Paper 4 Question 2

Language aids in developing one’s self-identity, social identity, and shapes the way humans are. As people learn to use language, especially from early childhood development, their sense of self-identity will constantly change and will continue to do so for the rest of their lives. The same result occurs as people interact with various social groups and speech communities. Using language allows people to communicate so they are able to share information and exchange ideas, yet it is undecided whether language shapes cognition or cognition shapes language. 

Linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf formed a hypothesis which suggests that people view the world by relating it back to the language they use. For instance, English uses one word for “snow” while the Inuit tribes of the Arctic posses a wider lexis, using three unique words for its different properties. Lera Boroditsky, a Stanford researcher, explains how selecting the correct verbiage is dependent on the intent behind the matter. English tends to “play the blame game” while Japanese and Spanish do not. In English, people would say, “She broke the cup” regardless of whether knocking a cup off of a table was an accident. However, in Japanese and Spanish, people would say, “The cup broke itself” if it was done accidentally. Here, the specific linguistic choices that were made have an entirely different affect on the meaning and may cause people to “think differently about what happened.”

As the extract discusses how people may think differently about the same situation and do not always share the same cognitive processes, it disproves Rik Pinxten’s universalism theory. Linguistic reflectionism is also disproved as it is the idea that language is reflective of human thoughts and does not have any responsibility in determining how people view the world.

In correspondence, linguistic determinism refers to how society is restricted to perceive the world by the language used. People are only able to describe objects or situations with the words they have been taught. This supports the behaviorist theory since people observe, imitate, and acquire language from the people and the environment around them. The extract from the Stanford University online magazine points how children showed the author how to “avoid being gobbled by a crocodile” which may be necessary in Australian culture but is not necessary in other parts of the world like England or Italy. 

One’s idiolect can be sculpted by the sociolect, also known as the form of language spoken, of a region. Sociolect is relative to others who live within a similar geographical area or associate with a similar social group. Different countries from across the globe all use different styles of language. In Peru, the Yagua language uses “five distinct grammatical forms of the past tense” while in English, people convey when something happens through means of “different verb forms.” On the contrary, the verbiage used by Indonesians “never change to express time.” Although in Indonesian only using the verb does not make the sentence ungrammatical, it may be deemed ungrammatical or incorrect in other languages with different linguistic rules. In Spanish, the lexis used depends on the gender of the subject. The articles “el,” “la,” “los,” and “las” are used to determine whether the subject is masculine or feminine and whether it is singular or plural. 

Furthermore, different countries around the world may want to make their language stand out from others. This is the process of divergence in which people make clearer distinctions from the surrounding speakers. This connects to Howard Giles’s communication accommodation theory as it supports the idea that people adjust the way in which they speak to others. This can be seen when Boroditsky showed various videos to Spanish-speakers. Spanish may have less of a variety of language to describe the actions taking place, whereas in English there are more.

    Language and thought are directly involved with each other and it seems that human thought is more reflective of language than the other way around.