CRCC Tech Report no. 21, Cognitive Science Dept., Indiana University 510 N.

Fess, Bloomington IN 47408

If This Paper Were in Chinese, Would Chinese People Understand the Title? An Exploration of Whorfian Claims About the Chinese Language David Moser Center for Chinese Studies Fluid Analogies Research Group (Psychology Dept.) University of Michigan Introduction This paper is primarily intended as an introduction to the work of the linguist Alfred Bloom and to the subsequent studies of psychologist Terry Kit-fong Au which challenged Bloom's results. Also included in this paper are my own thoughts and analyses of the ongoing debate, as well as some reflections on language and issues related to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in its weak form. My background includes neither psychology nor linguistics, but my hope is that this paper might be of interest to collegues and friends with expertise in those areas, and that they might be thus motivated to contribute to any research I might undertake in the future. I have assumed no knowledge of Chinese on the part of the reader, nor any familiarity with the issues of the Bloom-Au controversy. My apologies to those readers who have to wade through material already familiar to them. Bloom's work Earlier in this century, the American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf undertook to study the languages of the American Indians in an attempt to record and analyze them before their various speech communities became scattered or perchance died out. They encountered in these languages what seemed to them at the time to be enormous differences from Indo-European languages, and this led them to speculate that these linguistic differences might cause the speakers of these languages to conceptualize the world in fundamentally different ways. This general idea that language influences thought is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or simply the Whorf hypothesis, and it has fallen out of favor in recent decades partly because it has been at odds with the fundamental assumptions of several prevalent schools of psychology (such as behaviorism), and partly because evidence in favor of it has proved so elusive. Alfred Bloom, a linguist at Swarthmore College, has done some work that provides an interesting new research direction for the Whorf hypothesis. He begins his book, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought with the following anecdote: In 1972-1973, while I was in Hong Kong working on the development of a questionnaire designed to measure levels of abstraction in political thinking, I happened to ask Chinese-speaking subjects questions of the form, If the Hong

Kong government were to pass a law requiring that all citizens born outside of Hong Kong make weekly reports of their activities to the police, how would you react?; or If the Hong Kong government had passed such a law, how would you have reacted? Rather unexpectedly and consistently, subjects responded But the government hasn't, It can't, or It won't. I attempted to press them a little by explaining, for instance, that I know the government hasn't and won't, but let us imagine that it does or did... Yet such attempts to lead the subjects to reason about things that they knew could not be the case only served to frustrate them and tended to give rise to such exclamations as We don't speak/think that way; It's unnatural; It's unChinese. Some subjects with substantial exposure to Western languages and culture even branded these questions and the logic they imply as prime examples of Western thinking. By contrast, American and French subjects, responding to similar questions in their native languages, never seemed to find anything unnatural about them and in fact readily indulged in the counterfactual hypothesizing they were designed to elicit.1 This striking and seemingly deep-seated cultural difference led Bloom to investigate the possible link between the treatment of counterfactual utterances in the Chinese language and what he perceived to be a relative disinclination on the part of Chinese speakers to enter into this mode of discourse. (A counterfactual statement is any sentence such as the kind often marked in English by the use of would have or might have. The sentence Marsha went to the movies and saw Bill there is a simple declarative statement of fact, whereas If Marsha had gone to the movies, she would have seen Bill there, is a statement based on an assumption counter to the known facts a counterfactual statement.) Bloom noted that, whereas English, like most Western languages, has relatively unambiguous grammatical forms that mark the counterfactual, Chinese has no distinct lexical or grammatical device that explicitly signals that the events being talked about did not occur, and are being described only for the purpose of exploring what might have been or might be.2 In order to make this point clear, I will very briefly examine the way the Chinese language handles tense in general. Chinese does not have precise grammatical markings for the wide range of tenses found in most Western languages. It is not the case, as some naive accounts have had it, that Chinese has no tense at all, though it is true that the verb itself in a Chinese sentence never changes to reflect tense in the way that, for example, go in English changes to went or gone. Tense in Chinese is usually marked by the use of certain particles or auxiliary words that come before or after the verb. For example, the sentence I went in Chinese comes out something like I go + particle indicating past tense. Often a time word precedes the action of the sentence: Yesterday I go + particle indicating past tense. Actually, the Chinese marking of tense is a somewhat complex issue, well beyond the scope of this paper. The important things to keep in mind for the purposes of this discussion are: (1) Chinese simply has fewer and less specific grammatical markings for tenses than English has. (2) Even those markings are not employed as mechanically as the various tenses are in English. If the time of the event in question is already clear either from context or from some previous time-word or

