Ii According to the book ,Sociolinguistics written by R.A Hudson, 1999, the term thought covers a number of different types of mental activity, and lies in the province of cognitive psychology.
- Language and thought
It seems evident that there is a close relation between
language and thought . Everyday experience suggests that most of our thinking is facilitated by language.
Is there a clear identity between the two?
Is it possible to think without language?
Does language dictate the ways in which we are able to think?
A simple answer is certainly not possible but at least we can be clear about the main factors which may give rise to the complication.
- The relationships between language and thought
Many kinds of behavior have been referred to as thinking, but not all of them require us to posit a relationship with language.
The thinking which seems to involve language is the reasoned thinking which takes place as we as we work out problems, tell stories, plan strategies and others. It has been called “rational”, “directed”, or
“propositional” thinking. It involves elements that are both deductive and inductive.
For this kind of thinking, language seems to be very important. The formal properties of language, such as word order any sentence sequencing, constitute the medium in which our connected thoughts
can be presented and organized.
- Lingustic thoughts determinism and Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Let me now turn to the question of LD. To what extent, and in what ways, does language determine thought this question is normally answered with reference to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which language determines thought to avery great extent and in many ways.
- What the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has to say about language
and thought
The ‘Sapir-Whorf’ hypothesis combines two principles.
The linguistic determination (which states that language determines the way we think) and linguistic relativity (state that the distinctions encoded in one language are no c t found in any other language)
English speakers having one word for carrying things, in contrast with the malay language, where there are different words for carrying things:- i. junjung (carrying on the head)
ii. Bimbit/pegang(carry for example handphone
in the hand)
iii. jinjing (carry for example handbag in the hand)
iv. pikul (carry on the shoulder)
v. tanggung (two person carrying one thing)
According to one of the most famous quotation that whorf (1940)had laid out, whorf is talking about how our thinking is affected by the grammar of our language.
In other words, the only kind of experience that influences our
thought processes is linguistic experience as implied by the phrase linguistic determinism.
On the one hand, it claims that our grammar is the only things that influences our thinking---“…… the background linguistic system ……of each language is …… itself the sharper of ideas.”
Sapir and Whorf carried out a hypothesis, which is still alive but controversial over fifty years later. A research project was carried out in the 1950’s which involved a comparision of English with Navajo.
The general conclusion to which this research points then is that grammar does influence our thinking in ways that go beyond the use of language, but that it is only one of the things that does --- contrary to the extreme view of ‘linguistic determinism’
Another more recent research project carried out by John Lucy (Lucy 1992b) which supports the same view. The study was carried out over adecade of work with a community in Mexico whose language is Yucatec Maya.
The purpose was to compare the cognitive effects of speaking this language with those of speaking English and specifically the work focused on a very general grammatical difference between the two languages, their treatment of number differences in nouns
In conclusions, it seems that there is good evidence that some
semantic contrasts which are expressed by grammar are also applied outside the strictly linguistic realm of language use.
Whether or not a person applies these contrasts concerned,
so it seems reasonable to assume that language is the cause and the thought-pattern is the effect. In short, language does affect thought
in ways that go beyond the rather obvious effects of specific lexical items .
- Linguistic relativity
One language may take many words to say what another
language says in a single word, but in the end the circumlocution can
make the point.
