.........................................................................................................................
आभ्यंतर (Aabhyantar)
SCONLI-12
विशेषांक ISSN : 2348-7771
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Soumyadeep Mukherjee :
Department
of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur
1.
Introduction
The Linguistic
Relativity hypothesis deals with the relation between language and thought.
According to Tohidian (2009), four views can be speculated about the nature of
the relationship between language and thought. These are,
Ø Our language influences the way we think.
Ø Our way of thinking determines our language
use.
Ø Language and thought are two independent
mechanisms, but they become interdependent during our infancy.
Ø Language and thought are completely
independent.
The theory of
Linguistic Relativity is based on the first speculation. The formulation of
this hypothesis can be traced back to Sapir (1929), who made a comparison
between English and a number of Native American languages and concluded that
differences between languages changed the way their users perceive the outside
world.
This hypothesis is
probably the most closely associated with Whorf (1956), who studied a few
Native American languages in this context. In his study of Hopi language, he
argues that Hopi has “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions
that refer directly to what we call ‘time’.” He also had found that the
speakers of Hopi had “no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth
flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate,
out of a future, through the present, into the past.”, and concluded that
language determines the way people think.
A distinction can be
made between two versions of the hypothesis. The stronger version, known as
Linguistic Determinism, claims that language determines the thought of its
speakers. Whereas the weaker version, known as Linguistic Relativity, claims
that language influences our thought. This hypothesis is also known as the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a term coined by Harry Hoijer, and also as Whorfianism.
From the late 1980s,
in the hands of Lakoff, Levinson, Bowerman, Gumperz, Lucy and the like, the
Relativist hypothesis saw a new resurgence, but from different perspectives.
The revived form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been given the name of
Neo-Whorfism.
Grammatical
Gender:
Every language of the world employs the concept of
gender with the language system. Some of them are semantic in nature, some are
grammatical. In case of the languages having semantic gender, the gender is
expressed only through the meaning of the words as being male, female, or
neuter. On the other hand, languages are said to have grammatical gender, when
the gender of the noun shows an agreement with the verb, adjective, determiner
etc. Hockett (1958:231) defines gender as being classes of nouns which are
reflected in the behaviour of associated words.Consider the French example,
1. un
homme heureux
DET.MAS man.NOM happy.MAS
‘A happy man’
2. une
femme heureuse
DET.FEM woman.NOM happy.FEM
‘A happy woman’
Here, we see that an agreement is present between the
noun with the verb and the adjective.
Various world languages employ the distinction of
gender ranging from 0 to 7 types on the basis of sex, animacy etc. Some of the
most common gender distinctions assigned in a language are masculine, feminine,
neuter etc. Some languages derive their gender in a natural way (e.g. Spanish,
Italian), some more abstractly (e.g. German).
2.
Background
A considerable amount
of literature is available which deals with the presence or absence of
grammatical gender in a language and how it shapes the conceptual system of the
speaker of that language. These can be said to be directly or indirectly
dealing with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity that a
language partly determines (deterministic hypothesis) or influences (weaker
version) the speaker’s conceptualization of the world around him. Most of the
work in this field is based on behavioral experiments dealing with how language
users cognize their world. Some experiments also seek to show that the presence
of grammatical gender in a language influences the social behavior (e.g. sexist
attitude) of their speakers.
Boroditsky and Schimdt
(2000) tried to find out through their studies the arbitrariness of grammatical
gender assignment to the nouns in a language and if it has semantic
consequences or not. Their experiments on English and Spanish native speakers
show that people’s idea about gender is strongly influenced by the grammatical
gender of their language.
Findings of Bassetti
(2007), Forbes et al. (2008), Wasserman et al. (2009), Cubelli, Paolieri, Lotto
and Job (2011), Thompson (2014), Fahim et al. (2014), Kristjansdottir (2016) are also in the same line.
Vigliocco et al.
(2005) and Kousta et al. (2008) did not find any such relationship holding
between object categorization and grammatical gender of a language, but they
did not deny the existence of the relationship between conceptualization and
grammatical categories of a language.
Most of the work has
been carried out in the context of European languages, and only a few studies
relate to the Semitic group. But the languages of Indian subcontinent are yet
to be tested in this domain. Some of the Indian languages show the presence of
grammatical gender (e.g. Hindi), and some do not (e.g. Bangla). In Hindi, the
gender system is expressed through the agreement of verb and adjective with
noun in masculine or feminine form.
3.
acch.a
larka dudh pi.ta hai
good.MAS boy.NOM
milk.ACC drink.HAB.MAS.SG be.PRST.SG
‘A good boy drinks
milk.’
