7 - Language and thought

Summary

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: MEMES AND MIND

Throughout this book, I have pursued the opposition between absolute and relative frames of reference, ranging through their underlying conceptual structure or internal ‘logic’, their linguistic expression, their use in non-linguistic memory and inference, and finally in gesture and wayfinding. We have noted that not all languages use both the relative and absolute frames, and when they are specialized in this way, the frames of reference run deep in the cognition of the speakers. There is a special point in following this twisting trail of evidence, and it is this: we may be able to learn something quite important about what, somewhat grandiosely, one might call the ‘architecture of the mind’ from cross-cultural observations of these sorts. An analogy may help: just like we can trace blood flow by injecting radioactive isotopes, or trace the course of an underground river system by dumping dye into a river before it goes underground, so by focussing on exotic semantic parameters and seeing where they turn up in ‘inner space’ – the range of internal representation systems – we can perhaps find out something important about our inner languages or representations and how they talk to one another.

In Chapter 1, I mentioned the strategy of research borrowed from Lucy (1992b), in which a linguistic difference in semantic type is first established, and then speakers of each type are pursued through a set of non-linguistic tasks, in the search for correlations between language and cognition.