tense marker, the particles indicating tense are often left out. In the English sentence He told me he liked her, the use of the past tense is not optional; it is dictated by grammar. By contrast, in Chinese, if the past-tense context is already clear, the same meaning would most likely be expressed as He tell me he like her, (where tell and like are not really the equivalent of our present-tense verbs, but rather neutral, tenseless verbs). (3) Chinese definitely does not have an unambiguous marker for the counterfactual corresponding to the English If X were/had been the case..... In Chinese, the sentence If Marsha had gone to the library, she would have seen Bill, is expressed as If Marsha goes to the library she (then) sees Bill. (Jiaru Marsha qu tushuguan de hua, ta jiu hui kan dao Bill.) As long as the context is clear (i.e., the listener knows that Marsha didn't, in fact, go to the library), there is no problem in understanding that the phrase If Marsha goes means If Marsha had gone, and therefore the phrase she sees Bill is to be interpreted as she would have seen Bill there. And indeed, since most such speech acts are highly contexted, Chinese people easily and routinely use such counterfactual utterances in everyday life with no more problem, as far as I know, than English speakers, who do have an explicit marker for them. But note that in another context, or in a situation where the context is less clear (i.e., the listener doesn't know whether or not Marsha went to the library), the sentence in Chinese If Marsha goes to the library, she (then) sees Bill is ambiguous. In addition to the counterfactual interpretation just mentioned, it could also mean If Marsha goes (right now) to the library, she then will see Bill, or If Marsha went to the library (yesterday), she may have seen Bill. The sentence could have any of these meanings, and the hearer must integrate available knowledge of the facts in order to arrive at the correct interpretation --- a cognitive task that, given a context, is usually accomplished with no difficulty. To Bloom, this lack of explicit markers for counterfactuals in Chinese implied that, although Chinese speakers obviously do produce and understand counterfactual utterances, ...they would typically do so less directly, with a greater investment of cognitive effort and hence less naturally than their English-speaking counterparts. It would imply as well that they would not typically perceive the distinction between counterfactual and implicational (i.e., e.g., the distinction between if he had gone...he would have seen and if he went...he saw) as one of the divisions into which their cognitive world is divided....And finally, the suggestion that Chinese speakers do not typically make use of cognitive schemas specific to counterfactual thought would imply that Chinese speakers might be expected typically to encounter difficulty in maintaining a counterfactual perspective as an active point of orientation for guiding their cognitive activities. Chinese speakers might be expected, for example, if presented with an extended string of complex counterfactual arguments, to find it difficult to keep in mind, as they process the complex entailment relationships which hold between the arguments presented, the fact that all the arguments concern the would have been or the might have been rather than the world of actual fact.3

Bloom devised a group of psychological tests designed to yield evidence for his intuitions, and all of those experiments are dealt with in his book. I will discuss in detail only two of those tests -- the ones for which the psychologist Terry Au did her own counter-studies. In order to test his intuition that Chinese might have trouble processing a string of counterfactual arguments, Bloom devised three different versions of a paragraph in the form X was not the case, but if X had been the case, Y would have been the case, Z would have been the case... and so on, varying the number of counterfactual cues. Here is version 3 of the paragraph, which was given to both Chinese-speaking subjects in Hong Kong and Taiwan and English-speaking subjects in the U.S.A.: Bier was an 18th century European philosopher who wanted very much to investigate the principles of the universe and the laws of nature. Because there was some contact between China and Europe at that time, Chinese philosophical works could be found in Europe; but none had been translated. Bier could not read Chinese, but if he had been able to read Chinese he would have found that while Western philosophers generally investigated natural phenomena as individual entities, Chinese philosophers generally investigated natural phenomena in terms of their mutual interrelationships. If Bier had read Chinese philosophy he would certainly have been influenced by it, have synthesized it with Western philosophy, and have created a theory which not only explained natural phenomena as individual entities, but which also made clear their interrelationships. This theory would not only have overcome a weakness in the Western philosophy of that time, but also would have had a deep influence on German, French, and Dutch philosophy, leading them closer to science. Please indicate, by choosing one or more of the following answers, what contribution or contributions Bier made to the West according to the paragraph above: 1. Bier led Western philosophy to pay attention to natural phenomena as individual entities. 2. He led Western philosophy to pay attention to the mutual interrelationships among natural phenomena. 3. He led European philosophy closer to science. 4. He led Western philosophy one step closer to Chinese philosophy. 5. None of these answers are appropriate. (Please explain your own opinion briefly.)4 Presumably, readers who caught on to the fact that the paragraph says nothing about what Bier did, but only what he would have done, would opt for answer number 5. The results were rather dramatic. Of the three Chinese-speaking groups tested Taiwanese hotel workers, Taiwanese students, and Hong Kong students

