Culture and Language

The relationship between culture and language was examined across 39 languages spoken in 71 cultures. Correlations were computed across languages and cultures between the use of first- and second-person singular pronouns (e.g., "I" and "you") and global cultural dimensions such as Individualism, which were previously extracted in large-scale cross-cultural surveys. The personal pronouns were analyzed in terms of the number of first- and second-person singular pronouns and whether the pronouns can be dropped when used as the subject of a sentence in speech. Cultures with pronoun drop languages tended to be less Individualistic than those with nonpronoun drop languages. The number of personal pronouns correlated with some cultural dimensions that reflected different conceptions of the person. Personal deixis (person-indexing pronouns) may provide a window through which cultural practices can be investigated.

[1]  M. Gelfand,et al.  Culture, gender, and self: a perspective from individualism-collectivism research. , 1995, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  E. Hunt,et al.  The Whorfian Hypothesis: A Cognitive Psychology Perspective , 1991 .

[3]  Richard A. Shweder,et al.  Whorf and His Critics: Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Influences on Color Memory , 1979 .

[4]  Mahzarin R. Banaji,et al.  The Influence of Language on Thought , 1993 .

[5]  Virginia Valian.  Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children , 1991, Cognition.

[6]  T. Au,et al.  Chinese and English counterfactuals: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited , 1983, Cognition.

[7]  A. Fiske.  The four elementary forms of sociality: framework for a unified theory of social relations. , 1992, Psychological review.

[8]  M. Bond,et al.  College Students' Spontaneous Self-Concept , 1983 .

[9]  R. Berman,et al.  On acquiring an (S)VO language: subjectless sentences in children’s Hebrew , 1990 .

[10]  S. Schwartz.  Universals in the Content and Structure of Values: Theoretical Advances and Empirical Tests in 20 Countries , 1992 .

[11]  Nozomu Matsubara,et al.  Universals in Judging Wrongdoing: Japanese and Americans Compared , 1983 .

[12]  Roger S. Brown.  Reference in memorial tribute to Eric Lenneberg , 1976, Cognition.

[13]  E. Lenneberg,et al.  A study in language and cognition. , 1954, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[14]  H. Markus,et al.  Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. , 1991 .

[15]  P. Bloom.  Subjectlees sentences in child language , 1990 .

[16]  Michael Harris Bond,et al.  On the Empirical Identification of Dimensions for Cross-Cultural Comparisons , 1989 .

[17]  T. Parsons,et al.  PART 2. Values, Motives, and Systems of Action , 1951 .

[18]  Joel Sherzer,et al.  Discourse‐Centered Approach to Language and Culture , 1987 .

[19]  Virginia Valian,et al.  Null subjects: A problem for parameter-setting models of language acquisition , 1990, Cognition.

[20]  Fons Trompenaars,et al.  National Culture and the Values of Organizational Employees , 1996 .

[21]  E. J. Bourne,et al.  Does the Concept of the Person Vary Cross-Culturally? , 1982 .

[22]  G. Semin,et al.  Unfolding the category of person by verbal abuse , 1990 .

[23]  M. Banaji,et al.  THE WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS REVISITED: A COGNITIVE SCIENCE VIEW OF LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL EFFECTS ON THOUGHT , 1988 .

[24]  S. Cousins.  Culture and self-perception in Japan and the United States. , 1989 .

[25]  Jane H. Hill,et al.  Language and World View , 1992 .

[26]  H. Triandis.  The Self and Social Behavior in Differing Cultural Contexts , 1989 .

[27]  J. McGivney.  “Is she a wife or a mother?” Social order, respect, and address in Mijikenda , 1993, Language in Society.

[28]  Stephen C. Levinson,et al.  Rethinking Linguistic Relativity , 1991, Current Anthropology.