LupinoArts

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@jk @appassionato @bookstodon @linguistics What this evidence for linguistic relativity actually shows is how speakers name things, not how they percieve things: two related objects may have different names in one language, but only one in another; but if you present both things to the speakers at the same time, they both will agree that the things are different.
This wouldn't be the case if language (that is, names) were to influence your perception of the world.

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@petealexharris @jk @appassionato @bookstodon @linguistics not quite sure where you're getting at... That linguistic relativism is in itself unfalsifiable because there is no way to conduct any experiments without influencing the results? That would make it entirely worthless as a scientific hypothesis...

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@mapto @jk @appassionato @linguistics Just read this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245631970_Effects_of_language_on_color_discriminability Interesting findings, but i assume the effects could also be explained by priming: If you have a more differentiated lexicon for categories, you are faster at sorting elements into those categories, but this does not necessarily mean that you percieve those elements differently. I wonder, how the results would look if they compared, say, artists against non-artists.

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@appassionato @mapto @jk @linguistics It's the same as with the other paper: All they show is that a broader lexicon improves a subject's ability to put things into categories, but I don't quite get how that should be an argument for linguistic relativism (let alone determinism, as the wording in your quotation suggests): all those experiments say something about linguistic processing, but not (necessarily) about general world perception.

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@pneumaculturist @mapto @jk @appassionato @linguistics well, priming influences how quickly information is accessed during processing. It has not per se something to do with how we percieve the world around us as linguistic relativism would claim.

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@jk @pneumaculturist @mapto @appassionato @linguistics It's been a while and i might be wrong. My line of thinking was that if you see a color patch, the name for that category activates and naming the category goes faster. If the colour borders two different categories for one speaker, activation for both is weaker, while for a speaker that has another category in that area of the spectrum, the activation for that category is stronger and that leads to quicker reaction times.

LupinoArts, 7 months ago

@jk @pneumaculturist @mapto @appassionato @linguistics But yeah, mid way through the debate i wondered if it isn't actually "frequency effects" or some other term i forgotten since i left university ;)

LupinoArts, 8 months ago

@tschfflr @linguistics From years of experience in professional typesetting: (a).

References (internal or external) are part of the sentence, set parentheses like you would do with other interjections:
"…which you can find in Eq. (1)"
vs.
*"…Which you can find in (Eq. 1)",
but:
*"In Einstein's equation for special relativity Eq. (1)…"
vs.
"In Einstein's equation for special relativity (Eq. 1)…"

LupinoArts, 8 months ago

@tschfflr @linguistics It is noteworthy that in both examples (equations and Harvard-style references), the parenthesis around the numbers are a matter of stylistic choice. The correct way for both should be "(see Eq. (1))"/"as in Eq. (1)" and (cf. Chomsky (1990))"/"according to Chomsky (1990)", but most style guides discourage double parenthesis, so they are omitted when the reference as a whole is already parenthesized.