Abstract
Linguistic cues may be considered a potent tool for focusing attention on causes or effects. In this paper, we explore how different cues affect causal assignments in German and Tongan. From a larger screening study, two parts are reported here: Part 1 dealt with syntactic variations, including word order (agent vs. patient in first/subject position) and case marking (e.g., as ergative vs. non-ergative in Tongan) depending on verb type (transitive vs. intransitive). For two physical settings (wood floating on water and a man breaking a glass), participants assigned causality to the two entities involved. In the floating setting, speakers of the two languages were sensitive to syntactic variations, but differed in the entity regarded as causative. In the breaking setting, the human agent was uniformly regarded as causative. Part 2 dealt with implicit verb causality. Participants assigned causality to subject or object of 16 verbs presented in minimal social scenarios. In German, all verbs showed a subject (agent) focus; in Tongan, the focus depended on the verb; and for nine verbs, the focus differed across languages. In conclusion, we discuss the question of domain-specificity of causal cognition, the role of the ergative as causal marker, and more general differences between languages.
Highlights
Physical situations look the same all over the world
The prime objective of the study reported here was to explore whether and how language per se may affect causal cognition in the physical domain, and how differences between languages may come to bear on these effects
Despite the exploratory nature of the screening, the findings presented here still point toward intra- and crosslinguistic effects on causal assignments that are both interesting and important
Summary
Physical situations look the same all over the world. They follow invariable laws of nature and appear to be open to direct inspection, irrespective of the culture or language of a potential observer. The second group of factors is restricted to specific settings, but is still pervasive, namely the causal theories of folk science (Keil, 2003; Lawson, 2006), including such popular misconceptions as the impetus concept in motion (McCloskey, 1983; Hubbard and Favretto, 2003), or the valve model of how a thermostat functions (Kempton, 1986) They are responsible for content effects detected, for example, with different content versions of otherwise identical tasks (Cummins, 1995; Beller and Spada, 2003; Beller and Kuhnmünch, 2007; Klauer et al, 2010; and see Le Guen et al, 2015). Conveying this focus involves language, at least as a medium, and its effectiveness testifies, rather non-controversially, to an impact of language on causal representations
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