David Birdsong and Terence Odlin University of Texas at Austin

If Whorf Was on the Right Track: A Review of The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language and Thinking in China and the West. Alfred H. Bloom. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981. 106 PP.

The perennial questions are posed again: Do linguistic structures influence processes of thought, and, if so, do cross-linguistic cognitive differences follow as a consequence? These questions, elaborated in the so- called Whorfian linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity hypotheses (Whorf 1956), are often dismissed as so much fodder for undergraduate classroom debates and cocktail party chat; yet they serve as the point of departure for a serious and significant study, Alfred Bloom’s The Linguistic Shaping of Thought.

The study consists of an introduction to the Whorfian problem (in its twentieth century formulations) and two chapters. The first chapter deals with specific differences in the syntactic, lexical, and morphological structures of Chinese and English. These differences appear to be concomitant with differences in cognitive styles which, Bloom maintains, are reflected in divergent cultural patterns. The second chapter presents a plausible sketch of the ontogenesis of such cognitive differences. Throughout the book the fundamental question which Bloom poses-and for which he offers an affirmative answer-is “Was Whorf on the right track?”

Bloom’s approach to this issue blends psychophilosophical argumentation comparable to Julia Penn’s Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas ( I 972) with empirical data-gathering reminiscent of that reported in Cole and Scribner (1974) and of the better offerings in Rik Pinxten’s collection (1 976), Universalism versus Relativism in Language and Thought. In its detailed analysis of particular structures (as well as in the interesting interpretations of the results), The Linguistic Shaping of nought should provide further input into research in second language acquisition (cf. Clarke et al. 1981; Guiora and Acton 1979) conducted on Whorfian questions.

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After a thorough introduction which ably situates the study within the context of thinking by twentieth century philosophers, psychologists, and linguists on Whorfian ideas, Bloom proceeds to the structural specifics of his argument. Chapter I , “The Distinctive Cognitive Legacies of English and Chinese,” addresses a crucial question: “Could having or not having counterfactual constructions in one’s language play a significant role in determining how inclined one will be to think in counterfactual terms?”(p. 14). The motivation for this question is that Chinese (at least in most of its varieties) has no formal lexical or syntactical means to signal distinct hypothetical or counterfactual premises. Where English and other Indo- European languages use contrasting syntactic structures to distinguish meanings as in

If you bum your finger, it hurts. (IMPLICATIONAL) If you burned your finger, it would hurt. (HYPOTHETICAL) If you had burned your finger, it would have hurt. (COUNTER- FACTUAL)

Chinese uses a single structure. Thus implicational, hypothetical, and counterfactual meanings could all be derived from the same conditional sentence. Deciding which of the alternatives is appropriate is a matter of extrasentential inference. Second, compared to speakers of other languages, the Chinese appear to shun counterfactual reasoning both in speech and in texts, and have difficulty solving deduction problems containing hypothetical or counterfactual premises. Accordingly, Bloom seeks to determine whether these cognitive phenomena are causally related to a linguistic phenomenon, namely, the absence of explicit counterfactual marking.

Bloom presents an array of evidence to affirm that there are causal relations. In a series of formal tests, Chinese subjects consistently responded to such questions as “If the Hong Kong government had passed such-and-such a law, how would you have reacted?“ by declaring, “It didn’t,” or “It won’t.’’ Another group was given a less loaded question: “If all circles were large and this small triangle were a circle, would it be large?” posed in their native tongue. Only 25% of the Chinese subjects said “Yes,” as opposed to 83% of the Americans in a comparison group. Most of the Chinese responded, “No! How can all circles be large? How can a triangle be a circle? What do you mean?” Interestingly, when a group of Chinese- English bilinguals was asked the question in English, 43% answered it with the correct counterfactual interpretation. Other evidence is found in texts written by the Chinese. Bloom’s analysis of issues of a Taiwanese

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newspaper appearing over a three-week period revealed just one instance of counterfactual reasoning, and that was contained in the translation of a speech by Henry Kissinger. The writings of Mao, on the other hand, contained counterfactual reasoning; this apparent anomaly may be attributable to the influence of Western philosophy on his thinking. Bloom reports that Mao’s ideas are quite accessible to Western readers of Chinese prose, who find traditional Chinese works difficult; the opposite seems to hold for the Chinese themselves.

