INFORMACIÓN ADICIONAL Composión de Lantus

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6. INFORMACIÓN ADICIONAL Composión de Lantus

One of the most intriguing aspects of studying lexical typology is the rela-tionship between words and the objects, qualities, and events that they describe. How do the categories reflected in vocabulary relate to the real boundaries among things in the world? To what extent do vocabularies cut the world along its natural joints?

For some areas of vocabulary discussed above, the real world does pro-vide separable entities: people referred to by kin terms and by pronouns are distinct entities in the world. Body parts are less clearly delimited by reality: after all, they are all connected, and there are other domains that do not consist of segments at all: for dimensions of size, evaluative quality such as ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ temperature, sound, texture, taste, and smell, it is only language that provides the exact partitions.

One of these scalar dimensions is color. A rainbow shows some striping but the boundaries are fuzzy. Thus, one might expect that languages will label colors by dividing the color spectrum into arbitrary subfields. Due to lack of evidence to the contrary, this was indeed the view that anthropolo-gists and linguists used to take. The first time that this position was con-fronted with empirical data on a large scale was in the late 1960s when two anthropologists at the University of California in Berkeley, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, gathered information about color terms in 98 languages and presented their results in a ground-breaking study ( 1969 ( 1991 )).

Berlin and Kay offered two major findings both indicating that color nomenclature did not vary arbitrarily across languages. First, they pro-posed that there was a finite pool of 11 colors from which languages picked their basic terms. Second, they found that while languages differed in how many of these colors they had words for, there was a universal hierarchy that determined the choice. GEN-24 presents the restricted inventory from which languages choose their basic color terms; GEN-25

in turn charts the constraints on the choices from this set . GEN-25 offers one unrestricted universal: that all languages have words for black and white. In addition, it represents a number of implicational universals: if a language has a term for any one of the colors, it also has terms for all the colors to the left.

GEN-24 The inventory of basic color categories is as follows:

BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, BROWN, PINK, PURPLE, ORANGE, GREY.

GEN-25 The following implicational relations hold among the basic color terms in languages (Berlin and Kay 1969 : 5) Here are examples of languages for some of the types.

(54) BLACK, WHITE: Jalé (Papua New Guinea) BLACK, WHITE, RED: Tiv (Nigeria)

BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW: Ibo (Nigeria) BLACK, WHITE, RED, GREEN: Ibibio (Nigeria)

BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW, GREEN: Tzeltal (Mexico)

BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE: Plains Tamil (India) BLACK, WHITE, RED, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, BROWN: Nez Perce

(State of Washington)

The force of these claims in GEN-24 and GEN-25 is staggering. First, the pool of the 11 color terms is chosen from a literally infinite number of distinctions that could be made within the color spectrum. Second, the logically possible combinations of the 11 color terms amount to 2.048 types (such as “only brown,” “only black and pink,” “only red, blue and brown,” and so forth). In contrast, the hierarchy allows for only a minute subset of the combinatory possibilities: 22 types. This situation represents a paradigm example of a scientific puzzle: the existence of a large gap between what is conceivable and what is actu-ally found.

Since 1969, much more research has been carried out on color terminol-ogy and it has modified some of the original findings (see Hardin and Maffi 1997 ; Kay et al . 2009 ). This work has unearthed exceptions to the pool. For example, an additional basic color term – turquoise – has been found in at least one language, Tsakhur, a Nakh-Daghestanian language of the Caucasus. The hierarchy has also been modified somewhat: white and black cannot be said to be universal since some languages, such as Pirahã, have no color terms at all (Everett 2008 : 119); and grey may have a higher position in the hierarchy.

More importantly, the very basis of the research has been questioned by some researchers (Lucy 1997 ; Wierzbicka 2008 ). The major point of

criticism has to do with the nature of the data. Berlin and Kay presented speakers of languages with the color spectrum through the use of Munsell color chips and asked them to name the chips. The words provided by the consultants were then taken to be color terms in the respective languages.

But how do we know that the words did not have some other more basic meaning, such as referring to some objects that happened to have that color? The words obtained from the different languages must have over-lapped in their referential range but before it could be established that they were color terms, we would need to probe into the typical uses of those words in each language. In fact, the very notion of color may not be a linguistic category in all languages; people may not be paying attention to color in all cultures. Wierzbicka makes this point in connection with the Australian language Warlpiri (2008: 420):

The Warlpiri people do of course see what we call ‘colours’ and can be very sensitive to differences that we would think of as differences in colour. Judging by linguistic criteria, however, what we may see as a

‘colour’ (e.g. brown or purplish) they may see as ‘something that looks like something else’ (e.g. earth or smoke).

