This thesis builds on the idea that subtle, culturally induced differences in semantic meaning remain between translation equivalent words across different languages. This study further argues that...Show moreThis thesis builds on the idea that subtle, culturally induced differences in semantic meaning remain between translation equivalent words across different languages. This study further argues that these differences in meaning may be approached through the examination of the linguistic contexts within which these words occur. Consequently, this work provides a quantitative methodology for highlighting relevant areas in which such cultural differences may be reflected. The method is based on intuition derived from several existing, structuralist methods and works primarily by comparing the frequency of hypernyms of nouns that appear in the neighborhood of an examined word. This thesis focuses on the indigenous Dolgan language as a case study; one that is purposely exploratory in nature. This minority language poses the research with the additional challenge of working with a small-sized language corpus for computational purposes: it demands a ‘rough’ look at data to act as a means, instead of being a limitation. Overall, the results indicate that culturally determined differences between words exist to a measurable degree, despite the unavailability of an adequately sized dataset. Although the results provide insufficient guidance for drawing anthropological conclusions, the findings reassert that cultural knowledge is encoded within language and reiterate the need to preserve endangered indigenous languages.Show less
This MA thesis presents the results of a study which focused on ascertaining whether language influenced the way of thinking of English and Dutch respondents with respect to locating objects in...Show moreThis MA thesis presents the results of a study which focused on ascertaining whether language influenced the way of thinking of English and Dutch respondents with respect to locating objects in space. Speakers of Dutch make use of three different cardinal posture verbs, staan, liggen and zitten (to stand, to lie and to sit, respectively) when locating inanimate objects in space, whereas speakers of English prefer to use the neutral verb to be. By means of a classification experiment and a memorization experiment it became clear that speakers of Dutch do not have a different way of thinking (e.g. classifying and remembering) about the objects due to their more diverse lexical field. This can be due to the fact that English and Dutch do not differ sufficiently in their use of posture verbs, as English does have the verbs to stand, to lie and to sit and does use these verbs for locating objects. It can also be because the use of the three different posture verbs has conventionalized in Dutch, causing the respondents to refrain from conceptualizing the position of the object. Thus, the language does not inspire any thoughts, which means that it cannot influence the speakers’ way of thinking.Show less
