Translation as Different: A View from Linguistic Relativity

Reviewed by: Evidence for linguistic relativity ed. by Susanne Niemeier, René Dirven Zdenek Salzmann Evidence for linguistic relativity. Ed. by Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven. (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV, Current issues in linguistic theory 198.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. xxi, 240. Most of the ten contributions to this volume were originally presented at the 26th International LAUD Symposium entitled ‘Humboldt and Whorf revisited’ (1–5 April, 1998, Gerhard Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany). Proceedings of the meeting have appeared in two volumes; the fifteen contributors to this volume (including the two editors) come from ten countries on four continents. The volume is divided into two parts: Part 1 contains papers dealing with evidence from language structure; Part 2 has papers that draw on data from cognition, discourse, and culture. In his introduction (ix–xxi), John A. Lucy characterizes linguistic relativity and discusses its empirical evaluations. Before commenting on the papers of the volume, he mentions three types of empirical studies of linguistic relativity—approaches that are structure-oriented, domain-oriented, and behavior-oriented. To sample the contents of Part 1: In one of the papers Jan Schroten studies semantic structure and its relation to the conceptual structure of body-part nouns in English, Spanish, and Dutch. According to him, it is necessary to understand how the semantic structure is organized before one attempts to study the relationship between language and thought. Gábor Györi views the cognitive function of language as also serving ‘to provide the speakers with relatively stable, ready-made categories that reflect the environment the language users live in’ (76). Then by studying semantic change, we learn not only ‘how cognition influences what categories will be created in language, . . . [but also] how the linguistically established categories influence our view of the world’ (77). In Part 2, Dan I. Slobin in ‘Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism’ (107–38) gives an example of how languages shape their speakers’ way of thinking. He examines the event of human motion and explores differences in ‘thinking for speaking’ between ‘verb-framed’ languages like French and ‘satellite-framed’ languages like English (this typology originated with Leonard Talmy in 1985). Balthasar Bickel offers evidence from his fieldwork among a Tibeto-Burman people, the Belhare, that cultural forms of social practices (e.g. locating things or persons) show affinity to linguistic patterns. And in ‘ “S’engager” vs. “to show restraint”: Linguistic and cultural relativity in discourse management’ (193–222), Bert Peeters contrasts communicative norms of French and English speakers. The French ideal is one of engagement in order to defend individual expression; the Anglo-Saxon ideal is to avoid the risk of venturing an erroneous opinion and getting drawn into other people’s business. Ultimately, Peeters’s thesis is that ‘selected aspects of language... because of linguistic relativity, generate cultural relativity, which itself generates linguistic diversity’ (217). Papers in this volume will prove to be of interest because they suggest new ways of approaching the issue of linguistic relativity. Zdenek Salzmann Northern Arizona University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America

Every language is assumed to be unique, structurally and culturally. Taking this neo-Bloomfieldian assumption at the outset, this paper first points out the inadequacy of sentence grammars for foreign language teaching. Toward this end, the paper further argues for the necessity of understanding linguistic and cultural relativity. Linguistic relativity, or better known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, suggests that the way we perceive and categorize reality is partly determined by the language we speak; and cultural relativity implies that verbalization of concepts in a particular language is often culturally conditioned. As related to the field of foreign language teaching, relativity across languages and cultures presupposes contrastive analysis in a very broad senses. Thus, pointing out differences in language structures and cultural conventions should lead students to better acquisition of linguistic and cultural sensitivity.

The purpose of the article is to reveal the views of E. Sapir and B. L. Whorf on the relationship between language, thinking and reality (experience), to briefly analyze some interpretations belonging to the critics of the Sapir — Whorf hypothesis, to identify those statements of Sapir and Whorf that have retained their value for linguistics at the beginning of the XXI century. The object of study is the phenomenon traditionally called the “Sapir — Whorf hypothesis”. The subject of the study is the views of Sаpir and Whorf on the relationship between language, thinking and reality (experience), as well as their interpretation in the studies of critics of these views, which did not always reflect the true views of Sаpir and Whorf. The result of the study is to identify the essence of the statements of the critics of the Sapir — Whorf hypothesis, who put forward “strong” and “weak” versions of this “hypothesis”, and to clarify the achievements of Sаpir and Whorf. The authors of the article emphasize that Whorf viewed linguistic relativity not as a hypothesis but as a principle. While hypotheses need to be proved to turn them into theories, principles do not. The principle of linguistic relativity has a long tradition. Plato, Aristotle, F. Bacon, J. Locke, J. G. Hamann, J. G. Herder, W. von Humboldt, O. O. Potebnia, and J. Baudouin de Courtenay have already spoken about the influence of language on thinking. The article uses the actualist method, which involves, on the one hand, a historical view of the problem under consideration, and, on the other hand, the use of such techniques and procedures as source analysis (linguistic texts) and synthesis of the data obtained, comparison, abstraction and logical historical and scientific reconstruction. Conclusions: Sapir and Whorf’s undoubted merit to science was their pioneering study of a number of cognitive processes. This gave a powerful impetus to the development of cognitive linguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguocultural studies, and linguistic conceptology. Linguistic relativity is a modern research paradigm.