These are provocative findings to be sure. Their impact is attenuated, however, by certain flaws in Bloom’s presentation. First, it is not entirely clear what types of conditional premises and interpretations are problematic. Bloom’s testing suggests that certain hypotheticals (e.g., ”If all circles were large.. . ”) are as difficult for the Chinese as genuine counterfactuals (e.g., “If the Hong Kong government had passed such-and- such a law. . . ”). From these examples it would appear that the problematic type of question.is one which denies an obvious truth, be it a truth concerning a past event such as the government’s lawmaking or concerning a present or timeless state such as the form of a geometrical figure. This, apparently, is what Bloom means by “counterfactual.” It is easy for the reader to overlook this lumping together of the hypothetical and contrary- to-fact types because of Bloom’s careless use of idest: “The English speaker has a distinct label for the counterfactual (i.e., ‘had. . .would have’)” (p. 20).

One text used to test the Chinese ability to arrive at appropriate counterfactual interpretations raises further questions:

Bier was an 18th century European philosopher who wanted very much to investigate the principles of the universe and the laws of nature. Because there was some contact between China and Europe at that time. Chinese philosophical works could be found in Europe; but none had been translated. Bier could not read Chinese, but if he had been able to read Chinese he would have found that while Western philosophers generally investigated natural phenomena as individual entities, Chinese philosophers generally investigated natural phenomena in t e r m of their mutual interrelationships. If Bier had read Chinese philosophy he would certainly have been influenced by it, havesynthesized it with Western philosophy, and have created a theory which not only explained natural phenomena as individual entities, but which also made clear their interrelationships. This theory would not only have overcome a weakness in the Western philosophy ofthat time. but also would have had a deep influence on German, French, and Dutch philosophy leading them closer to science.

Please indicate, by choosing one or more of the following answers, what contribution or contributions Bier made to the West according to the paragraph above:

I. Bier led Western philosophy to pay attention to natural phenomena as individual entities.

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2. He led Western philosophy to pay attention to the mutual interrelationships among natural phenomena.

3. He led Western philosophy one step closer to science.

4. He led Western philosophy closer to science.

5 . None of these answers are appropriate.

(please explain your own opinion briefly). (p. 98)

Bloom claims that the fundamental syllogism in this text and those in several similar texts were expressed in Chinese, for a lack of a way to express the counterfactual directly, as “X was not the case; but if X was, then Y, then Z, then W, etc.”(p. 22). Could it be that different results would have been achieved if the problem had taken the form “Q was the case; but if X was, then Y, etc.’? In other words, could it be possible that explicit negative premises affect ease of solution in counterfactual syllogisms? The work of Clark (1969), Sternberg (1980), and others indicates that syllogisms such as “A is not as good as B; who is better?/ who is worse?” make for longer response latencies than those like “A is worse than B; who is better?/ who is worse?” Likewise, syllogisms of the form “If X is not as tall as Y, and Z is not as tall as X, who is the tallest/shortest?“are more difficult than “If X is shorter than Y, and Z is shorter than X, who is the tallest / shortest?” Here are clear differences in formal linguistic features which generate differing cognitive results; might this phenomenon be implicated in Bloom’s findings?

Regarding the explicit-negative initial premise, Bloom asserts that this is “. . .the way that the counterfactual is expressed when it is expressed in Chinese outside of the more usual concrete situational contexts, as in Mao’s writings or the translation of the Kissinger quote” (pp. 22-23). Earlier, we are assured by Bloom that in the “. . . more usual concrete situational contexts,” counterfactual reasoning is commonplace:

Imagine, for example, a situation in which a group of people have been waiting for John. He arrives late and they are, as a result, late for the movies. Under suchcircumstances, one cay say, in Chinese, “If John come-past-earlier. they arrive at the movies on time” and mean in English, “If John had come earlier, they would have (but didn’t) arrive at the movies on time”. . .within a concrete situational context which negates its premise.. . sentences can be used to express a counterfactual thought, even though there is no explicit linguistic marking in the sentence to signal that it is to be understood in that way. (p. 19)

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Comparing the description of concrete versus abstract counterfactuals, it would seem that the Chinese do have a functional marking for entry into the abstract counterfactual mode, namely, an explicit negative (e.g., Bier did not speak Chinese, but if. . . ). Bloom claims that for everyday concrete counterfactuals, there is no need for such marking, as the proper interpretation is readily inferred. Is the explicit negative indeed a marking for entry into the abstract counterfactual mode? Is difficulty with processing a result of its infrequent use or of its inherent cognitive complexity?