John Lucy ( 1997 ) provides an example of what he deems to be an analogous situation to Berlin and Kay’s experiment. Imagine a chart depicting various kinds of luggage – the kind that is presented to some-body at an airport who has lost his bags so that airline personnel could identify the type of the errant luggage. Suppose you show this chart to speakers of different languages, point at the various pictures and ask them to name them. You cannot be sure that what you get is equivalents of the English terms duffel bag , briefcase , and so forth. Instead, consul-tants may come up with words that refer to objects that resemble those depicted, such as ‘large object,’ ‘looks like a house,’ etc. From such a test, one could not establish a set of “luggage universals” because the test would be fundamentally biased by the assumption that the notion of luggage and its various kinds are available in the various cultures. The same problem arises in connection with eliciting color terms by show-ing color chips.

Nonetheless, it seems uncontroversial that the inventory of universally available basic color terms is restricted and that there are some prefer-ences guiding the choice that languages make from among these terms.

Given the very large number of logical possibilities noted above, the ques-tion arises how the enormous gap between possible and actual can be explained. Why is the pool restricted? Why are some colors preferentially chosen? And why does a particular language opt for one or the other from among the alternatives?

The explanation for the constraints on the pool and on the hierarchy must have to do both with the physics of color and with the way the human visual apparatus perceives colors. The answer to the third question – why a given language has one set of colors as opposed to another – may be social.

Berlin and Kay noted a correlation between complexity of color terminology and cultural complexity: languages spoken in cultures with less developed

technology – such as those of New Guinea – are the ones with simpler color terminology. It seems that people have a more differentiated view of color if they do not just see naturally occurring colors but they also create and manipulate them.

* * * *

In our vocabulary survey, it has become clear that the human perception of reality, rather than reality itself, is the basis of the meanings and struc-tures of words. The vocabulary of a language is a depository of thoughts:

of our perceptions and interpretations of the world. This much is non-controversial: thought creates words. But then a related question arises: is this a unidirectional causation? Or do words in turn affect thought? Is our perception of reality influenced by the way our language cuts up the world?

In our everyday life, we act as if we believe the answer is in the affirma-tive: if there are alternative ways of expressing the same meaning, we opt for one that steers thought in the right direction. Why do people prefer to use the phrase “if anything happens to me” rather than “if I die”? Why is the phrase “collateral damage” used in some military documents for civil-ian casualties? Why “visually handicapped” rather than “blind”? The use of these euphemistic expressions reveals our fear that the more direct words will channel thought in the wrong direction.

But what about cases where a language does not offer a choice of expressions? Pondering the great diversity of languages, the renowned Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson said: “Languages differ essen-tially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey” (cited in Deutscher 2010 : 151). Examples abound. In Turkish, it is quite possible to conduct a lengthy conversation about a person without his or her gen-der being revealed because, as we saw above, the third-person singular pronoun has a single gender-less form. In English, this would be near-impossible because the language forces us to choose between he and she . Does this mean that English speakers have a gendered view of the world while Turkish speakers have an ungendered perspective?

On one level, language clearly determines thought: for the purposes of speaking English, speakers have to keep gender in mind. As Dan Slobin has put it ( 2003 : 158–161), “thinking for speaking” requires a specific thought pattern that is appropriate for the language. In other words, if we want to express something in a given language, the idea needs to be forced into the channels dictated by that language.

But does language influence thought also on a deeper, non-linguistic level? Do English speakers consider gender ONLY WHEN they want to use a third-person pronoun or does the gendered view pervade their entire perception of the world? According to Benjamin Whorf’s and Edward Sapir’s influential theory, the answer is yes: their view, known as the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, claims a strong effect on thought exerted by language. How can we test this claim? What would be decisive evidence to establish that language affects non-linguistic thought and behavior?

Chosen from among the large number of experiments that provide evi-dence for or against linguistic relativity, here follows a recent study about color differentiation. Psychologist Jonathan Winawer and his co-workers ( 2007 ) set up an experiment to test the ways in which English and Russian subjects differentiated shades of blue. The crucial point is that Russian has distinct basic terms for dark blue ( goluboj ) and light blue ( sinij ) while in English, the term blue covers both. Subjects were presented with sets of three color chips, one on the top and two at the bottom. The task was to determine which of the two chips at the bottom matched the one on the top. What the experimenters were interested in was reaction time: how easy was it for subjects to arrive at the right answer? Results showed that if the two bottom chips differed in that one shade belonged to goluboj and the other to sinij , the Russian subjects could decide in less time whether either of them was like the top chip than if the bottom chips were both shades of goluboj or sinij . For the English subjects, this did not make a dif-ference. Thus, Russians perceived the colors as more different when they had separate terms for them. Winawer et al . arrived at the following conclu-sion: “(it) is not that English speakers cannot distinguish between light and dark blues but rather that Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them” (7783).

Based on other relevant experiments, a similar opinion is articulated by Stanley Witkowski and Cecil Brown ( 1982 : 411): “Our view is that lexical salience both mirrors and magnifies the inherent physical-perceptual salience of color referents and thus affects color behavior.” Language does not determine the way people see the world but it frames reality for us by focusing attention on certain aspects of the world.

