7. Correspondence of Linguistic Structures and Cognitive Structures

Language is an essential part of human cognitive. An account of linguistic structure should therefore ‘articulate’ with what is known about cognitive processing in general, regardless of whether one posits a special language module, or an innate faculty of language (Gupta 2002). The important thing is to integrate the findings of linguistics and cognitive psychology to bring them under the umbrella of cognitive science. The fact shows that language constitutes a logic or general frame of reference which molds the thought of its habitual users like a mathematical system. The relationship between the mechanism of language and the perception and organization of experience is really an empirical question. Although providing many lexical and grammatical examples of how language may influence cognition, Whorf did not actually collected or reported any non-linguistic data to do with the cognitive behaviours possibly related to linguistic behaviours (Kess 1992). It is, therefore, little evidence supported the strong version of Whorf’s hypothesis. Generally, to confirm the relationship between language and cognition, the first task is to have to assess language and cognition independently from each other, and then, to assess nonlinguistic cognitive processes independently of the linguistic features that are presumed in the Whorf’s hypothesis to influence them.

The correspondence of linguistic structures and cognitive structures should be determined to investigate the influence of cognition on various linguistic levels. Two main examples that were done by Whorf and have often used by researchers are known as the lexical level and grammatical level.

1. Lexical Influences on Cognition

The relationship of the lexical processing system to the higher-level representation of the utterance in light of the Whorfian hypothesis can be treated as an integration function. In order to complete the recognition process, the system must provide the basis for the integration, into this higher level of representation, of the syntactic and semantic information associated with the word that is being recognized. This is the domain of content-based function and processes. A processing theory of the mental lexicon is assumed to understand the nature of the process that links these two functional domains. The specific and immediate concern is to understand how the system is able to solve this problem, to project sound onto meaning. Studies have shown that the speech signal tends to continuously and immediately project not only onto the lexical level but also onto levels of semantic and pragmatic interpretations. The projection from the signal to message, in fact, can be viewed as carried out just about as fast as is either neutrally plausible or informationally possible. Although such observations need to be further examined in the context of language diversity frame, they appear to be true, though with different manifestations (Gupta 2002). Lexical influences on cognition generally can be confirmed by evidences of colour terms where the concept of codability defined by Peter Heriot has been extensively used and refers to “the ease with which a language tag can be used to distinguish one term from another.”

At the lexical level, much work has been done on colour terms. The reason is that until recently, the study of colour terms was the principal domain used by structuralists to demonstrate the fact that human languages are lexically non-isomorphic. The demonstration is not complex and very convenient, because languages, in fact, differ extremely in their differentiation of the colour domain.

Codability, as Brown (1958) defined, refers to the length of a verbal expression. Enough of evidence supports that some languages have single words to refer to a particular object or event, whereas others do not. Commonly, if a language does not supply a specific word for the occasion, its users can still make the reference by some combination of words. This is the case of Whorf’s example of ‘snow’ mentioned above. The reference by combination of words, as pointed out by Brown, is no doubt regarded as less codable than a single word. Codability is actually not necessarily constant and uniform throughout a language-community.

Imagine the colour spectrum, it is a continuum, each colour gradually blending into the next; with no sharp boundaries. But we impose boundaries; we talk of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. It takes little thought to realize that these discriminations are arbitrary–and indeed in other languages the boundaries are different. In neither Spanish, Italian nor Russian is there a word that corresponds to the English meaning of blue. In their Basic Color Terms, Berlin and Kay (1969) discovered that colour naming is far from arbitrary, and that there is cross-cultural regularity in color naming. They also found that though the number of colour terms not only may vary in a language, they may also vary from language to language. It seems every language has an underlying order, and that every language has a small number of basic colour terms. These basic colour terms possess four characteristics. Firstly, they consist of only one morpheme yet still cover the colour spectrum; for example, blue versus blue green. Secondly, they must be not contained within another colour; for example, crimson and scarlet are in red. Thirdly, they must not be restricted to a small number of objects; for example, blond is restricted mostly to hair colour. And fourthly, the last, they must be common and known; for example, yellow versus saffron. Berlin and Kay also found that all languages take terms from the following basic list of eleven colour names: white, black, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. Not all languages have the same number of these eleven color terms. Some languages, such as English and Vietnamese, use all eleven, whereas others, such as Dani in New Guinea, use as few as two. These eleven basic colour terms discussed above form a hierarchy which means that if a language has just two terms, these two terms are always black and white, sometimes are converted as dark and light. When a language has a three colour terms, the third term is always red, and so on. In general, Berlin and Kay thus could propose a remarkable degree of universal structure in colour terms.