 only 46%, 63%, and 50%, respectively, arrived at the correct counterfactual answer for the paragraph, while the Americans (students and non-students combined) almost invariably (96%) chose the right answer. Interviews with Chinese subjects after the test revealed that those who had failed to respond correctly had either (1) forgotten the philosopher could not speak Chinese by the time they got to the last few implications in the series, or (2) ---and this was the case for the large majority of subjects---had remembered that Bier could not speak Chinese, but had found that fact incongruent with the subsequent statements in the paragraph, and so, in order to salvage something from the account, decided that the intent of the paragraph must have been that Bier had achieved some of the accomplishments listed. Otherwise, why write the paragraph at all? In other words, says Bloom, for the majority of Chinese-speaking subjects tested, although recognition of the juxtaposition of a negative premise and implicational statements based upon it did lead to the realization that something was askew, it did not trigger, as it did in the West, a counterfactual interpretation.5 Bloom has also said that he believes that because of the lack of explicit grammatical markers for the counterfactual in Chinese, the structuring of a counterfactual interpretation is more subject to derailment by distractions.6 I will deal more with this point later. Bloom also attributed the higher scores of the university students to their more extensive knowledge of English, hypothesizing that their exposure to the conditional (words like would and would have) in English would have allowed them to extend their use of the counterfactual into their Chinese linguistic world, meaning that the students would now explicitly invoke counterfactual as a possible interpretation for their if-then labels.7 Bloom deliberately chose abstract and somewhat intellectually demanding material for his test. His prediction was that English speakers, given the clear grammatical counterfactual marking would have, would naturally and easily interpret all the implications of the paragraph as hypothetical, whereas the Chinese subjects, faced with the task of inferring the counterfactual nature of the implications by integrating the information given, would encounter greater difficulty. Put another way, the Chinese would have to deduce the hypothetical nature of the paragraph by understanding implicational statements at least well enough to notice that they were inconsistent with Bier's not being able to speak Chinese, whereas the Americans would not need to perform this cognitive integration of the materials, since the counterfactual nature of the paragraph is obvious enough from the grammar itself. Bloom, in order to test this explanation, devised a different kind of test designed to be free of any confounding of language and culture. In this test, Taiwanese subjects who knew English were given version 2 of the Bier paragraph in Chinese, and then three months later the same paragraph in English, having had no feedback on the first test. Despite the fact that Chinese was their native language, these subjects did very poorly on the Chinese version, but much higher on the English version. Since the comparison was within-subject, the effects of culture could be safely ruled out: the difference seemed to be due to language alone.

Another shorter test also produced very surprising results. Bloom asked American and Chinese subjects the following question: If all circles were large, and this small triangle large? (Chinese translation in footnote) were a circle, would it be