4.
acch.i
larki dudh pi.ti hai
good.FEM girl.NOM
milk.ACC drink.HAB.FEM.SG be.PRST.SG
‘A good girl drinks
milk.’
In Bangla, the gender
system is semantic in nature. That means the presence of gender is limited to
nouns where sometimes a feminine noun is derived from a masculine one with the
addition of suffixes like /-i/, /-ni/, /-ini/ etc. For example,
5.
MAS
bagh ‘Tiger’ à FEM bagh-ini
‘Tigress’
6.
MAS
paTha ‘Male goat’ à FEM paTh-i
‘Female goat’
But there are few
cases where the adjective shows an agreement with the noun.
7.
sundor chele
beautiful.MAS boy.NOM
‘A beautiful boy’
8.
sundor.i meye
beautiful.FEM girl.NOM
‘A beautiful girl’
But this grammatical
process is not common across the language and even this particular example is
not strictly maintained. Beside Bangla and Hindi, English is one of the most
common second languages of the speakers of these languages.
In English, the gender
system is semantic. The gender distinction of masculine, feminine and neuter is
present only in the use of pronouns as he,
she and it, respectively. According to Whorf, grammatical gender remains in
English as a covert grammatical category.
Of the many varieties
of bilingualism that we encounter, the following have been focused upon in the
context of the research questions of this study,
(a) Simultaneous bilingualism involving
Bangla-Hindi users
(b) Sequential bilingualism involving Bangla-Hindi
users
(c) Simultaneous bilingualism involving
Hindi-English users
(d) Sequential bilingualism involving
Hindi-English users
Since Bangla, Hindi,
and English differ with respect to gender encoding in these languages, it would
be of interest to investigate how object categorization by Bangla-Hindi and
Hindi-English bilinguals is influenced by these differences in gender encoding.
Further, it may be of interest to see how object categorization works for
simultaneous and sequential bilinguals.
The distinction between Simultaneous and Sequential
bilinguals is made on the basis of their ability to acquire the second
language. Simultaneous bilinguals are defined as those users who are exposed to
both the languages simultaneously before the critical period (i.e. 8-12 years
of age). Sequential bilinguals, on the other hand, are exposed to the second
language on a later part of their life after the critical period, and not
simultaneously with the first language.
The argument here is that the simultaneous bilinguals
have more capacity to acquire the language, which leaves a strong impact on
their conceptualization pattern influenced by the second language. The
sequential bilinguals being exposed to the second language much later, have a
weakened capacity of acquiring the second language resulting in a weaker impact
of the second language in their conceptualization.
The present work aims
at extending the relation of grammatical gender and cognition of the external
world by testing the patterns of object categorization among Bangla-Hindi and
Hindi-English simultaneous and sequential bilinguals.
In this context, three
experiments were conducted.
1)
How does the presence or absence of grammatical
gender in a language impact object categorization of its users?
2)
If it does, then does the impact vary with
respect to whether the language is being used as first language or second
language by a bilingual user?
3)
Does the impact vary with respect to whether the
bilingual use is of the simultaneous or the sequential type?
All the three experiments were conducted on a
population of 25 participants. Among them, 15 were Bangla-Hindi bilingual users
and 10 were Hindi-English bilingual users. Also, among them, there were 7 male
and 18 female participants. Among the 15 B-H users, there were 5 male and 10
female participants, and among the H-E group, there were 2 male and 8 female
participants. The average age of the participants were 27.2 ranging from 22 to
33 years. All the participants were the students of Indian Institute of
Technology Kanpur. They were chosen on a random basis. All the experiments had
to deal with showing pictures to them and recording their responses. The
experimental object pictures were shown to the participants with the help of
PPT slides in an 11.6 inches laptop. The pictures were downloaded from Google
Images and were made black and white with a photo editor tool (Photo Editor
Pro). The resolution of the pictures were not constant, it varied from 240*240
pixels to 1920*1080 pixels.
This present study
seeks to find the relation between language (focusing on the aspect of
grammatical gender category) and object categorization of its speakers.
All the 3 experiments
were conducted on the same set of participants over 7 days. The experiments
were initiated with a questionnaire which provided personal and language
related information for each of the participants. This questionnaire was also
helpful in finding the type of bilinguality (simultaneous or sequential) of the
participants. Two sets of the initial questionnaire were created, one for the
B-H users and one for the E-H users.
ü Design
The first experiment
seeks to find out how speakers assign genders to different inanimate objects.
This experiment has been adapted from Boroditsky and Schimdt (2000), Forbes et
al. (2008) and Kristjansdottir (2016). The participants were shown a total
of 10 black and white pictures of different inanimate objects and they were
asked to assign an imaginary gender to those artifacts. Among those 10 objects,
4 items were chosen which are grammatically marked as masculine in Hindi (e.g.
pen, sofa), and another 6 being marked as feminine in Hindi (e.g. key,
scooter). All
the participants had to mark their choices in a questionnaire which was
provided to them. After the experiments,
the participants were be given a post-experimental questionnaire where they
were asked to provide the basis for their decisions.
