before down" or the 16 cardinal directions used by the Aborigines, we could, in principle, acquire the same skills they already possess! In short, languages can be seen as a set of tools that alter and/or augment our cognitive capacities, perceptions and interpretations of reality in ways we are only beginning to understand.
___________________________________________________________________
Sources:
-Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations
in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
-Lera Boroditsky, How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think (see here:https://www.edge.org/conver... )
-Lera Boroditsky, Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time; Cognitive Psychology V.43, 1-22 (2001)
https://www.edge.org/conver...
The idea that language shapes thought was an intellectual taboo during much of the latter half of the 20th century in linguistics and analytic philosophy. Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and other Universalists dominated the intellectual landscape. For these thinkers, written and spoken languages are seen as different in only trivial ways. All natural languages are manifestations of a Universal and innate language capacity which Fodor called"Mentalese." Mentalese precedes and is the basis for all spoken and written languages on this view. But in the past few decades interesting experimental work has made linguistic relativity quite a bit harder to brush aside. Perhaps the most important researchers have been Stephen Levinson in the 1990s, and more recently Lera Boroditsky. Boroditsky espouses the view that language influences the manner in which we think and the way we understand such basic categories as time and space. She holds to a "weak" version of relativity in which language has considerable influence on us but does not determine our modes of thought and understanding. In her own words: "It is concluded that (1) language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and (2) 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; 2001)
Understanding Time In Different Cultures:
In the 90s, Stephen Levinson studied an Aboriginal Australian language
called Kuuk Thaayore. Subsequently Boroditsky expanded on Levinson's experimental work focusing on speakers' understandings of spatial and temporal relations. Before describing the Kuuk Thaayore, it's important to describe our own ways of making sense of time. According to Levinson and Boroditsky we do so by building up models of time that are based on spatial metaphors . Our (Western) framework for grasping time is based on the metaphor of journeying through space. Wherever "I" (any given speaker) happen to be, the future is understood as that which is in front of me and the past as that which is behind me. We naturally point forward when indicating the future, and when we talk and think about the past it seems intuitively right to say it is "behind" us. If we gesticulate while speaking, we indicate these directions literally. Our sense of temporal orientation depends on this cognitive framework relative to the bodily position of each speaker. But the system gets more complex than that.
Suppose someone tells you that an appointment for next Wednesday has been "moved forward two days?" What day, then, is the new appointment being changed to? Stop and think. What is your answer? Most likely, some readers will say "Friday" and others will say "Monday." This has been shown experimentally. But why this ambiguity? Well, if I consider the term "move forward" as a reference to (my) self or ego journeying forward (a metaphor of course), that is, me moving forward two days from next Wednesday, then I will end up moving 2 days and thus terminate my journey forward "on" Friday (as in the game "Hopscotch"). However, suppose I imagine the appointment itself moving forward by 2 days in my direction. In such a case we picture the appointment, as the saying goes, "approaching me." "I" am static and the event moves forward towards me,as it were. In that case, the appointment moves forward from Wednesday to Tuesday and ends up "on" Monday. Boroditsky claims that the cognitive metaphor of movement through time can be thought of in terms of a) ego movement or b) event movement. If I move into the future, I go forward toward the event in front of me. If the future is "approaching" then I am stationary and it moves toward the front of my body. Those who thought the appointment was changed to Friday in the above example were employing the agentive metaphor of the ego moving forward, while those who chose Monday employed the passive metaphor of being approached by the event (the appointment), much as we sometimes say "the deadline is approaching" or "the holidays are approaching."