Only 25% of the Taiwanese subjects answered yes, whereas 83% of the Americans gave the counterfactual response.8 Furthermore, Bloom reported that when the question was asked orally, the results were even more striking: It has been my experience in fact that when subjects are presented with the question orally and informally --- in other words, without given time to hesitate, to reconsider or to examine the question from different perspectives --- just about every native Chinese speaker who has not been exposed to strong Western influences, and even very many who have, will spontaneously respond no, while, by contrast, just about every native English speaker will spontaneously respond yes. During a talk I gave at Hong Kong University to a group of about twenty interested faculty members, I presented the question orally and, to a person, the audience divided along native speaker lines. Most Chinese respond No! How can a circle be a triangle? How can this small circle be large? What do you mean?9 This result, if it is true, is very intriguing. One simply does not expect to find cross-cultural differences of this magnitude in what seems to be a rather straightforward (if somewhat strange) reasoning task. Even more intriguing is Bloom's contention that this difference is the result of a Whorfian language effect. Together Bloom's results constitute evidence for what is known as the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, formulated by Hockett as Languages differ not so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what is relatively easy to say.10 (Where say can be replaced by say or understand.) In other words, language can in some cases predispose people to think or act in certain ways. Bloom also contends that effects such as Sapir and Whorf hypothesized would be most dramatic at more abstract levels of language use, which is one of the reasons he chose to study counterfactual thinking and the linguistic structures associated with it rather than differences in lexical items. Au's refutation of Bloom's results In 1983 Terry Kit-Fong Au, then at Harvard University, devised a series of experiments to refute Bloom's interpretation of his results. The ongoing debate between Bloom and Au involves a number of complex issues of methodology and translation that are too numerous and complex to be dealt with in detail here. I will try to distill what I consider the salient issues in the discussion that follows. Because Au felt that Bloom's Chinese paragraph was not very idiomatic, she wrote several different versions of a new counterfactual story to give to her subjects, experimentally manipulating the number of counterfactual cues and the number of implications in order to test the possible effects of memory

overloading as an explanation for the comprehension problems evidently experienced by Bloom's Chinese subjects. Here is the paragraph given in study 1: Once a Dutch explorer ventured into Central Africa and saw a tribe of natives gathered around a fire. Hoping to make some interesting discoveries, this Dutch explorer held his breath and observed the natives attentively from behind the bushes. He heard one of the natives shout in a language which he unfortunately did not know. He then saw the natives throw a dead human body into a big pot of boiling water. And when the human broth was done, the natives all hurried to drink some of it. Upon seeing this event, the explorer was absolutely astonished, and fled as soon as he could. If this explorer had been able to understand the language spoken by the natives and had not fled so quickly, he would have learnt that the dead native was actually a hero of the tribe, and was killed in an accident. The explorer would also have learnt that the natives drank the broth of their hero because they believed that only by doing so could they acquire the virtues of their hero. If this explorer had been able to understand the language spoken by the naives and had not fled so quickly, he would have learnt that the natives were very friendly, and were not cruel and savage as he had thought. Please indicate, by choosing one or more of the following answers, which thing or things about the natives the Dutch explorer knew, according to the above paragraph: (1) The dead native was a hero of the tribe. (2) The dead native was killed in an accident. (3) The natives believed that they could acquire a dead hero's virtues only by boiling the dead hero's body in water and then drinking the broth. (4) The natives were friendly and not cruel and savage as the Dutch explorer thought. (5) None of the above. (Please explain your opinion briefly.)11 Au got very different results with her paragraph than Bloom got with his. 96% of the American subjects gave a counterfactual response to the story, and fully 100% of the Chinese subjects also came up with the correct answer. None of the variables she tested for memory loading, number of counterfactual cues, etc. yielded any significant differences in the outcome. Indeed, her Chinese subjects seem to arrive at the counterfactual answer across the board, even scoring slightly higher than the American subjects. Au also attempted to see if Bloom's results were repeatable, giving her subjects Bloom's Bier paragraph in both the Chinese and English versions. The English speakers again scored very high, 93%, while 88% of the Chinese speakers gave counterfactual responses, a rate significantly higher than in Bloom's study and not significantly different from the Americans in the second study. Au gave some speculations as to the possible reasons for the discrepancy:

First, Bloom's task was distributed mostly to college students and graduates by a Chinese research assistant, whereas the present task was administered either by the teacher-in-charge or by me in the presence of the teacher, to secondary school and post-secondary vocational school pupils. It is possible that my subjects tried harder because the experimental situation resembled test situations at secondary school. In addition, the written Chinese instructions preceding the Bier story in Bloom's studies seemed quite unidiomatic. It is possible that the Chinese subjects in Bloom's studies were annoyed by the unidiomatic Chinese and did not take the test as seriously. In other words, Bloom's subjects may have been as competent as mine to give counterfactual interpretations to the Bier story, but noise due to the testing situation and the written instructions may have lowered their performance.12 In addition, since Au suspected that Bloom's results might have been due to the translation problems, she wrote the Bier paragraph in ways she considered more idiomatic, and the test was given to a different group of subjects.13 This time 97% of the Chinese subjects gave the counterfactual response, so that even the intriguing difference between Au's results with the Bloom paragraph (88%) and her own Human Broth paragraph (100%) seemed to have disappeared. Finally, in order to test her hypothesis that Bloom's results with Chinese subjects had been the result of unidiomatic translation, she had both the Human Broth paragraph and the Bier paragraph re-translated into English by four Chinese students who had been studying English for approximately 12 years. Au reasoned that if Bloom was correct that English speakers automatically reason counterfactually upon encountering the subjunctive, then a clumsy translation per se should not have any effect on their counterfactual response rates. Here is one of these unidiomatic translations of the Bier paragraph: Bier was a German philosopher in the 18th century. To study about the theory of the Great Harmony and the laws of nature was his greatest interest. In those days, the communication between China and Europe had already developed to some extent. Chinese works could be found in Europe but the translations of them were still not available. If Bier had known about the technique to master the Chinese language, he would certainly discover the different attitudes between the Chinese philosophers and the European philosophers when describing the natural phenomena: the Chinese stressed the interrelationships among these aspects while the European ignored them and studied each separately. Suppose Bier had learnt about the Chinese philosophy, he would certainly develop his own theory, which included not only a thorough study about the nature of natural phenomena, but also a clear explanation of the relations among various natural aspects. Such theory not only patched up the disadvantages of the Western philosophy, but also influenced deeply and furthered the development of philosophy in Germany, France, and Holland towards science.14 As might be expected, Au's American subjects performed very poorly on this particular version of the test: only 52% of those tested gave the correct answer.

Unidiomatic translation seemed not to have a significant effect on the Human Broth paragraph, however: American subjects scored 89% and 93% on two different translations of the text. At this point Au did some of her own counterfactualizing: Suppose this research story had been initiated by me in Hong Kong with the idiomatic Chinese Bier story and a 97% counterfactual response rate given by my Chinese-speaking subjects. Wishing to make a cross-national, cross-linguistic comparison, I had the idiomatic Chinese version translated by a bilingual who happened to provide me with the unidiomatic Translation-D [the above translation of the Bier paragraph]. Seeking a group in the U.S. comparable to my Hong Kong secondary school sample, I found a group of American high school pupils who gave only 52% counterfactual responses to the Translation-D of the Bier story. If these results had been my only research findings, I might have concluded that there was a national-linguistic difference in counterfactual logic competence favoring Hong Kong Chinese over Americans. In short, it would be the reverse of Bloom's conclusion.15 In a later (1984) paper Au also attempted to refute the results of Bloom's triangle-to-circle question. She gave one group of Chinese subjects Bloom's original question, and to another group she gave a revised version incorporating some changes she considered more idiomatic.16 There was little difference in the counterfactual response rates of the two groups (72% for Bloom's version, 73% for Au's) but, interestingly, both were significantly higher than the Chinese speakers' scores in Bloom's original study. Anticipating Bloom's possible objection that the discrepancy in the two studies might be due to the fact that Au's subjects had studied English, she asked the same subjects to translate a simple counterfactual Chinese sentence into English, in order to test their mastery of the English subjunctive. She found that those who could correctly translate the sentence using the subjunctive had scored no better on the triangle-to-circle question than those who could not use the subjunctive, and she therefore concluded that mastery of the English subjunctive had no effect on the counterfactual performance of the subjects when using Chinese. From all these studies, Au concluded that Bloom's results had been due merely to faulty translations or aspects of the test conditions, and thus did not constitute proof that Chinese subjects perform any differently from English speakers in tasks requiring counterfactual reasoning. Discussion of Au's results Au brings up several objections to Bloom's results, many of which are subtle and difficult to explain without minute examination of the Chinese texts. I will limit the discussion below to what I consider the most important issues in this debate. 1. Testing problems