ü Hypotheses
I.
Gender assignment to
inanimate objects by H-E users is done on the basis of Hindi grammatical gender
assignment.
II.
Gender assignments to
inanimate objects by B-E speakers are random.
ü Results
After the experiment, the results were computed on the
basis of Gender Correspondence in the context of Hindi (GC) capturing the
correspondence between grammatical gender of the objects in Hindi and the
imaginary gender assigned to them by the participants.
For the B-H users, the percentage of Gender
Correspondence was 54%.
For H-E users, the percentage of Gender Correspondence
was 65%.
ü
Analysis
Only 3 B-H and 2 H-E participants said that some of
their choices were made on the basis of how Hindi language marks the gender of
those objects and Rest of the participants recorded that their choices were
either random or based on memories attached with the objects or on how they
related to them in social settings etc.
The results found from the collected data are in line
with the given two hypotheses. The H-E users are more prone towards marking the
gender of objects on the basis of the grammatical gender assigned to them by
their first language (i.e. Hindi). The B-H users, although showed a fair amount
of Gender Correspondence in their choices, it was lesser than the H-E users. As
most of the participants’ choices were random (i.e. not on the basis of Hindi
grammatical gender), the gender assignment process in correspondence with their
grammatical gender was not conscious.
ü Design
The participants were
first asked to read a passage from a work of fiction. The passage was taken
from a short story ‘Kabuliwala’ by Rabindranath Tagore. After reading the
passage, they were shown 10 black and white pictures of inanimate objects.
Among those 10 objects, 5 objects are grammatically marked as masculine in
Hindi (e.g. cup, cloud) and 5 were marked as feminine (e.g. shirt, candle).
They were asked what imaginary voice (male or female) they would assign to
those objects if they are to come alive in a movie or a story. This type of
experiment has been previously undertaken by Forbes et al. (2008), Wasserman et
al. (2009), and Thompson (2014). For this particular experiment, in case of B-H
speakers, for 5 participants, the passage was given in Bangla (and the
instructions for the experiments were also be carried out in Bangla (Bangla
condition). For the next 5 participants, the same was carried out in Hindi
(Hindi Condition) and for the remaining 5 it was carried out in English
(English condition). This pattern was also followed for the H-E speakers as the
mode of instruction and passages were in Hindi (Hindi condition) for half of
the participants and in English (English condition) for the remaining
participants. The reason behind this particular design is that it has been
found that the mode of communication in a particular language acts as a
stimulus for the participants and that in turn influences their language of
thought (Wasserman et al. 2009). The responses were recorded in a
questionnaire.
ü Hypotheses
v B-H users adhere more to the Hindi grammatical
gender assignment under Hindi condition than under Bangla condition.
v H-E users adhere more to the Hindi grammatical
gender assignment under Hindi condition than under English condition.
v Altogether, the rate of adherence to Hindi
grammatical gender assignment is higher for H-E users.
ü Results
The data obtained from Experiment 2 was analysed on
the basis of Gender Correspondence alone and also on the basis of Gender
Correspondence together with the conditions (Bangla-Hindi-English and
Hindi-English Conditions) under which the experiment was conducted.
For B-H users:
·
Gender Correspondence without conditions was
60%.
·
Gender Correspondence under Bangla condition was
46%.
·
Gender Correspondence under Hindi condition was
66%.
·
Gender Correspondence under English condition
was 68%.
On the other hand, For H-E users:
·
Gender Correspondence without conditions was
69%.
·
Gender Correspondence under Hindi condition was
72%.
·
Gender Correspondence under English condition
was 68%.
In the post-experimental questionnaire, only 3
participants recorded that their choices were based on the Hindi grammatical
gender. For the rest, the assignment was either random, or based on their
associations (personal and/or social) with the objects, and/or how they had
heard those objects speaking to them.
ü
Analysis
Results show that the overall rate of GC is higher for
the H-E speakers, which points to the impact of the presence of grammatical
gender in their first language. Within the B-H group, the GC in Hindi condition
(66%) is significantly higher than in Bangla condition (46%), which shows that
a language condition may influence users’ object categorization who belong to
the same group (i.e. B-H users). It shows that even the second language having
grammatical gender (Hindi in this case) can have an impact on the
conceptualization pattern of its users. The higher rate of GC in English
condition is subject to study on a larger group.
Different conditions of the experiments for H-E users
did not show a marked difference (72% vs. 66%), which suggests that the second
language (i.e. English) where there is no grammatical gender, has less or no
impact on object categorization on the basis of gender among the users.
