Week 8

• Meme


  A "Mimeme"—a word derived from Greek that means "that which is imitated." The word was then abbreviated to just "meme" due to its similarity to the word "gene."
• Meme


  • Dawkins coined the term because he was trying to figure out whether there was a measurable unit describing how ideas spread and propagated through generations
  • A meme is to an idea what a gene is to a physical trait
  • Dawkins believed that anything capable of undergoing evolution—like memes and ideas—also did so through natural selection
• Modern meaning of meme

  The idea of the replication, selection, and evolution of ideas all working themselves out in the biggest proving ground of ideas ever—the internet
• Do we think before we speak

  Or do we need language to shape our thoughts
• Linguistic relativity


  • The structure of one's language affects the way in which we perceive the world
  • Our worldviews shape the linguistic structures of our respective languages, influencing thoughts and modeling linguistic behavior
• Whether linguistic relativity exists or not has been and still is heavily disputed amongst linguists
• Universalist Theory of Language

  Linguistic structures are innate and all cognitive processes are universal in human beings and therefore not influenceable by language
• Whorf's most famous argument in favor of linguistic relativity was what he believed to be a major difference in the concept of time in Hopi languages compared to English
• Universalists claimed that Whorf did not understand Hopi languages well enough
• Relativists argued that universalist misinterpreted Whorf's work and tried to force Hopi grammar into models that were not fit for the structure of the Hopi language
• Berlin and Kay's study on color terminology

  • Found Universalist trends even though languages have different color terms
  • Certain hues are seen as more focal than others
  • The choices of colors are not arbitrary, there appears to be a hierarchy of colors
• John Lucy, a relativist, claimed the work of Berlin and Kay had methodological shortcomings and was biased by the Western point of view
• Mayan Yucatec speakers tended to choose the object with the same material as more similar, whereas English speakers tended to choose the object with the same shape
• Merging of language systems


  Language systems which are storing our minds are not entirely separated from each other, they overlap and share certain features
• Boundary shifting


  Definitions of certain words and phrases can be broadened or limited in bilinguals
• Greek speakers who had longer exposure to English learned to separate the two types of blue they knew from their first language