Perhaps the most serious overall objection to Au's experiments is that the subjects were all at least moderately well-versed in English, some having as much as twelve years of exposure to the language. Bloom's subjects were all college students or adults whose education had been fully in Chinese, whereas Au's Chinese subjects were primarily students in the Anglo-Chinese track of the Hong Kong educational system, which does much of its instruction in English and which prepares students for entry into English universities. One of Bloom's hypotheses was that Chinese who learn English have a tendency to incorporate the counterfactual schema more explicitly into their Chinese psycholinguistic world. Whether or not one buys this hypothesis, it would seem that Au's subjects' extensive exposure to English would render her studies less valid for purposes of refuting some of Bloom's claims. Also, the fact that her subject pool was much younger than Bloom's at least raises the question of the effect of differences in intellectual development on the test results. In other words, it may be misleading for her to compare the low counterfactual scores of Bloom's adult Chinese subjects with the low scores of the American high school students who responded to her unidiomatic English translation. It could be argued that the former case reflects the Chinese subjects' experience in a psycholinguistic tradition that does not specifically label counterfactuals, whereas the latter merely reflects a lower level of intellectual sophistication in a psycholinguistic tradition that does. 2. The Human Broth paragraph Quite simply, I consider Au's results with the Human Broth story to be largely irrelevant to Bloom's claims for two reasons: First of all, Au's paragraph is clearly much less intellectually demanding than Bloom's. It is simply too vivid and exciting to be compared with the Bier paragraph. It is important to keep in mind that Bloom's contention was never that Chinese speakers could not correctly interpret a paragraph that demanded a certain degree of counterfactual interpretation, but simply that, for Chinese speakers, such a process would be more subject to distractions such as unfamiliar terminology, highly abstract content, etc., whereas for English speakers, the process would be less fragile due to the explicit counterfactual marker. Bloom is very clear on this: ...[T]he results of the two studies [the Bier paragraph and the triangle-to-circle question] clearly demonstrate (A) that the presence of counterfactual labels elicits with virtual certainty the adoption of a counterfactual standpoint; and (B) that the absence of such labels makes counterfactual processing subject to derailment, either because it leaves the subject freer to question the validity of adopting such a standpoint or because it leaves the subject more vulnerable to distraction.17 Bloom's paragraph involves abstract and somewhat intellectually demanding content specifically designed to provide such distractions, while Au's merely presents a colorful and exotic scenario expressed in a straightforward manner, and as such is simply irrelevant to what Bloom set out to investigate. Secondly, Au's paragraph is only superficially similar to Bloom's in structure. Both paragraphs are indeed of the form A was not the case, but if A had been the case B would have been the case, C would have been the case... and so on. But a close look reveals that whereas all of Bloom's implications are

clearly counterfactual in nature, Au's are not. Bloom's implications -- ...would have discovered Chinese philosophical works...would have been particularly influenced by...would have synthesized Chinese and Western views... etc. -- all describe things which were not, in fact, true, given the original premise. Au's implications, on the other hand -- ...would have learnt that the dead native was actually a hero...would have learnt that the natives were very friendly...etc. -merely, in effect, enumerate a list of true facts which the explorer would have known had he been able to speak the natives' language. That the explorer would have known these things if only he had been able to speak their language is, in fact, the only counterfactual proposition the reader of the paragraph must keep in mind. In Bloom's paragraph, the implications given do not merely constitute a list of facts, but are really full-blown hypothetical propositions. Thus in Au's paragraph, the focus of the counterfactual reasoning process is somewhat clearer and more straightforward than in Bloom's; the paragraph is simply too conceptually simple to be of any interest (viz., the somewhat suspicious 100% counterfactual response rate), and again, is irrelevant to Bloom's particular agenda. The point may seem subtle, but it is worth considering. 3. The Bier paragraph The criticism that Bloom's translations are flawed or unidiomatic is certainly one of the most crucial questions here, and at least one other researcher has also taken issue with his results on these grounds.18 Au found fault with all three versions of Bloom's paragraph, but since both Au and Bloom have used his version 3 as a focal point in the discussion, I have done likewise in this paper. In psycholinguistic tests such as these, which utilize translated material, the issue of what can be considered idiomatic or even correct is difficult and subtle, and here is compounded by the fact that prose style was precisely one of the variables Bloom concerned himself with. The aim in constructing the stories, he says, was, of course, not that of typifying the most colloquial of styles, for that was not the issue, but rather that of varying the difficulty of style and content, within the range of grammatical, acceptable and comprehensible Chinese, so as to be able to test the impact of that variation on level of counterfactual response.19 Ironically, there is evidence from Au herself that Bloom's paragraph falls at least within this range of acceptable Chinese. For if the story's unidiomatic quality is responsible for the lower counterfactual response rates of Bloom's subjects, then how can Au explain the fact that 88% of her own subjects responded counterfactually to the identical paragraph? But the question of whether Bloom's paragraph is written in grammatical, acceptable and comprehensible Chinese is different from the question of whether Bloom's paragraph makes the same thing happen in the head of a native Chinese speaker as in the head of an English speaker. In evaluating the success of a particular translation, we can ask the question, Is this the way a native speaker would have written the paragraph? This seemingly simple question actually raises a number of complicated issues -- for example, What if the very style of the original were one that would normally not be employed or one that feels unnatural in the target language (e.g., one that employs the counterfactual mode)?

