Professor Lila Gleitman
Lecture Abstract
Does language affect the way we think?
Benjamin Whorf famously investigated the idea that languages differ in how they categorize objects, relations, and events. In his view, these language differences mold the thought of their users. Hence language differences play a powerful causal role in cultural diversity. This position fell into relative disfavor in the past few decades owing to the influence of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's conception of linguistic theory as providing an explanatory account of language acquisition has encouraged a universalist position about the mapping between thought and language. Recent studies, however, paint a rather different picture and have effected something of a Whorfian renaissance in psychological, anthropological,and linguistic discussions. Much of this new work has investigated possible relations between spatial reasoning and thought. I will discuss three lines of investigation that cast this debate in a somewhat different light. The first (Li, Gleitman, Gleitman, and Landau) asks whether cross-linguistically varying lexicalization patterns for spatial prepositions affect the categorization of events in a nonlinguistic task. The second (Papafragou, Massey, Gleitman) asks how memory may be affected by the ways that different languages encode the manner and path of motion events. The third (Li and Gleitman, 1999) investigates potential effects of absolute (e.g., East/West) versus relative (left/right) spatial terminology on spatial reasoning. The findings, overall, indicate that human categorization is quite robust to differences in the mapping relations across languages. We conclude with the observation that young language-learning children all over the world have reason to rejoice if this is indeed the case.
Whorf, Benjamin (1939) The relation of habitual thought and behavier to language. In J.B. Carroll (1995), Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Whorf. MIT Press
Pedersen, Eric, et al. (1998) Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization. Language, 74(3), 557-589.
Gleitman, Lila. (1990) The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition, 1(1), 3-55.
