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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis branches out into two theories: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is viewed as the stronger form – because language is viewed as a complete barrier, a person is stuck with the perspective that the language enforces – while linguistic relativity is perceived as a weaker form of the theory because language is discussed as a ...
For example, Malotki's monumental study of time expressions in Hopi presented many examples that challenged Whorf's "timeless" interpretation of Hopi language and culture, [74] but seemingly failed to address the linguistic relativist argument actually posed by Whorf (i.e. that the understanding of time by native Hopi speakers differed from ...
Berlin and Kay found universal restrictions on the number of basic color terms (BCTs) that a language can have, and on the ways the language can use these terms. The study included data collected from speakers of twenty different languages from a range of language families. Berlin and Kay identified eleven possible basic color categories: white ...
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in linguistics states that the grammatical structure of a mother language influences the way we perceive the world. The hypothesis has been largely abandoned by linguists as it has found very limited experimental support, at least in its strong form, linguistic determinism.
The statements about the obligatory nature of the terms of language have been taken to suggest that Whorf meant that language completely determined the scope of possible conceptualizations. [41] However, neo-Whorfians argue that here Whorf is writing about the terms in which we speak of the world, not the terms in which we think of it. [72]
The assumption of the autonomy of syntax can be traced back to the neglect of the study of semantics by American structuralists like Leonard Bloomfield and Zellig Harris in the 1940s, which was based on a neo-positivist anti-psychologist stance, according to which since it is presumably impossible to study how the brain works, linguists should ignore all cognitive and psychological aspects of ...
In his example, the string "John hit the chair" can have "John" deduced as the subject by a child, as a "chair" is unlikely to "hit" (rare (extraneous) examples include "I was hit by a car"). After several of these strings with the verb "hit," the child observes that inanimate objects, unlikely to possess the ability to "hit," consistently ...
For example, one of the language families lacks nouns, while another primarily uses monosyllabic adjectives to describe objects. As the story progresses the books become more and better known to the world at large, their philosophy starts influencing the real world, and Earth becomes the ideal world described in the books.