Lecture 19: cultural influence on word meanings revealed through large-scale semantic alignment

define the “universalist” view of language

• language is independent of conception

• language and thoughts are independent

define the “relativist” view of language

• each language has unique meanings relative to the communicative requirements of their culture

• language and thoughts are interconnected

universalist or relativist: different languages have different mappings (different syntax, same semantics)

universalist

universalist or relativist: each culture has a unique conceptual space,, which maps onto cultural constraints

relativist

define “whorfianism”

proposal that language dictates thoughts

what was language used for according to Chomsky?

as a way to organize thoughts

what is language actually used for?

as a communicative tool to do some social signalling

how do universalist and relativist perceive frequent words?

• universalist: common words for animals, artifacts, emotions align across languages

• relativist: words vary across language because of the cultural differences, even common words

define the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”

perception of the world is determined by the language we speak

true or false: only cultural differences impacted language, not geographic

false: both did, but culture was a stronger predictor (possibly due to mass media)

define “adaptation effect”

once you have adapted to a community, you will start communicating in the same way as other members do

true or false: distributional semantics suggest that word meaning is relative of the language

true