Probing into the vast differences among vocabularies of different lan-guages is a broadening experience. If we only know one language, it seems that it is the only way for a language to be. Learning about other lan-guages, we discover that just because something is familiar to us, it may not be the only option ; there are diverse ways in which words can capture reality.

This is the same experience as learning about new cultures. We learn that one can consume calf’s brain, dog meat, or buttered tea with relish;

one can live without taking showers and even without bathrooms; and it is OK to bow rather than shake hands when meeting somebody. The experience is also comparable to how mankind’s knowledge of astrono-my has broadened over the centuries. Before Copernicus came around in the sixteenth century, people thought that the earth – their very own planet – was the center of the universe and that therefore it was some-thing very special. Copernicus, however, demoted the earth from its sublime status when he proposed that it was the sun that was the center of the galaxy rather than the earth. Then, in the early twentieth century, astronomers came to realize that even our galaxy was not distinguished:

it was one of countless billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars like our sun. We have thus gradually come to see our proper place in the 14-billion-years-old cosmos. In John Coleridge’s words, mankind was getting “habituated to the vast.”

In the course of their expanding knowledge, astronomers have learnt two things about the universe. One is its enormous expanse and the vari-ability of its forms. The other is that there are general physical laws spanning the variation. The attempt to assess variation and to discover its limits is a common denominator uniting crosslinguistic studies, crosscul-tural studies, and the study of the universe. In the following chapter, we will continue to pursue this quest by viewing language structure beyond vocabulary.

Summary

In the introductory section of this chapter, two features of an ideal vocabulary were envisaged: (i) There is a word for everything. (ii) From the way a word sounds, it is easy to tell what it means.

Regarding (i): we saw that the concept of “everything” was blurry;

but however it may be defined, it is not true that even a single language could comply with this requirement. Languages do have words for some things; but the very notion of a distinct “thing” is elusive: languages differ in how they segment and categorize the world. What is a name-worthy part and nameable kind in one language may not be that in another language.

Regarding (ii): we saw that languages make some use of

compositionality: putting morphemes together so that the sum of the meanings of the morphemes at least approximates the meaning of a word; but they do so to varying extent and in varying ways.

With respect to the existence and the composition of words, we encountered both crosslinguistic variation and crosslinguistic invariance. A total of twenty-five crosslinguistic generalizations were presented (GEN-1–GEN-25). By way of a partial review, here are a few examples of our findings.

(A) THE EXISTENCE OF WORDS a. Variation

There are languages that have separate words for toes and fingers and there are languages that do not have separate words for them.

b. Invariance

If a language has a word for ‘purple,’ it also has a word for ‘red.’

(B) THE MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE OF WORDS a. Variation

Some languages use ‘twenty’ as a base in their numeral system;

others do not.

b. Invariance

If a language forms the plural of the second-person pronoun with a nominal plural marker, it does the same for the plural of the third-person pronoun.

Furthermore, from the survey of the six semantic fields, a very general pattern emerged spanning both the existence of words and their mor-phological structure. This pattern is markedness. The picture is frag-mented but its outlines are clear: there is a tendency for three basic characteristics of words to cluster: syntagmatic simplicity, paradigmat-ic complexity, and frequency. Examples include body-part terms for the upper body being simpler in structure, more variegated, and more frequent; consanguineal kin terms being more simple in structure, having more subdistinctions, and being more frequent; singular pro-nouns being monomorphemic, having gender-differentiated forms and being more frequent; lower numerals being monomorphemic, dif-ferentiated for gender, and more frequent; and adjectives of antonymic pairs referring to the salient pole of the dimension being morphologi-cally simple, showing distinctions that are neutralized at the marked pole of the opposition, and being more frequent. Markedness patterns will continue to crop up in the following chapters on syntax, mor-phology, and phonology as well (Chapter 4 , Section 4.2.2.2, Chapter 5 , Section 5.3, and Chapter 7 , Section 7.3).

Activities

1. Body part words are often polysemous: they are used in extended and figurative senses. Here are some examples for finger :

(a) The fingers of this glove are too tight for me.

(b) A long finger of the island reaches far into the sea.

(d) Joe likes to have a finger in every pie.

Similar extensions of meaning can also be found for the word hand as in the hands of the clock , or in Give me a hand . Find such extended or figurative uses for head , face , shoulder , leg , and foot and determine what are common properties of the various uses of any one of these words. Compare similar examples from other languages.

2. This exercise has to do with special uses of color words.

(a) Color terms are at times used idiomatically to describe objects whose actual color does not match the meaning of the word. An example is white wine .

(b) Some color words are specific to particular objects; such as blond , which is used only for hair and wood.

For each pattern, find additional examples in English and try to find reasons for the special uses. Collect examples from other languages as well and compare them with the English uses.

3. Words like ‘minute,’ ‘hour,’ ‘day,’ ‘week,’ ‘month,’ ‘year,’ ‘decade,’ and

‘century‘ serve to segment the continuum of time. To what extent are they based on natural divisions?