The specific feature of vocabulary and grammar as manifestations of world view

Language does not exist apart from culture that is from the socially inherited assemblage of practices and beliefs that determines the texture of our life.

A group of languages needs not in the least correspond to a racial group or a culture area (English in the USA). But this does not mean that the three are not correlated. The most frequently asked question is how language and culture are related?

Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. It’s difficult to see what relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience (culture) and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience.

It goes without saying that the mere content of language is intimately related to culture. A society that has no knowledge of theosophy need have no name for it. Aborigines that had never seen or heard of a horse were compelled to invent or borrow a word for the animal when they made acquaintance with it. So the vocabulary of a language more or less faithfully reflects the culture. But we should not identify a language with its dictionary.

At the same time the complete vocabulary of a language may be looked upon as a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests and occupations that take up the attention of the community. Objects and forces in the physical environment become labeled in language only if they have cultural significance.

The relationship of vocabulary and cultural value is multidirectional. Speakers give names (words) to important entities and events in the physical and social worlds, and, once named, those entities and events become culturally and individually noticed and experienced. Through these interdependent processes unique cultural models are created and reinforced. “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.”

Sapir gives the following example. In the language of Paiute people living in semi-desert areas of Arizona, Utah and Nevada, among the geographic terms translated by Sapir are the following: semicircular valley; circular valley or hollow, spot of level ground in mountains surrounded by ridges; plain valley surrounded by mountains; plain; desert; knoll (a small round hill); plateau; canyon without water; canyon with creek; slope of mountain or canyon wall receiving sunlight; shaded slope of mountain or canyon wall; etc. the English language is able to express these numeral topographical features in a descriptive way, as shown by Sapir’s translations, but it lacks separate words unique to each. The Paiute language labels each feature with a separate name and thereby gives it distinctive value.

 

Benjamin Whorf, who had been a student of Sapir, investigated whether grammatical structures provide framework for orienting speaker’s thoughts and behavior. He believed that the influence of language can be both through vocabulary and through more complex grammatical relations. Whorf wrote expensive analysis of the language spoken by Hopi people in Arizona focusing on its underlying grammatical categories. E.g. in the following English sentences Hopi people would use a different word for “that”.

1. I see that it is red.

2. I see that it is new.

3. a. I hear that it is red.

b. I hear that it is new.

In the first sentence, a speaker makes deductions based on direct sensory awareness. In the second sentence, a speaker makes inferences about newness based evaluation of data. In sentences 3a and 3b a speaker repeats or reports a fact provided by someone else, not directly experienced by the speaker himself. Thus, Hopi people are directed by grammatical requirements of their language to notice underlying causes of their knowledge of things: through direct senses, through inferences, through reported facts. Speakers of English need not pay attention to such differences (it does not mean that they are never aware of these differences).

Whorf also concluded that Hopi and English have different ways of conceptualizing time, number and duration. He felt that these concepts are fundamental in creating the culture’s view of the universe. For example, English uses nouns to refer to phrases in a cycle of time, such as “summer” or “morning”. Hopi treats phases as continuing events. Words like “morning” are translated into Hopi as kinds of adverbs such as “while morning phase is occurring”. English tenses divide time into three distinct units: present, past future, whereas Hopi verbs do not indicate the time of an event as such, but rather focus on the manner or duration of an event.

 

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The opinions of Sapir and Whorf on relationships among language, thought, and behavior have come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The weak version of this hypothesis is that some elements of language, e.g. in vocabulary and grammatical system influence speakers’ perceptions and can affect their attitudes and behavior. The strong version suggests that language is ultimately directive in this process. This strong position is clearly improvable.

Sapir: “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation”.

M.M. Bakhtin also believed that language and speakers’ perceptions of experience are intertwined. he wrote: “There is no such thing as experience outside the embodiment in signs…It is not experience that organizes expression, but the other way around – expression organizes experience”. An individual’s thought is guided by possibilities offered by his or her language. We can illustrate his point with the following examples:

 

English speaker	I must go there.
Navajo speaker	It is only good that I shall go there.
English speaker	I make the horse run.
Navajo speaker	The horse is running for me.

 

In their use of language English and Navajo express different views of events and experiences. They have different attitudes about people’s rights and obligations. English speakers encode the rights of people to control other beings (people or animal) or to be controlled and compelled themselves. In contrast, Navajo speakers give all beings the ability to decide for themselves, without compulsion or control from others.

 

Cognitive linguistics emphasizes the idea that culture results from sharing of individuals’ lived experience. Culture provides us with cultural presuppositions. Presuppositions can be defined as background assumptions against which an action, theory, expression or utterance makes sense. The participants in speech interactions have an array of knowledge and understandings (models) of their culture as expressed and transmitted through language.

 

We can identify the following types of cultural presuppositions:

· Shared knowledge of facts, events, objects that are significant for this culture;

· Culture-specific perception of universal concepts such as time, space, etc. According to B. Whorf, in the language of Hopi they do not use words like “morning” or “evening” that refer to a phase in a cycle of time, but phrases like “while morning-phase is occurring” making this phase continuous.

· Culture-specific understanding of appropriate attitudes, relations between people, goals and wishes, etc. (e.g. joking or insulting).

· Culture-specific ideas of appropriate behavior, including verbal behavior (‘’How are you?”).

· Culture-bound values and evaluations.

· Associations caused by common historical expereince, way of life, everyday routine, etc.

These presuppositions are manifested with the help of an array of verbal means:

▪Semantic fields: degree of specification in designated this or that sphere of reality

▪Prototypical categories

▪Images used for building new words and new meanings in polysemes (use of metaphor)

▪Collocations and idioms

▪Modality

▪Cultural scenarios for stereotypical situations