In fairness to Bloom, it is not surprising that such a ground-breaking study raises as many questions as it answers. A bit more precision would have been welcome, however, in the areas noted above and in other sections as well. Confusions arise in terminology (where, for instance, “subjective” instead of “subjunctive” is used to describe counterfactual markings in Spanish and German [p. 141) as well as in explanations which become hard to follow because of extremely convoluted sentences. Likewise, Bloom’s rendering of the concrete-counterfactual example above (“If John come- past-earlier . , . ’? introduces for the first time a past-tense marker; Bloom’s earlier description insisted that a single structure, apparently uninflected for tense, was employed for all types of conditional sentences. Also lacking in Bloom’s account is mention of the variety of Chinese under consideration. Non-Sinophones (such as ourselves) likely will find it disconcerting to consult Li and Thompson’s Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1981) and discover four additional words for ifquite unlike any of those mentioned by Bloom.

In addition to the divergent ways of encoding conditionals, the differences between the morphosyntactic patterns in Chinese and Indo- European languages are another basis for the Whorfian arguments that Bloom employs. For Bloom, the significance of those patterns is most apparent in what he sees as a tendency of speakers of Indo-European toward the “entification” of properties and actions:

. , . when an English speaker adds "-ity,""-ness,""-ante,""-tion,""-merit,"“-age," to talk of “sincerity,” “redness,” “importance,” and “abstraction,” of “the committees’s ‘acceptance’ of that proposal,“ of “John’s ‘discovery’ of that ancient theory,” of ”the ‘proliferation’ of nuclear arms,” or of “Joan’s ‘generalization’ of the argument from one context to another,” he talks of properties and actions as if they were things; he converts in effect what are in his baseline model of reality characteristics of things and acts things perform into things themselves-and by means of such entification, ascends to a more conceptually detached way of dividing up the world. (p. 37)

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In contrast, it is only recently-and by virtue of Western influences, according to Bloom-that Chinese has developed somewhat productive morphological patterns which allow for entification. Moreover,

. . . the use of these nominalizingdevices does not yet constitute a natural, freely productive aspect of Chinese grammar. Sentences employing such devices are still perceived as markedly foreign in flavor by a very large segment of the present-day Taiwanese and Hong Kong populations and, as such, are considered to be less aesthetic if, at times, unavoidable, alternatives to “purely” Chinese adjectival forms. (p. 38)

Thus,

in presentday Taiwan, for example, one can shift from talking about “something being possible” to “the possibility of something” and from “something being important” to “the importance of something,” but no acceptable means has yet emerged for converting “white” to “whiteness,” “probab1e”to “probability,””subtle” to “subtlety,” or “abstract” to “abstraction,” much less for transforming “accept” to “acceptance,” “preserve” to “preservation,” “elucidate“ to “elucidation” or ”generalize” to “generalization”. (p. 39)

Again, Bloom presents several kinds of evidence to support his contention. One kind comes from Chinese syntax: As a left-branching language, Chinese cannot, according to Bloom, allow extremely long modifying clauses to precede an N P head which has yet to be identified. Thus statements in English such as “Congress just passed a law which imposes a tax on the use of private cars in large cities and encourages the use of public transportation” cannot normally be translated into Chinese without breaking up numerous internal levels of subordination within the sentence. Bloom further provides evidence that the relatively low tolerance in Chinese for multiple levels has consequences not only for the structure of discourse but also for the way problem solving proceeds. First, he presents a conjectural picture of what entification encourages in the cognition of English speakers:

. ..repeated exposure to talk of entified conditions and events and to theoretical accountings constructed out of them would over time tend to lead English speakers to develop cognitive schemas that would enable and in fact predispose them not only to move freely in speech from talking about them as if they were conceptual units of abstracted, theoretical structures, but to move freely in thought as well, from operating with conditions and events and their interrelationships qwr actual or potential occurrences to operating with them as a function of the roles they play or might be made to play in abstracted. theoretical structures. (p. 48)

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Then, on the hypothesis that speakers of languages relying less on entification, such as Chinese speakers, will not solve problems in the same way, he reports a series of tests and their results, including the test below:

John Donahue has the following peculiar characteristics: When the humidity in the atmosphere is relatively low, the hotter the temperature and the less f sh he eats, the more comfortable he feels. However, when the humidity is very high, these relationships reverse.

