The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (1940)

The hypothesis makes the claim that the structure of the language one habitually uses influences the manner in which one thinks and behaves. E.g. English speakers conceive of time as a linear, objective sequence of events encoded in a system of past, present, and future tenses, or a discrete number of days as encoded in cardinal numerals. The English language binds English speaker to a Newtonian view of objectified time, neatly bounded and classifiable, ideal for record-keeping, time-saving, clock-punching, but is incapable of expressing time as a cyclic, unitary whole. The Hopi conceive of it as intensity and duration in the analysis and reporting of experience (They stayed 10 days= They stayed until the 11th day/ left after the 10th day). The Hopi language does not regard time as measurable length, but as relation between two events in lateness.

Despite the general translatability from one language to another, there will always be an incommensurable residue of untranslatable culture associated with the linguistic structures of any given language.

Modern scholars prove that understanding across languages does not depend on structural equivalences but on common conceptual systems, born from the larger context of our experiences.

 

Summary

1. There is nowadays a recognition that language, as code, reflects cultural preoccupations and constrains the way people think.

2. We recognize how important context is in complementing the meanings encoded in the language.

 

Meaning as sign

Language can mean in two fundamental ways, both of which are intimately linked to culture: through what it says or what it refers to as an encoded sign (semantics), and through what it does as an action in context (pragmatics).

The linguistic sign

The crucial feature that distinguishes humans from animals is humans’ capacity to create signs that mediate between them and their environment. Every meaning-making practice makes use of two elements: a signifier and a signified. Thus, for example, the sound [rouz] or the four letters of the word “rose” are signifiers for a concept related to an object in the real world with a thorny stem and many petals. The signifier (sound or word) in itself is not a sign unless someone recognizes it as such and relates it to a signified (concept); for example, for someone who does not know English, the sound signifies nothing because it is not a sign, but only a meaningless sound. A sign is therefore neither the word itself nor the object it refers to but the relation between the two.

There is nothing necessary about the relation between a given word as a linguistic signifier and a signified object. The word “rose” can be related to flowers of various shapes, consistencies, colours and smells, it can also refer to a colour, or to a smell. Conversely, the object “rose” can be given meaning by a variety of signifiers: Morning Glory, Madame Meillon, flower, die Rose, une rose. Because there is nothing inherent in the nature of a rose that makes the four letters of itσ English signifier more plausible than the five letters of the Greek word ροδον, the linguistic sign has been called arbitrary. Furthermore, because there is no one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified, the dualism of the linguistic sign has been called asymmetrical.

The meanings of signs

The words are the referents of objects. Their meaning that can be looked up in the dictionary is denotative. On the other hand, the meaning of the word is linked to the many associations they evoke in the minds (rose – love, passion, beauty). These are connotations. The meaning can be also iconic. An iconic meaning of words based on resemblance of words to reality, e.g. onomatopoeia. It is the image of the object signified. Exclamations like “Whoops!”, “Wow!”, “Whack!” don’t so much refer to the emotions or actions as they imitate them (onomatopoeia).

Cultural encodings

Code is a formal system of communication. The experience can be encoded differently by different discourse communities. For example, table, Tisch, mesa denote the same object by reference to a piece of furniture, but whereas the English sign “table” denotes all tables, Polish encodes dining tables as stol, coffee tables or telephone tables as stolik. British English encodes anything south of the diaphragm as “stomach”, whereas in American English a “stomachache” denotes something different from a “bellyache”. Similarly, Bavarian German encodes the whole leg from the hip to the toes through one sign, das Bein, whereas English needs at least three words “hip”, “leg”, or “foot”. Cultural encodings can change over time in the same language. For example, German that used to encode a state of happiness as glűcklich, now encodes deep happiness as glűcklich, superficial happiness as happy.

E.g. stone falls.

The encoding of experience differs also in the nature of the cultural associations evoked by different linguistic signs. For example, although the words “soul” and “mind” are usually seen as the English equivalents of the Russian word “душа”, each of these signs is differently associated with their respective objects. For a Russian, “душа” is used more frequently than “soul” and “mind” in English. And through its associations with religion, goodness, and the mystical essence of things it connotes quite a different concept than the English.

Душа –

· бессмертное духовное существо, одаренное разумом и волею (человек с духом и телом – ни души нет дома; у него сто душ крестьян; прописные души – пропущенные в народной переписи; мертвые души – умершие в промежуток между двумя переписями, но числящиеся по уплате податей / человек бестелесный по смерти своей – отдать богу душу; положить душу – жизнь, заложить за к-л душу – ручаться; на душе легко/тяжело; отпусти душу на покаяние – не губи напрасно, дай пожить; в чем душа держится)

· душевные и духовные качества человека, совесть, внутреннее чувство – человек с слабою душой; взять на душу; в его сочинениях много души; быть душой компании; душа-человек; душа не на месте – тревожиться; отвести душу – утешиться; жить душа в душу; у меня дело это на душе лежит – забота не дает покоя; это на твоей душе – совести; покривить душой – поступить против совести; затаить в душе – держать в тайне; душа замирает – лишаюсь чувств; на душу мутит, с души тянет – делается дурно; душа не принимает этого; душа меру знает; рад душой, от души – искренне; души не чаять; по душе; лезть в душу; за душой ничего нет; плоть душе ворог; грешное тело и душу съело; свет в храме от свечи, а в душе от молитвы; муж голова, жена душа; покуда душа жива; хоть шуба овечья, да душа человечья; хоть мошна пуста, да душа чиста; стоять над душой; душа божья, голова царская, спина барская; своя душа не холоп; у немца ножки тоненьки, душа коротенька; душа пузыри пускает – отрыгивается; в чужую душу не влезешь; чужая душа потемки; человек видим, а душа нет; сколько душе угодно; душа не принимает, а глаза все больше просят; душу вынуть.

