rift: Окружённая среда

Радостный день для немногих оставшихся в живых приверженцев теории Сапира-Ворфа: в Science опубликованы результаты исследования, четко показывающие, что язык таки да определяет сознание.


Peter Gordon, Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia

ABSTRACT: Members of the Pirahã tribe use a "one-two-many" system of counting. I ask whether speakers of this innumerate language can appreciate larger numerosities without the benefit of words to encode them. This addresses the classic Whorfian question about whether language can determine thought. Results of numerical tasks with varying cognitive demands show that numerical cognition is clearly affected by the lack of a counting system in the language. Performance with quantities greater than 3 was remarkably poor, but showed a constant coefficient of variation, which is suggestive of an analog estimation process.


Отрывок:

The Pirahã Language

The structure of the Pirahã language has been described extensively by Dan Evertt (2,3). The language, while somewhat minimal in vocabulary, has very complex verb structure, common to many Native American languages, where a verb stem might consist of several combined simple motion stems to express more complex meanings. To the verb stem are appended up to15 potential slots for morphological markers that encode aspectual notions such as whether events were witnessed, whether the speaker is certain of its occurrence, whether it is desired, whether it was proximal or distal, and so on. None of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender, which we expect to be encoded based on more familiar languages.

There is no recursion in Pirahã grammar so there are no relative clauses or other embedded constructions. Because of this limitation, certain kinds of comparative constructions cannot be formed. One cannot ask whether one group of objects “has more nuts than the other” because this would require an embedded construction that does not exist in the Pirahã grammar. To make such comparisons simple sentences are juxtaposed as in: “This is big (ogii). That is small (hói).” Again, the word for ‘small’ (‘hói’) is the same as the word for ‘one’. There is no word for ‘number’, pronouns do not encode number (e.g., ‘he’ and ‘they’ are the same word), and most of the standard quantifiers like ‘more’, ‘several’, ‘all’, ‘each’ do not exist, although comparable meanings can sometimes be constructed through complex composition of other elements. In general, there is no method of specifically quantifying over 9 number. They can only refer to the size of an array with dimension unspecified. These linguistic limitations severely limit the kinds of experiments that can be carried out in the language because judgments about relative quantities can be true or false depending on whether they are basing their answers on numerosity or amount of stuff.

The common word for ‘many’ (baagi-so), is literally a noun derived from a causative form of the verb meaning ‘to bring together’. The other Pirahã word for ‘many’ (aibai) contrasts with a word that means something like ‘much’ (apagi). This appears to instantiate something like a count/mass distinction, although the exact distributional properties of these terms has not been fully examined in terms of which exact nouns they may or may not modify.


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