It is important to remember that in our own culture and language forward and backward are not absolute or cardinal directions, but relative to the body of each speaker. So whether I face east or west does not matter. What is in front of me (the future) adjusts to my position. If I "look forward to seeing you" the spatial metaphor does not in any way hang on notions like "north" or "east." But things are very different for the Kauuk Thaayore. They represent time, like the apparent movement of the Sun, as moving from the East to the West. If I speak of the future in their language, I will gesture to the West no matter which way my body is facing. The words used to make such future reference are encoded in the memories of native speakers in terms of east and west and 14 other cardinal directions.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardi... The role of cardinal directions is central to the entire language which carries a set of 16 such directions https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... To make sense of which events in my memory happened before or after other ones, I must have the memories stored in such a way that I would be able to know which way I was facing at any given time. These speakers can "dead reckon" or immediately point in any of sixteen absolute directions. When they request that you move they specify not left, right, up or down but southwest or northeast perhaps. All of this is rooted in the profoundly basic mode of cognizing time important for understanding time. Even the word for "hello" is itself inclusive of one's direction of heading... literally. This means that you must know which way you are facing (north, south, east, west etc.) to communicate in this language.
The fact that these people can "dead reckon" like birds that "know" how to fly South or North is a striking empirical finding. In the past scientists supposed accurate dead-reckoning to be biologically impossible for human beings https://en.wikipedia.org/wi.... Apparently, if one's language requires the skill then it can be cultivated. This raises the question, "What other skills and cognitive capacities do different languages engender?" Language, it appears, is not just a window on the world, but a tool for augmenting and refining latent cognitive abilities and skills. But Boroditsky's claim is not that you would have to speak that language to be oriented in terms of absolute space. Rather, we all could be aware of our absolute spatial position without GPS if we practiced this orientation from early childhood because of some social
function that makes it necessary. It would not have to be an ancient Australian language. That is why her relativity is "weak" and not strong. Linguistic constructions influence but do not determine our modes of thought and understanding.
Writing Systems & Time:
When it comes to representing time graphically, the general rule is that the
direction of time follows the direction of the writing system. Indo-European languages usually run from left to right. Studies show that if you lay pictures of a baby, child, teenager, adult, old person down on a table and ask, say, a speaker of English to "put it in the right order" it will be arranged chronologically from left to right, i.e. baby, child, teen, adult and old person in that order. If you ask a speaker of Arabic or Hebrew to put the same pictures in "the right order" that order will be reversed, as those languages go from right to left. I have a print of Hieronymus Bosh's famous triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, on the wall, and have occasionally wondered whether Arabs, for example, would have a more optimistic interpretation of it. Would they tend to see it as "moving" towards a future Garden of Eden rather than Hell? https://en.wikipedia.org/wi... If any one whose first tongue is Arabic or Hebrew is reading this, please let me know! The point is that writing systems also influence our perception of time and direction.
Borodotsky also did research showing that speakers of Mandarin are far
more likely to think of the direction of time as vertical (up= earlier, down = later) due to the frequency of such spatio-temporal metaphors in the language. Like most East Asian languages, Mandarin originally was written and read from top to bottom and started at the upper right side moving down and then left. However, like other East Asian scripts it can be oriented vertically or horizontally, and from left to right or the opposite direction, since the language as written is made up of disconnected syllabic units and/or ideographic units each occupying a block of space. Today it is seldom oriented right to left. So, speakers of Mandarin, when asked, tended to arrange chronological pictures left to right like English speakers . But sometimes they also employed the up to down scheme which was not found in speakers of English. When bilinguals were given items to arrange "in right order" those who learned English at a younger age were less likely to think in terms of vertical patterns, indicating plasticity of cognition resulting from acculturation. Finally, speakers of English who were given exercises that reinforced associations of vertical time patterns had similar results to the bilinguals, even though they only spoke English. That last point is important. It shows that language does not determine the structure of thought, but rather influences it (again, the "weak" linguistic relativity thesis). If we were to practice exercises for orienting ourselves in terms of "up=before down" or the 16 cardinal directions used by the Aborigines, we could, in principle, acquire the same skills they already possess! In short, languages can be seen as a set of tools that alter and/or augment our cognitive capacities, perceptions and interpretations of reality in ways we are only beginning to understand.
___________________________________________________________________
Sources:
-Stephen C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations
in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
-Lera Boroditsky, How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think (see here:https://www.edge.org/conver... )
-Lera Boroditsky, Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers' Conceptions of Time; Cognitive Psychology V.43, 1-22 (2001)
https://www.edge.org/conver...
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