Language influences the way you think (fwd)

[Matthew Ward]

I appreciate Dr. Kita's explanation.  I would suggest that part of the
problem is how the media reports language issues.  Decades of half-baked
ideas about linguistic determinism have made a huge impression on the
public consciousness, leading many educated people to believe that
people's thoughts are sometimes constrained by the languages they speak.
 The media is fond of such stories, and usually misinterprets them.

For example, the article which was posted on this list-serve made it
sound as though Japanese and Turkish speakers were unable to conceive of
the action described, simply because their language does not have a
specific verb for that action (in the case of Japanese, the verb
encompasses both the meanings of "swing" and "sway;" as Dr. Kita points
out, it is only an intransitive verb, Japanese also has a separate
transitive verbs ("yuru," "yusuburu") for these actions).

In other words, the idea is created that Japanese and Turkish speakers
are not able to express themselves as well as English speakers, simply
because of their native language.  This not only has damaging
connotations, but it also has very little scientific basis--decades of
studies have confirmed only weak versions of this kind of idea, such as
"It is slightly easier for speakers to remember colors for which their
language has words," and have generally disconfirmed that people's
thinking is in any way limited by their native languages.

I would suggest that those who conduct these kind of studies should, if
possible, take steps to ensure that the media does not misinterpret
them, because the effects can be quite damaging.  I remember, for
example, a book published in Japan with a title which would translate
something like "Lack of English Ability is Destroying the Nation," which
posited the ridiculous idea that Japanese people cannot express
themselves clearly, due to the language they speak, and that English was
the solution.

Actually, of course, the Japanese LANGUAGE can express anything it needs
to, but Japanese CULTURE often requires its members to express
themselves indirectly.  Of course, this cultural convention is reflected
in the language, (for example, many indirect phrases that can be used to
make a request more polite) but it does not mean, by any standards, that
Japanese (or any other language) is not capable of being clear, it's
just that doing so, in certain situations, can be percieved as rude.

Unfortunately, because of the many myths about language that exist in
the public consciousness, this kind of distinction is too often lost.
 In the case of a large, powerful language like Japanese, the damage is
probably not significant, but in the case of indigenous languages, these
myths (such as the old Sapir-Whorf saw "Hopi has no words relating to
time") can be very destructive indeed.

Matthew Ward

Natasha L Warner wrote:

>Hello,
>
>Dr. Kita, whose work has been discussed on this list lately, asked me to
>post the following message for him.  (He is a former colleague of mine.)
>As he suggests at the end of his message, please copy him at
>sotaro.kita at bristol.ac.uk on any responses.  Also, I am afraid my email
>program is not encoding the characters of Dr. Kita's collaborator's last
>name correctly in the message below.  For clarity, her name is Asli
>OEzyuerek.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Natasha Warner
>
>Dear Dr. Senarslan and readers of ILAT,
>
>One of my colleagues has told me that some discussions are going on in
>ILAT about our work, which was recently covered by mass media.  The
>difficulty of such a situation is that what people see is not our work
>itself, but a journalist's summary of our work (or, in many cases, a
>journalist's summary of another journalist's summary).
>
>Some of the messages in ILAT (not Dr. Senarslan's) seem to interpret our
>work to be a "deficit grammar" study,  making an English superiority
>claim.  This characterization is completely inaccurate.  The study has
>been published in the following journal.
>
>Kita, Sotaro, & ?zy?rek, Asli (2003). What does cross-linguistic
>variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal?:
>Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and
>speaking. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 16-32.
>
>I would appreciate it if you could base your scholary criticisms on our
>publication, from now on.  If you do not have access to this journal, I
>am happy to send you a PDF version of the published article.
>
>Another thing that did not get through the media is that this is a
>collaborative work between myself and Dr. Asli ?zy?rek (Max Planck
>Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands).
>
>Back to linguistics,  there are a couple of messages that point out that
>Turkish (Dr. Senarslan) and Japanese (Dr. Ward) do have a verb to
>swing.  As I will explain later, whether or not Turkish and Japanese
>have a certain verb or not is not really the central issue in our study.
>But, let me discuss the issue of the existence of swinging verbs in
>Japanese and Turkish first.
>
>Dr. Senarslan pointed out that Turkish sal could refer to swinging.
>According to my collaborator, who is a Turkish speaker, sal  roughly
>means dangling (one end of a long thin object is fixed, and the other
>end is free and is capable of moving about).  Though sal and swing have
>some referential overlap, sal is not really felicitous in description of
>an event in which an animate figure swings on a rope from Point A to
>Point B.
>
>Dr. Ward recently pointed out that Japanese yureru could refer to
>swinging. Yureru roughly means swaying (one end of a long thin object is
>fixed, and the other end is free and moves about). Unlike in sal, yureru
>entails movement (but the movement is not directed). In addition, yureru
>does not refer to intentional action; thus yureru cannot refer to Tarzan
>swinging from one tree to another.   Yureru has referential overlap with
>swing, but it is not really felicitous in description of an event in
>which an animate figure swings on a rope from Point A to Point B.
>
>The precise semantics of these related verbs is not really the crucial
>point of our study.  The crucial point is that the English speakers
>encoded different set of information from Japanese and Turkish speakers
>when they described a scene from an animated cartoon.  This is the scene
>in which Sylvester the cat swings on a rope from one building to another
>in his attempt to catch Tweetie bird. None of the 15 Japanese and 17
>Turkish speakers, who talked about this event, did not encode the arc
>trajectory (they simply said something like, "the cat went/flew to the
>other side"), where as 16 English speakers all used the verb "swing" and
>thus encoded the arc trajectory.  Obviously, there are many other
>differences.  All Turkish speakers encoded evidentiality, and most
>speakers of the other languages did not, and all Japanese spakers
>encoded addressee-honorification but most speakers of the other
>languages did not.  We focused on encoding of spatial information in
>speech in our study since iconic co-speech gesture is believed to be
>driven by underlying spatial and motoric imagery that the speaker
>activates at the moment of speaking (McNeill, 1992).  We found that
>Japanese and Turkish speakers are more likely to produce a gesture that
>moves straight, namely, that does NOT encode the arc trajectory than
>English speakers.  Based on the assumption that co-speech iconic
>gestures reveal important aspects of the speaker's imagery at the moment
>of speaking, we concluded that the imagery that speaker generates at the
>moment of speaking is influenced by how the speech production process
>organizes information.  We suggested that adjusting the content of
>imagery according to the preference of the speech production process
>might facilitate verbalization of thought.
>
>The above article include analysis of how Manner and Path of a motion
>event is expressed in speech and in gesture in the three languages.  All
>three languages expressed both Manner and Path of a particular event in
>the cartoon, but the syntax they used were different.  And, the
>linguistic difference was mirrored in a gestural difference.  For the
>sake of brevity, I will not go into further details.
>
>One caveat is that our study only makes a claim about linguistic
>influence on the imagery that the speaker generates at the moment of
>speaking.  It does not make any claim about  lingusitic effects on
>thoughts outside the context of speaking.
>
>I hope that this clarifies things a bit.  As I do not subscribe to ILAT,
>please CC your posting to ILAT also to <Sotaro.Kita at bristol.ac.uk>.
>Thank you very much!
>
>Reference
>McNeill, David. (1992). Hand and mind. University of Chicago Press.
>
>Best regards,
>Sotaro Kita
>
>
>