· ямочка на шее над грудною костью

· душечка, душевный, душить, душистый, душник, душный, душевредный, душепагубный, душегуб, душеприказчик.

Anna Wierzbicka Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Are emotions universal or culture-specific? According to Izard and Buechler (1980) the fundamental emotions are 1) interest, 2) joy, 3) surprise, 4) sadness, 5) anger, 6) disgust, 7) contempt, 8) fear, 9) shame/shyness and 10) guilt. These emotions are identified by means of English words. Polish does not have a word corresponding exactly to “disgust”. An Australian Aboriginal language, Gidjingali, does not lexically distinguish “fear” from “shame”, they have one lexical item.

Studies of the semantic networks of bilingual speakers make these associations visible. For example, bilingual speakers of English and Spanish have been shown to activate different associations within one of their languages and across their two languages. In English they would associate “house” with “window”, and “boy” with “girl”, but in Spanish they may associate casa with madre, and muchacho with hombre. But even within the same speech community, signs might have different semantic values for people from different discourse communities. Anglophone readers of Dickinson’s poem who happen to not to be members of her special discourse community, might not know the denotational meaning of the word “Attar”, nor associate “rosemary” with the dead. Nor might be iconic aspects of the poem be evident to them (“s”). Even though they may be native speakers of English, their cultural literacy is different from that of Emily Dickinson’s intended readers.

Words can also serve as culturally informed icons for the concepts, objects, or person they signify. For example, English speakers may intensify denotative meanings by iconically elongating the vowel of a word: “It’s beau::::::::tiful!” In French intensification of the sound is often done not through elongation of the vowel but through rapid reiteration of the same form:”Vite vite vite vite vite! (quick)”. These different prosodic encodings form distinct way of speaking viewed as typically English or French. Similarly, onomatopoeia links objects and sounds in seemingly inevitable ways for members of a given culture. For example, the English sounds “bash”, “mash”, “smash”, “crash”, “dash”, “lash”, “clash”, “trash”, “splash”, “flash” are for English speakers icons for sudden violent movement or action. A speaker of another language might not hear in the sound [æʃ] any such icon at all. Think of the sounds the animals produce.

It is important to mention that the differences noted above among the different languages are not only differences in the code itself, but in the semantic meanings attributed to these different encodings by language-using communities. It is these meanings that make the linguistic sign into a cultural sign.

 

Semantic cohesion

As a sign, a word also relates to other words or signs that give it a particular value in the verbal text itself or co - text. Beyond individual nouns and sounds, words refer to other words by a variety of cohesive devices that hold the text (pronouns, demonstratives, repetition of the same words from one sentence to the next, or same sounds, recurrence of words that relate to the same idea, conjunctions. These devices capitalize on the associative meanings or shared connotations of a particular community of competent readers who readily recognize the referent. Semantic cohesion depends on a discourse community’s communal associations.

A sign or a word may also relate to the other words or instances of text and talk that have accumulated in a community’s memory over time, or prior text. Russian word dusha denotes “a person’s inner core”, it connotes goodness and truth because it is linked to other utterances spoken and heard in daily life, to literary quotes (e/g/ from Dostoyevsky “His soul overflowing with rapture, he yearned for freedom, space, openness”), or to other verbal concepts such as pricelessness, human will, inner speech, knowledge, feeling, thoughts, religion, that themselves have a variety of connotations. When English speakers translate the word dusha by the word soul, they are linking it to other English words (“disembodied spirit”, “immortal self”, “emotions”), that approximate but don’t quite match the semantic cohesion established for the word in the Russian culture. The meanings of words cannot be separated from other with which they have come to be associated in the discourse community’s semantic pool.

Another linguistic environment within which words carry cultural semantic meaning consists of the linguistic metaphors that have accumulated over time in a community’s store of semantic knowledge. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Metaphors we Live By: Culture is encoded not only in the semantic structures of a language, but also in its idiomatic expressions that both reflect and direct the way we think. Different languages predispose their speakers to view reality in different ways through the different metaphors they use. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature. Let us start with the concept ARGUMENT and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR.

Your claims are indefensible.

He attacked every weak point in my argument.

His criticism was right on the target.

I demolished his argument.

I’ve never won an argument with him.

You disagree? OK, shoot!

If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out!

He shot down all of my arguments!

We don’t just talk about argument in terms of war. We see the person we are arguing with as opponent. It is a verbal battle. It structures the actions we perform.

Some of these metaphors are inscribed in the very structure of the English code, for example, the metaphor of the visual field as container. This metaphor delineates what is inside it, outside it, comes into it (“The ship is coming into view”, “I have him in sight”, “He is out of sight now”.