Sex, Syntax, and Semantics

Abstract

Sex, Syntax, and Semantics Lera Boroditsky ( lera@psych.stanford.edu ) Department of Psychology; Jordan Hall, Bldg 420 Stanford, CA 94305-2130 USA Lauren A. Schmidt ( lschmidt@stanford.edu ) Department of Psychology; Jordan Hall, Bldg 420 Stanford, CA 94305-2130 USA Abstract Many languages have a grammatical gender system whereby all nouns are assigned a gender (most commonly feminine, masculine, or neuter). Two studies examined whether (1) the assignment of genders to nouns is truly arbitrary (as has been claimed), and (2) whether the grammatical genders assigned to nouns have semantic consequences. In the first study, English speakers’ intuitions about the genders of animals (but not artifacts) were found to correlate with the grammatical genders assigned to the names of these objects in Spanish and German. These findings suggest that the assignment of gen- ders to nouns is not entirely arbitrary but may to some extent reflect the perceived masculine or feminine properties of the nouns’ referents. Results of the second study suggested that people’s ideas about the genders of objects are strongly influ- enced by the grammatical genders assigned to these objects in their native language. Spanish and German speakers’ mem- ory for object--name pairs (e.g., apple--Patricia) was better for pairs where the gender of the proper name was congruent with the grammatical gender of the object name (in their na- tive language), than when the two genders were incongruent. This was true even though both groups performed the task in English. These results suggest that grammatical gender may not be as arbitrary or as purely grammatical as was previously thought. Introduction Does the language you speak shape the way you under- stand the world? Linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists have long been interested in this question. This interest has been fueled in large part by the observation that different languages talk about the world differently. However, despite the interest and controversy, definitive answers are scarce. This paper briefly reviews the empirical history of this question and describes two new studies that demonstrate both the role of semantic constraints in shaping language, and the role of language in shaping habitual thought. The doctrine of Linguistic Determinism—the idea that thought is determined by language—is most commonly as- sociated with the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf proposed that in so far as languages differ, their speakers too may differ in how they perceive and act in objectively similar situations (Whorf, 1956). What has been called the strong Whorfian view—the idea that thought and action are entirely determined by language—has long been abandoned in the field. Particularly effective in undermining the strong view was work showing striking similarity in color memory despite wide variation in color language (Heider, 1972; but see Lucy & Shweder, 1979; Kay & Kempton, 1984). Although the strong linguistic determinism view seems untenable, many weaker but still interesting formulations can be entertained. Several lines of research that have looked at domains other than color, have found cross- linguistic differences in thought. Unlike English speakers, speakers of classifier languages like Yucatec Mayan and Japanese were found to attend to the substance of an object more so than to its shape, and were also more likely to ex- tend novel labels based on the substance than on the shape of a given example (e.g., Imai & Gentner, 1997; Lucy, 1992). When asked to reconstruct an array of objects, speakers of Tzeltal (a Mayan language that relies primarily on an absolute framework for describing spatial relations) were likely to preserve the positions of objects with respect to cardinal directions (so that the Northern-most object was still the Northern-most), while English speakers (who rely heavily on relative spatial descriptions) tended to preserve the objects’ positions relative to themselves (so that the left- most object was still left-most) (Levinson, 1996). Studies of conceptions of time have also revealed cross- linguistic differences (Boroditsky, 1999). English and Mandarin speakers talk about time differentlyEnglish speakers predominantly talk about time as if it were hori- zontal, while Mandarin speakers commonly use both hori- zontal and vertical metaphors to talk about time. This dif- ference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. A collection of studies showed that Mandarin speakers tend to think about time vertically even when they are thinking for English (Manda- rin speakers were faster to confirm that March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true for English speakers). Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin-English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English. In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using verti- cal spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. On a subse- quent test, this group of English speakers showed the same bias to think about time vertically as was observed with Mandarin speakers. This last result suggests two things: (1) language is a powerful tool in shaping thought, and (2) one’s native language plays a role in shaping habitual

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• Stanford University US
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology US

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