According to the paragraph above, which two of the following conditions make John Donahue the least comfortable:

I. high temperature

2. high temperature

3. high temperature eats a lot of fish

4. high temperature eats a lot of fish

5. low temperature eats a lot of fish

doesn’t eat much fish

doesn‘t eat much fish

relatively low humidity

very high humidity

relatively low humidity

very high humidity

relatively low humidity @. 51)

The proportion of English speakers who selected the correct options (#2 and #5) was only 3596, but it was significantly higher than the proportion of successful Chinese (who took the test translated into Chinese): a mere 3%. Other test results indicated similar discrepancies in performance between subject groups which seem to have been composed of individuals comparable in all respects except native language.

While Bloom’s results do provide considerable support for his argument, they also leave a reader with unanswered questions. Why, if language differences constitute the critical dependent variable on the test, did so many native speakers of English do poorly on the test? Presumably Bloom would contend that not all native English speakers have yet developed the conceptual software needed to arrive at successful solution of such problems. Recalling the results he obtained from Chinese-English bilinguals on the circle-triangle problem described above, we find Bloom implying that problem solving is not only a developmental challenge involving language but also a challenge which bilingualism can go a long way to meet. While such a position is plausible, it is far from certain, The research of Clark, Sternberg, and others on lexical markedness (where, for example, marked adjectives such as low and less present cognitive diffkulties relative to their unmarked counterparts such as high and more)

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may have implications for the performance of subjects on the John Donahue test; moreover, performance may have been affected by the metaphoric extensions of high and low to describe temperatures.

The second (and final) chapter of Bloom’s study consists of conjectures (often repetitious) of how conceptual software (or “schemata”) may develop in interaction with language acquisition strategies. Though at times misleading-for example, his presentation of Rosch’s work on prototypes distorts her position as one definitely opposed to any kind of featural representation, whereas in reality Rosch (1 978) considers the adequacy of featural representation to be an open question-Bloom’s conjectures on schemata are quite plausible. Schemata develop, he believes, only with constant exposure to situations which require special processing. Thus, like programs computer users can construct to bypass repeated processing routines, humans can develop special categories (e.g. “counterfactuality,” “entification,” etc.) which reduce the cognitive load often entailed in problem solving and other complex mental activities. But except for a few cross-cultural studies (e.g., Greenfield et al. 1966), he presents relatively little evidence to bear out his speculations. Readers thus cannot help but wonder to what extent the results of Bloom’s test reflect differences in the kinds of problem solving encouraged within cultures. In other words, could it be the case that the Chinese bilinguals often were successful with the test problems because of previous study in fields requiring similar types of thinking rather than because of their exposure to syntactic structures and discourse peculiar to a Western language?

His argument on entification raises other questions as well. Bloom explicitly takes a position similar to that of Chomsky (1972) on the lexicalist hypothesis where only some morphologically complex words are transformationally derived. Yet, simultaneously, Bloom takes a position close to that of linguists such as Chafe (1970) where parts of speech have a semantic as well as a syntactic characterization; while Bloom’s eclecticism is not contradictory it is a little unusual. The semantic assumptions in his approach, moreover, raise implications which he does not discuss. For Bloom, the part-of-speech classification noun clearly serves to categorize persons, things, and entities. He does not make clear, however, what, if any, commonalities there are between persons, things, and entities. Most likely, both persons and things are also entities of a more particular sort, perhaps corresponding to Lyons’s notion (1977) of first-, second-, and third-order nouns. In any case this is not spelled out. Moreover, it is not clear whether Bloom considers both action verbs and statives, which many

Review Essay 409

grammarians of Chinese (e.g., Chao 1968) have analyzed as both belonging to a single superordinate class of verbs, to have something in common semantically. In most semantically based theories of parts-of-speech the canonical meaning ascribed to verbs is, in some sense or another, “action.” There is clearly a Whorfian implication in all this: If nouns always involve entities, then adjectives and verbs may (for Chinese speakers) always involve some sense of action. Thus sentences we have heard in English from Chinese speakers such as *Can Iabsent? would entail a suggestion of active effort to be absent which the English translation equivalent Can I be absent? may not have. Whether or not this implication is reading?oo much into Bloom’s arguments, he should further clarify the emantic assumptions of his grammatical analysis.