This paper explores the significant - albeit little-known - impact that physicist Albert Einstein's theory of relativity had on the development of the science of linguistics. Both Max Talmey, a physician who played a key role in the development of early twentieth-century constructed-language movements, and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who is closely associated with the notion of 'linguistic relativity', drew on their understanding of relativity to develop their ideas (and, in Talmey's case, also on his personal relationship with Einstein). Linguistic relativity, which posits that humans' linguistic categories shape their perceptions of nature, has often been tied to 'relativism' in the social sciences and humanities. In contrast, Talmey's commitment to reformulating the language of Einsteinian relativity - especially through a constructed language he built in the 1920s and 1930s - emphasized the significance of 'invariance' simultaneously in the scientific doctrine and in the language in which it was discussed. The semiotic flexibility of Einstein's 'relativity theory' as it was widely (and wildly) appropriated outside the small community of theoretical physicists enabled the two opposing moves, while obscuring the historical linkage between physics and linguistics for both.

In this article is presented and is explored some of the fundamental ideas related to the so-called linguistic (or deterministic) relativism. Linguistic relativism is represented in the contemporary era by the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. This states that there is a systematic connection between the grammatical categories of a language and the way its speakers conceive, categorize or interpret the world. What this connection may consist of and to what extent it takes place is, obviously, a matter of controversy. In addition to presenting some ideas in favor and others against this hypothesis, I will argue, in the conclusion of this article, that it is necessary to take into account not only the empirical-linguistic aspect, but also the ontologicalphilosophical one of this hypothesis for a better understanding of this problem.

Linguistics and anthropology have much in common in terms of research category and methodology. Whereas the “emic/etic” approach in linguistics distinguishes between the social/psychological qualities of the sound system of a specific language and the physical/ physiological qualities of supra-language sounds, the “emic/etic” approach in anthropology attempts to make a distinction between the “inside” view and the “outside” view of culture. Both approaches involve a set of dualistic relationships between linguistic and cultural relativity and linguistic and cultural universality, as well as between linguistic/ cultural diversity and genetic diversity. Due to validation difficulties, “linguistic relativity” has received a cold welcome in the field of linguistics. However, “cultural relativity” now constitutes the core of modern anthropology. The inherent links and near identity of functions between linguistic/cultural diversity and biological diversity render possible methodological exchanges across the disciplines.

There are a lot of difficulties deriving from the diversity of cultures, history, languages, when people from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds come into contact and communicate with each-other. This idea led to the theory of linguistic relativity, which was inspired by Edward Sapir’s hypothesis. It gives priority to the necessity of understanding linguistic and cultural relativity. Linguists claim that English speakers think about the world in different ways from Albanian ones. Albanian language is spoken by a small population and its lexicon is rather smaller than that of the English language, and for this reason, during the translation process lexical or semantic equivalents are often unavailable. This paper contrastively analyses the English and Albanian languages in terms of linguistic relativity in derived words by means of prefixation in English and Albanian language.The paper treats problems that occur during translation process in the words formed by means of prefixation. We will consider the locative prefixes, the negative prefixes, the prefixes of attitude, reservative prefixes, pejorative prefixes, prefixes of size, degree and status, prefixes of time and order, prefix of repetition, as Quirk classifies them semantically. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n1p205

Despite the achievements of large-scale multimodal pre-training approaches, cross-modal retrieval, e.g., image-text retrieval, remains a challenging task. To bridge the semantic gap between the two modalities, previous studies mainly focus on word-region alignment at the object level, lacking the matching between the linguistic relation among the words and the visual relation among the regions. The neglect of such relation consistency impairs the contextualized representation of image-text pairs and hinders the model performance and the interpretability. In this paper, we first propose a novel metric, Intra-modal Self-attention Distance (ISD), to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. In response, we present Inter-modal Alignment on Intra-modal Self-attentions (IAIS), a regularized training method to optimize the ISD and calibrate intra-modal self-attentions from the two modalities mutually via inter-modal alignment. The IAIS regularizer boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin, which demonstrates the superiority of our approach.