Experiment 3:
ü Design
The third and last
experiment was a memory test, an experiment in line with that of Boroditsky and
Schimdt (2000). A set of 10 black and white pictures of objects were used. Half
of the items would be grammatically masculine (e.g. flower, banana) and half would
be grammatically feminine in Hindi (e.g. clock, car). These pictures would be
paired with 10 proper names out of which half would be male names and half
female. These names would be similar to one another (e.g. Dipak-Dipika etc.). Among
those object-name pairs, in half of the cases, the grammatical gender of the
objects in Hindi were similar with the gender of the proper names, (Paired
Pictures), and for the rest, it was the opposite (Non-Paired Pictures). First,
the participants were shown the 10 pictures for 5 seconds each. After a minute, they were given a
questionnaire where the object names were given and they were asked to write
down the corresponding proper names which were paired with those objects. A
post-experimental questionnaire recorded their strategy of memorization.
ü Hypotheses
I.
Recall is better for
artifacts paired with the names of same gender category.
II.
Rate of recall is
higher for H-E users than B-H users.
ü Results
The data were analysed on the basis of the rate of
recall.
For the B-H users,
·
The overall recall rate was 64%.
·
Recall rate for paired pictures were 50.5%.
·
Recall rate for non-paired pictures were 49.5%.
For the H-E users,
·
The overall recall rate was 62%.
·
Recall rate for paired pictures were 58.1%.
·
Recall rate for non-paired pictures were 41.9%.
Only 1 participant recorded the gender-pairing as a
memorizing strategy.
ü
Analysis
The overall recall rate among B-H and H-E users was
nearly the same (64% vs. 62%), which does not support the second hypothesis in
this context. Recall rate in case of paired objects, for both the groups were
higher than that of the non-paired objects. H-E speakers show this difference
in a high rate (58.1% vs. 41.9%), whereas the same in case of B-H speakers is
not so significant (50.5% vs. 49.5%). This shows that H-E speakers
unconsciously chose gender-pairing as a memorizing strategy which is evident in
their first language, and this is not the case for the B-H users which is
evident from their almost same percentage of Recall Rate for paired and non-paired
objects.
The arguments proposed in the context of the
distinction between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals were analysed from
the collected data. But, the data was not adequate enough to keep with the
defining characteristics of the distinction. While computing the results in
this context, a distinction was made between nearly simultaneous and sequential
bilinguals. Nearly simultaneous bilinguals are defined as those users who were
exposed to the second language before the age of 5. On the other hand,
sequential bilinguals are those language users who were exposed to the second
language after the age of 5. This is to find out how much the influence of the
grammatical structure of the second language is embedded in the conceptualization
pattern (object categorization in this context) of the users.
Out of the 15 B-H participants, 5 participants were
marked as being nearly simultaneous bilinguals (who learned Hindi at or before
the age of 5) of Bangla and Hindi. Their results show,
q
In Ex. 1, GC of nearly simultaneous bilinguals
is 52% (vs. overall of 54%).
q
In Ex. 2, GC of nearly simultaneous bilinguals
is 78% (vs. overall of 60%).
q
In Ex. 3, the rate of recall of simultaneous
bilinguals is 65% (vs. overall 64%).
Ø
For paired objects, Recall Rate is 51.7% (vs.
B-H overall of 50.5%).
Ø
For non-paired objects, Recall Rate is 48.2%
(vs. B-H overall of 49.5%).
This data show that when Hindi is learnt nearly
simultaneously with Bengali as the first language, it impacts the user’s object
categorization in terms of grammatical gender assignment. Sequential and nearly
simultaneous bilinguals behave somewhat differently when it comes to using a
grammatical feature of the second language in categorizing objects, especially
evident in the results of Experiment 2. But for the other two experiments, the
results did not show a marked difference
In case of the H-E users, out of the 10 participants,
all of them were marked as nearly simultaneous bilingual users, and therefore,
the possibility of an intra-group distinction was not explored.
This study suggests
that the presence or absence of grammatical gender in a language has an impact
on the users’ conceptualization patterns in the form of object categorization.
If the second language of a bilingual is characterized by the presence of
grammatical gender (Hindi in the present case) then the nearly simultaneous and
sequential bilinguals show differential behavior with respect to object
characterization. However, this does not appear to hold for bilinguals with a
semantic gender based second language (English in the present case).
The results of the
study are at best indicative because the experiments were conducted on a small
population due to the paucity of time.
The difference between
simultaneous and sequential bilinguals indicated by this study needs to be
explored further. Also, this study can be extended to other structural domains
of language (e.g. classifiers, spatial and temporal markers etc.).
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