【正文】 tures until they get some positive evidence for one of them. And if they arbitrarily choose one of the possibilities, they are most likely to choose the simplest. The idea is that people initially construct the simplest (or least plex) syntactic structure when interpreting the structure of sentences. This is called the minimal attachment theory. Text prehension In the process of understanding texts, background information plays a very important part because background knowledge can activate people‘s mental association which can help the prehension of texts. () Exercise: Try to translate the passage on into Chinese. 譯文 :有了典當(dāng)?shù)恼鋵氃诮?jīng)濟(jì)上的支持 ,我們的英雄勇于挑戰(zhàn)阻止方案 實(shí)施 的一切尖酸嘲笑。他說(shuō) ,眼睛 誤導(dǎo) 了你們 ,正確代表這個(gè)有待考察 的行星的 ,是雞蛋而不是桌子。于是 , 為了尋找證據(jù) ,三個(gè)結(jié)實(shí)的姐妹勇往直前 ,有時(shí)穿過(guò)寧?kù)o的浩淼 ,但更多的時(shí)候是跨越 險(xiǎn) 峰和 峭 谷。 度日如年 ,只因眾多懷疑者散布過(guò)有關(guān)邊沿的可怕謠言。最后不知何處冒出了 令人驚喜 的帶翅生物 ,這標(biāo)志著重大的成功。 5. Language and thought Language determines thought SapirWhorf Hypothesis—the notion that the semantic structure of the language which a person speaks either determines or limits the ways in which they are able to form conceptions of the world in which they live. SapirWhorf Hypothesis has the following two parts: Linguistic determinism—the notion that linguistic structure determines cognitive structure. () Linguistic relativity—the notion that the resulting cognitive systems are different in speakers of different languages. () Whorf claimed that the Hopi Indians of Arizona perceived the world differently from other tribes (. the Englishspeaking tribe) because their language led them to do so. In the grammar of Hopi, there is a distinction between ?animate‘ and ?inanimate‘, and among the set of entities categorized as ?animate‘ were clouds and stones. Whorf concluded that the Hopi believe that clouds and stones are animate (living) entities and that it is their language which leads them to believe this. Now, English does not mark in its grammar that clouds and stones are animate, so English speakers do not see the world in the same way as the Hopi. In Whorf‘s words, ―We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.‖ Thought determines language A number of arguments have been presented against this view. Here is one from Sampson (1980). Imagine a tribe which has a language in which differences in sex are marked grammatically, so that the terms used for females have special markings in the language. Now, you find that these ?female markings‘ are also used with the terms for stone and door. We may then conclude that this tribe believes that stones and doors are female entities in the same way as girls and women: la pierre (?stone‘) and la porte (?door‘). It is the tribe which lives in France. Do you think that the French believe that stones and doors are ?female‘ in the same way as women? The problem with the conclusions in both these examples is that there is a confusion between linguistic categories (?animate‘, ?feminine‘) and biological categories (?living‘, ?female‘). Of course, there is frequently a correspondence in languages between these categories, but there does not have to be. Moreover, the linguistic categories do not force you to ignore biological categories. While the Hopi language has a particular linguistic category for ?stone‘, it does not mean that a Hopi truck driver thinks he has killed a living creature when he runs over a stone with his truck. We realize that English does not have a large number of single terms for different kinds of snow. However, English speakers can create expressions to refer to wet snow, powdery snow, spring snow, and so on. The average English speaker probably does have a very different view of ?snow‘ from the average Eskimo speaker. That is a reflection of their different experiences in different cultural environments. The languages they have learned reflect the different cultures. In Tuvaluan (spoken in some central Pacific islands), they have many different words for types of coconut. In another Pacific culture, that of Hawaii, the traditional language had a very large number of words for different kinds of rain. The notion that language determines thought may be partially correct, in some extremely limited way, but it fails to take into account that fact that users of a language do not inherit a fixed set of patterns to use. They inherit the ability to manipulate and create with a language, in order to express their perceptions. If thinking and perception were totally determined by language, then the concept of language change would be impossible. If a young Hopi boy had no word in his language for the object known to us as a puter, would he fail to perceive the object? Would he be unable to think about it? What the Hopi does when he encounters a new entity is to change his language to acmodate the need to refer to the new entity. The human manipulates the language, not the other way around