What's special about the way language influences thought? In some cases, the answer may be: nothing at all. Language influences nonlinguistic cognition via numerous mechanisms. Other forms of experience can also influence our thinking via some of the same mechanisms. This article illustrates how separable streams of linguistic, cultural, and bodily experience can influence the way people think, feel, and make decisions by strengthening some implicit associations in long‐term memory while weakening others. As a result, people with different experiences think differently, in predictable ways. Distinct kinds of physical and social experiences can shape our minds via similar processes, suggesting continuity between different facets of experiential relativity: linguistic relativity, cultural relativity, and bodily relativity.

Ch. 3 Immediate and not so Immediate Sources of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis': Methodological considerations

SummaryA scholarly consensus traces the roots of the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’ to German language theory of the late 18th to early 19th century, which connects the ‘inner form’ of a language with the potential for cultural achievement of the nation that speaks it. This paper attempts to complexify that genealogy by exploring more immediate sources of the idea that one’s native language determines individual and cultural patterns of thought. In the version of this idea held by Herder and Humboldt, called here the ‘magic key’ view, language is seen as embodying the national mind and unfolding in line with the Romantic (Hegelian) theory of history. But there is another version, here dubbed ‘metaphysical garbage’, which envisions language developing within an evolutionary view of history and introducing obstacles to logical thought. This view was a commonplace of Cambridge analytical philosophy (Whitehead & Russell) and Viennese logical positivism (Carnap). A key Cambridge-Vienna link was C. K. Ogden, whose series included books by the leaders of both groups, and whose own bookThe Meaning of Meaning(with I. A. Richards, 1923) – the subtitle of which beginsThe influence of language on thought – synthesizes many of their positions. Sapir’s positive review of this book marks a turning point from his view of language as a cultural product (as inLanguage, 1921) to a sort of template around which the rest of culture is structured, as in his “The Status of Linguistics as a Science” (1929). This paper, like others of Sapir’s writings from 1923 on, takes up the rhetoric of metaphysical garbage almost exclusively. Whorf, drawn by Sapir to structuralism from originally mystical interests in language, likewise takes up the ‘garbage’ line, interweaving it with ‘magic key’ only in the two years between Sapir’s death and his own. Other influences on Whorf s views are examined, including Korzybski’s General Semantics, to which he has intriguing connections.

Beginning with the anthropological linguistic tradition associated primarily with the names of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir and their students and concluding with the work of Noam Chomsky and William Labov at the end of the century. This book offers a comprehensive account of essential periods and areas of research in the history of American Linguistics and also addresses contemporary debates and issues within linguistics.Topics covered include: * The sources of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' * Leonard Bloomfield and the Cours de linguistique générale * The 'Chomskyan Revolution' and its Historiography * The Origins of Morphophonemics in American Linguistics *William Labov and the Origins of Sociolinguistics in America.Toward a History of American Linguistics will be invaluable reading for academics and advanced students within the fields of linguistics and the history of linguistics.

For many years, a common assumption in linguistics has been that the anthology of Whorf's papers (1956) espouses a distinct 'hypothesis' - the language system determines the manner in which its speakers understand reality. This goes under the names of 'linguistic determinism' or the 'Whorfian hypothesis'. As confirmation of this espousal, many stylisticians and critical linguists cite a famous paragraph in the paper 'Science and Linguistics' (SL). The `hypothesis', however, is actually a misconstrual of Whorf's writings. An exploration of his papers, as Ellis (1993) points out, shows that there is no mention of a 'hypothesis' or any overall suggestion of such a strong deterministic relationship between linguistic systems and thought. I offer an explanation as to why many stylisticians and critical linguists confirm the misleading 'hypothesis' as Whorf's position, and because I am particularly interested in misreading of Whorf by such linguists my main focus is SL rather than any of his other papers. The reasons I provide are connected with the pervasiveness of objectivist background assumptions of the nature of language and thought and with how in stylistics and critical linguistics it has been overlooked that SL is intended for an educated lay-audience. I then examine the famous paragraph without the distraction of the 'hypothesis'. I show that, for Whorf, when we talk we affirm common conceptualizations extant in the culture rather than conceptualization being determined by the language system itself. Finally, I indicate some implications of this reading of Whorf for stylistics and critical linguistics.

634LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction. By Penny Lee. (Studies in the history of the language sciences, 81.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. xix, 373. Reviewed by John E. Joseph, University of Edinburgh When the balance sheet is drawn on American linguistics of the twentieth century, there may be some dispute about who was its greatest figure but not about its most intriguing. That distinction belongs to Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), who is also in the running for most controversial —and most influential, particularly when one looks beyond linguistics to the impact on other fields of study and on general culture.1 Yet our knowledge of him has been limited, for several reasons. Those closest to him, fearing that his brilliance might be overshadowed by his unconventionality, have been selective about which aspects of his thought would be put on public display. Whorf's diaries and many other papers were withheld from the materials donated to the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Yale University Library, and only now, following the death of Whorf's widow in July 1997, is there some possibility of them becoming available to scholars. Even the bulk of the material heretofore open to public view has gone unpublished—surprisingly, seeing how well the 1956 collection of papers has sold and continues to sell. As a result his influence has tended to proceed from severe reductions of his thought, on the lines of the definition of 'Whorfian hypothesis' given in the New shorter Oxford English dictionary (1993): 'the theory that one's perception of the world is determined by the structure of one's native language'. His centenary has coincided with a spate of renewed interest in his work, and at long last the first serious attempt has been made to move beyond the handful of his well-known papers to reconstruct his system ofideas in its totality. Penny Lee's book, however, is more than an exercise in archaeology. Her critical reconstruction of the Whorf theory complex is accompanied at every step by a réévaluation of work done explicitly or implicitly in a neo-Whorfian vein through the 1990's. Besides contributing a much fuller sense of what Whorf was about, the book establishes the existence of a vivid Whorfian research paradigm of decades' standing, with more strands and more coherence than even those involved in it might suspect. L begins with an introductory chapter outlining Whorf's life and work from 1924 until his premature death from cancer, tracing how his work would subsequently be 'misread, unread, and superficially treated' (14) and giving an overview ofthe theory complex which it is impossible to summarize further without repeating past reductionism. I shall therefore limit myself to one important point. L emphasizes that Whorf's theorizing is 'only by extension about language in general . . . and thought in general'; rather, it is aimed at the intersection of the two, 'linguistic thinking' (30). Whorf considered that socially generated and sustained patterns of language use become physically entrenched in cognition and in doing so condition physiological (including neurological) structures, processes, or associated energy fields and bring about adjustments to the overall patterning of mental behavior. He did not claim that all conceptual activity is linguistic in origin or character nor did he claim that the sole function of language is to facilitate conceptual activity. He did, however, claim that it is the species specific ability to talk that characterizes what is distinctive about human cognition. (30-31) The idea that patterns of language use condition neurological structures foreshadows connectionism by half a century, as L discusses at length, just as human cognition being distinguished by species-specific language ability foreshadows the opposite cognitivist trend. While the lines connecting Whorf to contemporary work like that of Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1989-92), Lucy (1992, on which see Lee 1994) and the contributors to Gumperz and Levinson (1996) are obvious enough, nothing in the book is more surprising than the links drawn to Chomsky, especially with regard to Whorf's notions of 'cryptotypes' (a link already noted by Ogle 1973, as L points 1 See for example Joseph (1995: 380n.) on the...

We report a cross-cultural study of colour grouping carried out as a test of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity theory). Speakers of English, Russian and Setswana-languages that differ in their number of basic colour terms, and in how the blue-green region is categorized--were compared on a colour sorting task. Informants sorted a representative set of 65 colours into groups so that members of the groups looked similar to each other, with no restriction on the number of groups formed. If linguistic relativity theory is true, then there should be reliable differences between the three samples in the composition of the groups they formed associated with the differing positions of colour category boundaries in the languages. The most striking feature of the results, inconsistent with linguistic relativity theory, was the similarity amongst the patterns of choice of the three samples. However, there were also significant differences amongst the samples. Setswana speakers (who have a single basic term for BLUE or GREEN) were more likely to group BLUE colours with GREEN colours than either English or Russian speakers. But Russian speakers (who have two basic colour terms for BLUE) were no more likely than English speakers to group light and dark BLUE separately. In addition there were general structural differences in grouping among the samples: they differed in the level of consensus in grouping, the number of groups formed and in the distribution of the number of colours placed in a group. These structural differences may reflect differences in the availability and salience of the colour categories across the languages. Our data support perceptual universalism modulated by weaker linguistic effects.