A study carried out with more than a thousand speakers of 29 different languages has shown that all languages in the world have words to designate “this” and “that”, that is, demonstrative words to indicate the spatial location of objects.
The study, led by an international team led by the University of East Anglia (UEA), in Norwich, England, analyzed how different languages use demonstratives, words that indicate where something is in relation to a person speaking, such as “this cat” or “that dog.”
Until now it was believed that the spatial distinctions of different languages were different and that, therefore, their speakers could think in fundamentally different ways.
But the new study, the details of which are published this Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior, shows that all the languages analyzed make the same spatial distinctions using words like “this” or “that” depending on whether they can reach the object they are talking about. .
“More than 7,000 different languages are spoken in the world. “We wanted to find out how speakers of a wide variety of languages use the oldest recorded words: spatial demonstratives, like ‘this’ or ‘that,'” explains Kenny Coventry, principal investigator of the study and professor at the Faculty of Psychology at the UEA.
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The international team, made up of 45 people, studied 29 languages from around the world, including English, Spanish, Norwegian, Japanese, Mandarin, Tzeltal and Telugu.
They analyzed more than 1,000 speakers to see how they used demonstratives in their language to describe where objects were located in a series of different spatial configurations.
The statistical analysis revealed the same correspondence between reachable and non-reachable and demonstrative objects in all languages.
According to Coventry, “in all the languages analyzed there is a word for objects that are within the speaker’s reach, such as ‘this’ in English, and another for those that are out of reach, ‘that’.”
“This distinction could explain the early evolutionary origin of demonstratives as linguistic forms,” he adds.
This research has been led by the University of East Anglia in collaboration with researchers from 32 other international institutions, including the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena (Germany), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Aarhus University (Denmark) and the University at Buffalo (USA).
With information from EFE.
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2023-10-30 18:04:33
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