Overview of Chomsky and Bloom's Linguistic Theories

Language is a common skill to all human beings. However, when there are 6,500 different languages it divides humanity culturally and mentally. Experts who focus on language have pondered the extend of this divide and proposed that if there are different languages it is bound to shape one’s thoughts. They also concluded that people who speak different languages could never understand each other’s view of the world. Two anthropologists proposed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that the language one speaks unconsciously does in fact shape one’s thinking of the world. This was later theorized as linguistic relativity which states the determination of the world. Two great examples of over this matter are based on the Piraha and the Mandarin cultures.

The first study was based on the Piraha language and culture. The Piraha is a little tribe who live in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. This tribe has shown the world several unique features such as: no numbers, no color terms, no kinships beyond a single parent or first sibling, no religion, no collective memory, and no art. The Piraha shows no evidence for recursion in their language. Which means that they do not have the ability to combine an endless number of ideas in a single sentence. In 2002, Noam Chomsky proposed that recursion is the basis of all human language. A key component of his theory was universal grammar which at the time was the most influential idea in linguistics. Universal grammar argues that the structure of language (the grammar) is innately found in the human genome which is something that a human is born with rather than learned. 

According to Chomsky, he had proposed that all human languages regardless of their surface differences shared a common deep structure known as a universal grammar. This powerful idea had dominated linguistics for more than 50 years. However, Daniel Everett, a missionary, who had a very close relationship with the Piraha and learned their language, had questioned Chomsky's proposition. Everett argued that Chomsky's proposition was not true. Everett proposed that the Piraha language was not based on recursion, meaning that if Pitaha was missing recursion than recursion could not be the basis for all human language. At the time, Everett knew that if his proposition was to be proven true many would believe that the universal case for grammar would be severely undermined. For Everett to turn his proposition into a scientific method, he brought recordings of the Piraha language to MIT. The process in which the recording would go through would be testing them through a language applications computer system that would help determine recursion which would then bring a quantifiable evidence. After three months of evaluating the language MIT had analyzed that there was no clear evidence of proof of recursion structures. They also presented that the Piraha language did not have any linguistic structures found such as conjunctions (there is no 'and' or 'or'). This study helped show the world how a small tribe who was completely uninterested in the outside world gave a little bit of an inside look of human cognition influence of other cultures. This study also presented how culture can affect not just the words of a language but the entire language itself.

Study two is based on another area where language differs radically in the use of logical terms. Linguistic relatively claims that members of different language groups may differ in their logical abilities when they use words such as “if”. A clear test of this prediction compared the Mandarin and English language speakers on their ability to do counterfactual reasoning. Counterfactual reasoning helps denote something that humans do all the time. According to Bloom and Revlin when the study was conducted, the results presented that English speakers are helped by understanding counter factual expressions by the grammatical form called subjunctive conditionals. By using this syntactic form, the English speaker readily communicated to the listener that he or she is pretending. In contrast, the Mandarin language has no construction. Therefore, this study was proven to be consistent with the principle of linguistic relatively. 

Study one and two both presented how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a weak presentation of language. The Piraha language is a great example of language assisting cognition as the Mandarin language is another great example of language controlling cognition. For example, when the Piraha were given numerical tasks to match certain groups their performance declined. The only exception to this performance was with tasks involving unevenly spaced objects. Uneven spacing allowed subjects to perceive the items as smaller chunks that could then help them identify and match correct corresponding groups. 

In conclusion, study one met all of the necessary components of language but study two proved the Sapir-Whort hypothesis to be weak. The hypothesis proposed that states that the language one speaks unconsciously shapes one’s thinking of the world. Study one, presented on how culture and human cognition is more likely to affect language. However, study two has proven otherwise.  Both of these experiments are able to show how having the right linguistic resources could in fact carve out one’s reality. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that language is the division of the world into different categories. However, Bloom  states that language chooses to distinguish one thing, while another object can affects how reality is perceived.