Does Language Influence Culture?

Does Language Influence Culture? - Printable Version

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Does Language Influence Culture? - nest0r - 2010-09-18

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html

"... In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.

In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events (for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well... "

Does Language Influence Culture? - pm215 - 2010-09-18

Language Log's Mark Liberman had a good discussion of this article and one of the papers underlying it:

languagelog Wrote:the best advice that anyone can give you is to ignore the conclusions until you're sure you have a good grasp of the facts

and the facts are not in this case really strong enough to support some of the assertions in the WSJ. For instance, prior exposure to 24 sentences of a particular grammatical form was enough to have an effect twice as large as the English-vs-Spanish-speaker difference.
Rather than saying that "languages shape how we understand causality", Liberman suggests that

Quote:as Lane Greene aptly put it, "language nudges thought (in certain circumstances)".

is probably a better way of thinking about what this research is telling us.

Does Language Influence Culture? - Ryuujin27 - 2010-09-18

I've always thought the opposite. Culture influences language. Culture more than likely formed before any kind of language came about to describe it. Plus, if you want to take a more literal view, you can often see how people butcher a foreign language by using their own cultural preconceptions to construct sentences.

Does Language Influence Culture? - nest0r - 2010-09-18

pm215 Wrote:Language Log's Mark Liberman had a good discussion of this article and one of the papers underlying it:

languagelog Wrote:the best advice that anyone can give you is to ignore the conclusions until you're sure you have a good grasp of the facts
and the facts are not in this case really strong enough to support some of the assertions in the WSJ. For instance, prior exposure to 24 sentences of a particular grammatical form was enough to have an effect twice as large as the English-vs-Spanish-speaker difference.
Rather than saying that "languages shape how we understand causality", Liberman suggests that

Quote:as Lane Greene aptly put it, "language nudges thought (in certain circumstances)".
is probably a better way of thinking about what this research is telling us.

I think that's more like moot advice I was confident anyone reading already thought of and employed themselves: "As I suggested in my earlier post, if you're interested in these questions, you really should read the original papers where the experiments are documented. The body of research done by Boroditsky and her collaborators is extensive, careful, and interesting, and reprints are available on her excellent web site. But when you read these papers, as I suggested at the beginning of this post, you should ignore the conclusions until you're confident that you understand the facts."

My hackles rose at mention of LL till I noticed it wasn't Victor Mair, hehe.

Sorry I didn't post the originals, I was lazy, but I assumed at this point that ppl realized the Sapir-Whorf thing is a straw man (no one I know of adheres to a literal idea that language is purely cultural and entirely constructs thought, though linguists do seem to predominantly believe that the particulars and dynamics are on this side of the fence rather than the biological) and WSJ articles are mainstream reflections of more extensive bodies of work searchable via Google, and thus nitpicking over phrases like "shapes how we understand causality" is a bit overkill, methinks (it's a perfecly accurate general statement - i.e. let's not take "shapes" to be some essentializing, specific term, as it isn't). In light of the times article which cites Jakobson commenting on how language obliges us to think, which I previously posted in the study habits thread, it's hopefully a bit clearer.

I felt like Liberman was analyzing a different article to what I read, especially the latter half of the piece. Boroditsky's got it covered, and if someone's got beef with the SW straw man, I can understand how they'd take 'such differences', 'profound', 'shapes', etc., the wrong way. To me 'profound' meant collectively thought-provoking rather than generically extreme/a profundity.