Paper 4, Question 2
Language plays a huge role in everybody's lives. It does not matter what your background is, what language you speak, what country you're from, your religion, or your culture. The language will always be vital. The article's headline states that a Stanford researcher says that language can shape how we think. I agree with the researcher's statement. I think language plays a huge role in the way we think. The way we perceive language can affect the way we think. When we are presented with new information, that information has to go through the mental process which includes: perception, memory, and emotions. The language in which we are presented with new information affects the way we view it.
Lea Borodlitsky is a researcher at Stanford University she spent many years of her life trying to find out if language can change the way we think. After studying for many years, she came to the conclusion that language does in fact change the way we think and perceive information. Her main focus was looking at people who spoke other languages like Spanish, Russian, Australian, etc. This is important because it gave her a variety of backgrounds, dialects, and other languages on to base her research. Boroditsky wanted a variety of people because she wanted to find the differences in how people from other cultures, backgrounds, and languages are affected by language. She found that every language is different. For example, ¨Some languages require their speakers to include temporal information in every utterance, ¨ this means that people who speak other languages might be affected by it in a different way than anyone else would.
A hypothesis that supports Borodlitky´s statement in the article would be the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The hypothesis states that the structure of a language affects the speakers. In this case, this hypothesis supports the article because they both believe the same thing. Edward Sapir would completely agree with Borodlitky´s statement about language and the way it affects the way we think.
The article gives the example of a cup dropping on the floor. Borodlitky stated that English speakers would say, ¨She broke the cup,¨ whereas Spanish or Japanese speakers would say, ¨the cup broke itself¨ I personally grew up speaking Spanish, and I would in fact say, ¨the cup broke itself,¨ because that is just the way we use language. The way other languages structure their sentences affects their speakers in different ways. For example, if someone says, ¨the cup broke itself,¨ it would not make any sense to a person who grew up speaking English. The structure of sentences also affects their meaning of it.
Boroditsky found out languages have different linguistic features. This relates to how people perceive language due to gender and environment, this ties back to the universalism theory by Rik Pinxten. The theory does not support the article because Pincten´s theory stated that culture, background, gender, and time did not affect how people perceive language. I personally disagree with his theory because everyone has different experiences in life and not everyone will have the same effect because not everyone has the same perspective in life, which makes Pinxten´s theory unreliable.
AO1: 7 AO2: 4 AO4: 7
ReplyDeleteI thought that your description of the article was very thorough and clearly demonstrated the key points in the article. Therefore, it had an “effective reference to specific points.” I also found it interesting how you made personal connections to the text. I thought it demonstrated that you had a “detailed understanding” of the concept, since you had experience with it. I had never thought to do this before, and I will try to apply this to my own writing. Furthermore, I thought it was very intuitive how you used both the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” and the “universalism theory” since it was very prevalent in the discussion of the text. There are a couple of additions that would further bolster your discussion. For instance, to further enhance your knowledge of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, you could include the example of the Inuit language and the “three words for [snow’s] different properties” to further describe to the reader the context of the hypothesis. Another addition that you could make would be to put in a few buzzwords such as “linguistic determinism” when discussing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and “linguistic reflectionism” when discussing the universalism theory. This would show the reader your wide understanding of linguistic issues. Overall, your sentences had a nice structure, and there were only a few grammatical errors.
AO1: 7 AO2: 5 AO4:6
ReplyDeleteLoved the way you brought personal experience into the text. It was encouraging to see someone else do this (mostly because I was doubting myself that it worked for this paper). You did it better than me.
Your use of theories was something that I personally overcooked and you most certainly didn’t. That will get major kudos on the test.
Great work as always!
AO1: 3/5. You had a clear understanding of the text however, you used very little quotes and you focused more on your ideas than the information that was given to you in the text. Sharing ideas is important but you need to remember to stay on task.
ReplyDeleteAO2: 4/5. Your writing was overall very clean and precise. The only comment I have is to organize your writing better.
AO4: I am going to give you a 7/10 because you were under word count and did not have enough quotes, however you did a good job with using the hypothesis as a reference.
AO1:
ReplyDelete5/10. In terms of textual evidence, you did a good job with your analysis of the 'blame game' portion of the English language, but you should have expanded more upon the tenses part of the text. Otherwise, you did well with what you had.
AO2:
3/5. Effective expression and mostly relative expression. I feel that part of the description of the author was not entirely necessary.
AO4:
6/10. I feel like you did a great job at bringing up theories from your outside knowledge and incorporating them into the issues that are raised in the text.