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