I, a lowly non-native and not even fluent speaker of Chinese, cannot authoritatively evaluate the quality and flavor of Bloom's translations, but my feeling is that the paragraph in question (Bier version 3) certainly contains no outright errors, and may not even be unidiomatic per se, keeping in mind the questions I raised above. (Not so with versions 1 and 2, which are more problematic. I deal with this later.) I have informally given the Bier paragraph and set of questions to many Chinese friends, and on numerous occasions have discussed with them the paragraph's language and style (giving them the English original for comparison, of course). At least one person reported that it had the feel of a translated text, and several people have characterized the style as stilted or antiquated. (I should note that the English original does not seem to me a model of good writing, either.) Everyone has found it dry and plodding. Certainly no one has objected that the language is incomprehensible or grossly misleading in some way. Issues of style are, of course, very subjective, but the effects can be no less real for that, and Au's concerns about the quality of translation are legitimate. 4. Au's intentionally unidiomatic translations Au's intentionally unidiomatic translations of the Bier paragraph seem to me methodologically suspect, and I think any comparison of them with Bloom's original is somewhat inappropriate and unfair. For one thing, even a casual reading of the translation I gave earlier reveals out-and-out grammatical blunders, such as using would instead of would have to mark the past-tense conditional. Whatever the translation problems with the Bier paragraph are, it was, according to Bloom, written by native speakers of Chinese, and judged to be at least grammatically acceptable by other Chinese speakers. To compare this text with an English translation written by non-native speakers is simply ridiculous. Furthermore, even if it turns out that the Bloom paragraph is unidiomatic to the point of being grammatically unacceptable, how can Au be sure that the awkward English translations she used are unidiomatic in exactly the same way? She is at that point confronted with the same translational hazards that Bloom faced, with perhaps even murkier criteria of success to boot, since the goal of her translation is to test the effects of obfuscation rather than the limits of clear communication. Another complicating factor in the experiment is that the American subjects all knew they were reading translations written by non-native speakers20 It is unclear what effect this might have had on the subjects' responses. Despite the objections to her translation on strict methodological grounds, Au's overall point is well-taken: It does seem likely that the level of the paragraph's idiomatic quality might have some effect on comprehension. More preferable would have been a series of paragraphs that were consistently grammatically sound but varying in degrees of idiomatic quality. As the matter stands, Au's tests do provide some slight (albeit flawed) evidence that the counterfactual reasoning process in English speakers is also subject to the kind of derailment that Bloom hypothesizes, despite the presence in English of explicit grammatical counterfactual markings. 5. The triangle-to-circle question