In research we have conducted on part-of-speech anomalies such as the one just cited, we have found examples of other kinds as well from Chinese speakers, for example, *Childrens are trained in this traditional from they are very small and *I don ’t have confident of getting a A grade in rhis test, where adjectives perform nominal functions. Given all of Bloom’s arguments, it would seem natural to explain these on the basis of differences in the semantics and morphology of Chinese and English. However, contrastive analysis alone does not appear to explain every case of part-of-speech anomaly, as in * . . . not only did the Spanish discovery a New World. . . and * . . . the first clue in the discover of the treasure. . . which were produced by Spanish speakers. The translation equivalents of discover and discovery in Spanish are descubrir and descubrimiento- unmistakably parallel cross-linguistically, both in terms of semantics and morphology. A contrastive analysis based on Bloom’s assumptions would not predict such anomalies from Spanish speakers. While Bloom presents very intriguing instances of what may well involve language transfer, there is a need for caution in any inferences about language transfer or other issues in language structure and acquisition which might be drawn from his study. The results of the John Donahue test are fully consonant with the findings of Clarke et al. (198 1) on relations between grammatical gender and perception of objects, but the comparative behavior of Spanish and Chinese speakers in relation to part-of-speech anomalies seems consonant with very different findings on gender and perception discussed by Guiora and Acton (1979). Clearly, reconciling the differences of such findings and answering the relevant theoretical questions, not to mention clarifying the pedagogical implications, will require a great deal more investigation.

Though there are many unanswered questions (as well as questionable

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assumptions) in his work, Bloom does provide enough empirical support for his case to justify speculation on wider implications of his findings. For example, in his approach to entification he posits “abstract entities” which have strong resemblances to Platonic abstract objects (cf. Lyons 1977). Moreover, he cites historical accounts of Chinese science which contend that while empiricism and skepticism were strong currents in the traditional Chinese outlook, the disinterest in hypothetical worlds may have impeded model-building which would have led to more scientific discoveries and fuller development of scientific method. If Bloom is correct about the West having further developed scientific method because of a general tendency-both linguistic and cultural-to allow for abstract entification, he then has provided very persuasive evidence for abstract objects as ontological as well as psychological constructs and thus has seriously undermined the nominalist tradition in philosophy. Yet at the same time, his approach is unmistakably non-Platonic, both in terms of the empirical support he sought (through tests) for his suppositions and in terms of his convictions that language is embedded in a cultural matrix and that the acquisition of language is as much a product of acculturation as of innate cognitive capacity. His findings, then, counter the notion that language acquisition is more or less achieved by middle childhood. Failure to solve problems such as the John Donahue conundrum presented above would likely indicate insufficient exposure to (as well as use of) discourse structures which help to categorize reality in terms of abstract interrelations. His emphasis on the development of conceptual schemata networks shows an unmistakable affinity with studies such as Olver and Hornsby (1966) which suggest that language acquisition continues into adolescence with new uses for pronominal anaphora and greater use of abstract terms in discourse.

His developmental and cultural theories clearly imply that the Western scientific approach represents, in some sense, a cognitive advance. Nevertheless, he avoids comparisons that smack of chauvinism. Both by acknowledging a likely influence of the Chinese outlook on Western thinking (via Leibnitz), before which the West had previously given less consideration to interrelatedness of all phenomena, and by pointing out liabilities incurred with hypothetical and entificational modes of thinking, he presents the traditional Chinese outlook as a necessary counterbalance to the speculative tendencies of Western philosophy. The Chinese emphasis on the world-as-it-is serves, according to Bloom, as a valuable check on both scientific and ethical imagination. Science obviously becomes anemic

Review &say 411

when the dialectic strays too far from the facts and there are just as serious social and individual risks in speculative thinking:

When analyzing theoretically, moreover, as the Chinese see it. it is particularly easy to separate what is seen as morally right from what is seen as economically, politically, or socially effective; particularly easy to allow a set of abstract justifications and considerations to obscure the concrete effects that a decision or policy may have on individual human beings.. . more generally, in moving away from involvement with the real world to the assumption of a theoretical perspective on it, it is particularly easy to delegitimate the dictates of one's own emotional and intuitive life and thereby to undercut the source of one's own sense of personal confidence and autonomy and restrict unnaturally the potential dimensions of one's own experience. (p. 57)

Thus while suggesting unique advantages of Western ways of thinking, Bloom nevertheless is careful to point out its limitations, thereby avoiding any smugness in his comparisons. At its worst, a Whorfian approach degenerates into racism (something that one can hardly attribute to Whorf's own thinking, however). At its best, it transcends platitudes that every culture is unique and that every culture is equally valid, and instead informs us of the assets and liabilities in other people's ways of thinking as well as in our own. Even if further support for Bloom's thesis is long in coming, he has admirably given reasons to contemplate once again the spaces between ourselves and others.

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