This hierarchical structure is denoted as follows:

Kay and McDaniel (1978) observed no significant differences in colour perception for speakers of different languages; though their conclusions drawn from a large cross-cultural survey supports that perception tends to largely determines language, rather than language determining perception. Several other studies have shown sensitivity to focal colours as the most salient colours, regardless of cultural naming differences. Rosch (1973) argues that focal colours are more perceptually salient than nonfocal colours and that this salience, in turn, influences the codability and memoability of a colour. It is further pointed out that codability is not so different across languages, and that the perceptual salience of focal colours is a better determiner of how well a colour is picked out, described, or remembered, than are the features of the language in question. Generally, “far from being a domain well suited to the study of the effects of language on thought, the color space would seem to be a prime example for the influence of underlying perceptual-cognitive factors on the formation and reference of linguistic categories” (Heider 1972: 20). Such arguments, though, have been criticized on other grounds. Bringing together such divergent views, Kay and Kempton (1984) note that linguistic differences may bring on nonlinguistic cognitive differences in a feebly related way, but not at all to the degree that universal cognitive processes fail to appear in other appropriate contextual conditions.

In general, results the various studies help us to conclude that under some circumstances the manner in which we perceive and perhaps remember colours is related to the linguistic terms which we use to refer to them. The perceptual salience of colours may also be a crucial factor. It, however, cannot be regarded that one set of factors, linguistic or perceptual, is reducible to the other but that both factors seem to influence our colour cognition. Such ideas, therefore, provide some useful supports for only the weak version of the Whorf’s hypothesis (Carroll 1994). Other proofs of lexical influences on cognition have been examined, for example, by Gupta (2002: 6-13), Kess (1992: 243-6, 251-7), and Carroll (1994: 281-3).

2. Grammatical Influences on Cognition

At the grammatical level, the distinctions employed by a language may influence the ease with which a speaker can adopt a particular mode of thought. Grammatical influences on cognition can be evidenced through some arguments.

2.1. Grammatical Categories and Form Perception

Carroll and Casagrande (1958) tested whether grammatical categories have any effect on perception. They first compared Navaho and English. In fact, Athapaskan languages such as Navaho, Chipewyan, and Hupa have elaborate classificatory schemes with nouns falling into sets such as (i) living being, (ii) round objects, (iii) long rigid objects (e.g., stick), (iv) broad flexible objects (e.g., fabric or cloth), (v) long flexible objects (e.g., rope or a piece of string); (vi) empty containers; (vii) containers with contents; (viii) bundles or packages, (ix) liquid, (x) loose items (e.g., grain, sand or hay), (xi) dense, viscous substances (e.g., mud or dough); and (xii) aggregates or sets (Kess 1992: 246). Carroll and Casagrande’s observation showed that in Navaho, the form of the verb for handling an object varies with the form or shape of the object. It means that the verb varies if the object is a long flexible object versus a long rigid object or a flat flexible object and so on. The results of their observation also indicate that Navaho-speaking children tended to group objects according to shape classes, while English-speaking children tended to group more according to colour. On the basis of this grammatical distinction, Carroll and Casagrande proposed that Navahospeaking children would learn to discriminate the forms of objects at an earlier age than their English-speaking peers. This proposal was not all; because when testing English-speaking children in a Boston suburd, they discovered that these children performed similarly to the Navaho children.

In some ways, the results of the investigation by Carroll and Casagrande (1958) seem to support Whorf’s view that the grammatical distinctions in a language may influence or determine certain cognitive processes. The observations from the Boston suburdan children, nevertheless, also propose that even though grammatical categories determine qualities of thought, they are not the only determinants since other attributes of the child’s environment may serve the same function (Carroll 1994).

