The bachelor thesis examines academic works that study the topic of linguistic relativity from the perspective of comparing the Chinese and English languages. Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, states that the language we speak influences our thinking, leading to differences in thought among speakers of different languages. The first part of the thesis provides an explanation of the idea of linguistic relativity, its historical development and experimental investigation. The second part first provides an overview of the mentioned academic works, and then, based on the works of three authors, examines in detail which linguistic categories allow for the study of linguistic relativity and how it is reflected in them. The works of Alfred Bloom, Lera Boroditsky and Jiang Song, who deal, in this order, with counterfactual reasoning, the conception of time and the category of classifiers, are presented in detail. Based on their works, it is evident that linguistic relativity is most sensibly studied in abstract linguistic categories, as it is reflected in abstract cognitive processes. Among these, some abstract categories are more appropriate than others: counterfactual reasoning and the category of classifiers are found to be weaker areas of study for the hypothesis compared to the conception of time. According to the findings of these studies, linguistic relativity is, to some extent, indeed reflected among speakers of Chinese and English, suggesting that language may indeed influence the mindset of its speakers.
|
