И. Г. Петровского Кафедра английского языка учебно-методическое пособие
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1. Two Conflicting Positions the “Universalist” versus the “Relativist”
Fundamentally, we can understand the way in which language represent the world to us in terms of two opposing positions. According to one view, human beings generally (whatever their culture or language) are endowed with a common stock of basic concepts-"conceptual primes" as they are sometimes known-out of which more elaborated conceptual systems and patterns of thought can be constructed. Language, according to this view, is merely a vehicle for expressing the conceptual system which exists independently of it. And, because all conceptual system share a common basis, all language turn out to be fundamentally similar. They will all, for instance, find some way of expressing such, conceptual primes as relative height (e.g. "up" vs. "down"), relative distance (e.g. "near" vs. "far"), relative time (e.g. "now' vs. "then"). According to this position, thought determines language; and consequently separate languages represent the world in closely equivalent ways. We might characterize this view as the "universalist" position.
The alternative position maintains that thought is difficult to separate from language; each is woven inextricably into the other. Concepts can only take shape if we have the words and structures in which to express them. Thinking depends crucially upon language. Because the vocabularies and structures of separate language can vary so widely, it makes no sense to posit conceptual primes of a universal nature. Indeed, it is not at all likely that different languages represent the world in equivalent ways. On the contrary, habitual users of one language will experience and understand the world in ways peculiar to that language and different from habitual users of another language. The latter viewpoint might be termed the "relativist" position.
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2. Vocabulary and Grammatical Differences between languages.
In support of the relativist position it is clear that the continuum of experience is differently dissected, by the vocabularies of different languages.
Some of the most striking differences, between the vocabulary of separate language show up in the arrangement of colour terms. Whereas English operates with eleven basic colour terms ("black, "white" "red", "green", "yellow", "blue", "brown", "purple", "pink", /"orange" and "grey"), some languages operate with more, some with less. Russian for example, deploys twelve, the former making a distinction, between two types of blue. The way in which the colourspectrim is segmented can thus vary quite dramatically from language to language.
However, the really fundamental differences between languages operates at more than the level of vocabulary; they operate within the structural patterns of the language itself. Thus, differences between languages may be found in the way they are structurally patterned to handle such basic notions as time, cause and effect, agency, spatial relations, and so on. The linguist with whom the relativist claim is most associated — Benjamin Lee Whorf proposes "a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic background are similar, or can in some way be calibrated... Users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different, views of the world."
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3. Difficulties in the Relativist position
Over forty years have elapsed since Whorf wrote these words. Yet, with occasional shifts in the terms of debate, controversy around these issues has remained strong ever since. Evaluating the respective merits of the relativist and universalist position would really require a book. There are it mast be admitted, certain basic difficulties in the relativist position. In its extreme form it assumes distinctions in experience and understanding on the basis of linguistic distinctions. So it assumes, for example, that Russians experience the colour spectrum, particularly in the domain of “blueness", rather differently than English speakers do, because the linguistic terms are different in this respect language is not an absolute straitjacket - it does not totally constrain our ways of seeing and experiencing. I would still want to claim, as Whorf states, that language plays an active and crucial role in sharing (though not completely determining) the processes of representation, by "pointing us toward different types of observation" and "predisposing certain choices of interpretation".
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4. The “Interested" Character of Linguistic Representation
What the relativist position emphasizes, then, despite certain difficulties associated with it, is that the world is not given to us directly and straightforwardly in experience. In apprehending, comprehending and representing the, world we inevitably draw upon linguistic formulations. One might say that because of this we always see it slightly askew. But it is not so much a question of "bias" that is at stake here. What it amounts to in fact is that there is no absolutely neutral and disinterested way of apprehending and representing the world. Language always helps to select, arrange, organize, and evaluate experience, even when we are least conscious of it doing so.
In this sense representation is always interested: the words chosen are selected from a determinate set for the situation at hard and have been previously shaped by the community, or by portions of the community, to which the speaker belongs.