2.2. Manner of sentence formation

Language has various manifestations, each of which draws on and contributes to structural constraints on the language created by every other subsystem. A child, during the course of language acquisition simultaneously learns all these systems primarily how to talk in the sentences, how to understand sentences, and how to predict new sentences in his language. These and other skills can mutually influence each other as the child acquires them and as they are integrated in adult language behaviour (Gupta 2002). Thus, the question is that: is there some connection between sentence patterns in a language and the way in which perceptions are ordered? The fact shows that certain aspects of linguistic structure are direct reflections in language of human general cognitive structure and its development.

In his Universals of language, Greenberg (1966: 76) presented logically that there are only six possible word orders for noun subject (Samyutta Nikāya), verb (V) and noun object (O) in declarative transitive sentences in the world’s language; that are, SVO, SOV, VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS Of the six logically possible orders, only the first three SVO, SOV, and VSO occur commonly. Languages such as English, Vietnamese, and Indonesian are SVO; whereas Hindi, Japanese and Turkish are SOV; Tagalog, Welshand and some other Philippine languages are VSO. The last three sequences are either limited or rare to occur; for example, the VOS is used only in far-flung Austronesian language found off the east coast of Africa; the OVS is limited to the Carib family; and the OSV appears only in several small language families in the Brazilian Amazonian basin (see Derbyshire & Pullum 1981).

A generative grammar which founded with the advent of Chomsky (1957) and developed by scholars who passionately followed it seeks to provide a description of the structural basis for intuitions about sentences as in (5a-b).

(5) a. He kicked the ball.
b. Ball the kicked he.

It is obvious that in these two sentences, only (5a) is part of the language and (5b) is not. The basic intuition of ‘sentencehood’ is accounted for if the grammar provides a description only for those sequences that are accepted as sentences. Current transformational grammar represents the traditional notion that sentences have structural levels of description, the basic internal relations among phases, ‘actor, action, object, modifier’, and the explicit relations among phrases in the actual appearance of the sentence. A transformational grammar represents the relations between the internal and external form of a sentence with a set of rules that maps abstract internal structures such as that represented in (6) onto actual sequences (Gupta 2002).

(6) The cat killed the mouse
actor = the cat
action = kill
object = the mouse

Thus, language, as displayed by (6), involves constituents, especially while comprehending language. A constituent is a phrase or basic unit in a sentence that “can be replaced by a single word without a change in function and without doing violence to the rest of sentence” (H. Clark & E. Clark 1977: 48). According to Gupta (2002), all linguistic theories agree that a sentence has an internal and external structure, although they may differ as to the role the internal structures plays within the linguistic description. This obvious explains why talking involves active mapping of internal structures onto external sequences, whereas comprehension involves mapping external sequences onto internal structures. In general, the grammatical elements in a sentence of a language help to specify a crucial set of concepts. This set is highly restricted: only certain concepts appear in it, and not others. Generally, what is viewed is that grammatically specified notions collectively constitute the fundamental conceptual structuring system of a language; that is, this cross-linguistically select set of grammatically specified concepts provides the basic framework for conceptual organization within the cognitive domain of language. This enables us to conclude that human cognitive processes impose certain psychological constraints on language processing, and inversely, grammatical forms of a language tend to influence on those cognitive processes.

In general, a language has been characterized to have two subsystems, designated as the lexical and grammatical, carrying out different, complementary, and indispensable functions respectively. Subsystems of the language specify different portions of a cognitive representation which impose the certain psychological constraint on language processing. While the lexical elements together contribute the majority of the content of a sentence, grammatical elements determine the majority of the structure of the cognitive representation. Together, lexical elements do incorporate some of the same structural indications that grammatical elements express, but when the two are in association or in conflict within a sentence, it is generally always the grammatical elements specifications of structure that are determinative. The grammatical specifications in a sentence provide a conceptual framework, a skeletal structure or scaffolding, for the conceptual material that is lexically specified, whereas in mental lexicon of a language is characterized by the lexical creativity. The processing of the structural units of syntax of a language, on the other hand, as constrained by its size and its quality, is another important parameter that emerges from this perspective of language and cognition (Gupta 2002).

In sum, a full-fledged human language must be reasonably regular in its grammatical forms, must be able to be learned by children owing to the feature of learnability, and must be spoken and understood by adults easily and effectively (Clark, H & Malt 1984). Recent studies at the lexical and grammatical levels do provide some evidences for the weak version of Whorf’s hypothesis and suggest that linguistic structure shows influences on various cognitive operations.