back to the future

Wed Feb 27 00:29:00 UTC 2013

There is also the chicken and egg aspect to the language-culture/cognition relationship: for a linguistic pattern to be repeated often enough for it to become fully conventionalized (at the societal level) and habitualized (at the individual level), it necessarily must initially be motivated by something in the cognition or culture of the speakers, otherwise they would not put the extra effort into constraining the addressee's inference of the speaker's communicative intention in that particular way. Once it is conventionalized/habitualized, then it often will persist for a time even if the situation changes and the motivation is no longer there. As much of a speaker's culture is learned through the language, then even if they are no longer motivated the particular patterns, and the associated cognitive categories, will be passed down through the generations.

Because of this, although it is good if we find direct correlations between language and culture/cognition, the emphasis on finding particular smoking guns sort of misguides the discussion.

Also, in relation to this article and studies using statistics and material implications generally, a material implication or a statistical correlation does not entail a causal relation.

Randy
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Prof. Randy J. LaPolla, PhD FAHA （罗仁地）| Head, Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies | Nanyang Technological University
HSS-03-45, 14 Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637332 | Tel: (65) 6592-1825 GMT+8h | Fax: (65) 6795-6525 | http://sino-tibetan.net/rjlapolla/

On Feb 27, 2013, at 6:12 AM, Bill Palmer wrote:

Utterly ludicrous, yes. But not in principle different to some of the claims made in relation to linguistic relativity. Basically the claim can be rephrased as follows: grammatical encoding of a distinction between future and present forces speakers to attend to that distinction, and influences the way the child constructs conceptual representations of time and their own relationship to time as they acquire the language. As cross-modal correlations for many such conceptual representations are well established, the null hypothesis is that the grammatical categories of the langauge are influencing conceptual categories that surface in a range of other behaviours.

Obviously in this case the details contain errors and omissions - as others have noted English is not a "strong FTR" language, and the 'typology' this guy proposes does not take into account a presumably comparable effect of a distinction between realis and irrealis in tenseless languages. However, they're details, and I can't help feeling that if this hypothesis had been proposed by a linguist and couched in sober scientific neo-Whorfian language we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Bill

Dr Bill Palmer
Deputy Head of School - Research
School of Humanities and Social Science
Convenor, Endangered Languages Documentation,
   Theory and Application Research Group
Linguistics Research Higher Degree/Honours coordinator
HSS
University of Newcastle
Callaghan NSW 2308
Australia
email bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au<mailto:bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au>
Nigel Vincent <nigel.vincent at MANCHESTER.AC.UK<mailto:nigel.vincent at MANCHESTER.AC.UK>> 27/02/13 3:14 AM >>>
At Frans' prompting I post this piece of nonsense for typological (or indeed other!) comment:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574

Nigel

Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Vice-President for Research & HE Policy, The British Academy

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
UK

http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/nigel-vincent/

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