There may be many complex reasons for the difference (if any) between Chinese and English speakers on this question, and my intuition is that the question of translation per se is not the most important one. Note, for example, that Au's subjects performed almost exactly as well on her improved version of the triangle-to-circle question as they did on Bloom's original. I have many other thoughts on this that I will spell out below, but the biggest question to answer here is why Au's subjects did so much better than Bloom's on the same test materials. Bloom would most likely contend, as Au realized, that her subjects' extensive exposure to English made them more likely to interpret the sentence correctly. Au, anticipating this objection, gave her subjects an additional test to determine which of them could correctly use the conditional in English. She then noted that the subjects who seemingly could use the subjunctive scored no better on the test than those who seemingly couldn't, and thus concluded that her subjects' knowledge of English had had no effect on their performance. But, leaving aside for the moment Bloom's point about the possible influences of English on Chinese counterfactual reasoning, is Au justified in so confidently equating the lack of ability to construct English sentences using the conditional with ignorance of it? The word know here has a slippery quality. The process of learning a language is slow and cumulative, and we passively absorb and come to know many words and structures long before we are able to actively and correctly use them. It is unclear to me from reading the rest of Au's paper what her final stance is on the discrepancy between her results and Bloom's results on the triangle-tocircle question. She first contends that, as with the Bier paragraph, the problem is one of translation, and that with a few idiomatic improvements, Chinese performance on the test would match that of the English speakers. But her results using the original wording of the question do not exactly replicate Bloom's; her subjects did much better ---almost exactly as well as those who responded to her improved translation. It would seem that from Au's standpoint, either Bloom's results were simply wrong, or the translation issue is not a crucial one. Bloom can still claim, of course, that Au's subjects' knowledge of English biased the results. Problems with Bloom's interpretation 1. Analysis of his contention that the Chinese lack a cognitive schema for the counterfactual Bloom has, of course, never said that Chinese people are somehow incapable of dealing with counterfactual sentences --- a belief that a few critics with only a passing acquaintance with Bloom's work and complete ignorance of the Chinese language have been quick to attribute to him. What he does claim, however, is that Chinese speakers lack a cognitive schema for dealing with them: ...[T]he fact that the English speaker has a distinct label for the counterfactual (i.e. had...would have), which the Chinese speaker does not share, cannot by any means be expected to bestow upon the English speaker an exclusive facility for that mode of thought, but it might be expected to encourage him or her, by contrast to his or her Chinese counterpart, to develop a cognitive schema specific to that

way of thinking --- a schema that represents an achieved integration of the idea of an implication linking two events with the idea that neither of these events constitutes a factual occurence.21 What, exactly, does Bloom mean by cognitive schema? He borrows the term from the so-called cognitive structuralists, a rather loosely defined school that includes Piaget and Fodor, among others. Bloom defines the term thus: ...[W]e impose meaningful organization on the infinitely varying world of sense experience, by means of a highly complex and extensive repertory of discrete cognitive schemas. According to this view, our schemas permit us to divide up and conquer the world, cognitively-speaking, to segment it cognitively into the types of objects, actions, relations, and properties we perceive to exist in it...They [cognitive schemas] constitute the component elements of the thoughts we think and the nodes around which we construct our more permanent, long-term models of the world.22 (It will not be my purpose here to critique the notion of cognitive schemas as a whole, but only to examine what Bloom has to say about them in the context of his book and in relation to Chinese.) According to Bloom (who is borrowing from Piaget and Vygotsky), children rapidly develop a repertoire of cognitive schemas such as mommy, red, and crawl, which they soon begin to use in constructing more abstract mental nodes such as mothers, red things, and acts of crawling. Language acquisition is parallel to and concomitant with this process, and children soon master an imposing set of linguistic structures -- grammatical schemas such as dependent clauses, passive constructions, the negative question, the tag question, etc. -- that they utilize in order to retrieve, refer to, and link the various cognitive schemas at their disposal. What kinds of things have cognitive schemas associated with them? There are cognitive schemas for fathers, games, animals, clothing, and faces. There are cognitive schemas for color, shape, hungry, thirsty, magazine, birthday, diplomatic immunity, militaryindustrial complex -- in short, there are cognitive schemas for just about any thing or concept that can be named, talked about, or considered with any degree of autonomy or boundedness. Some cognitive schemas are strongly associated with certain linguistic schemas, such as the relatively abstract cognitive schema evoked by If X had been the case...then Y would have been the case. To use one of Bloom's examples, constructing a cognitive schema for bachelor would involve an integration of several existing cognitive schemas, those for male, unmarried, adult, etc. Speakers of a language that lacked a word for bachelor could still refer to the concept by invoking unmarried adult male, or other appropriate cognitive schemas available to them in their language. Of course, given the enormous number of these schemas, it is inconceivable that each one would have a linguistic label associated with it. Bloom is very aware of this point and makes it clear that a very large number,

perhaps most, of the cognitive schemas one constructs are free of any influence of exerted by the language one speaks. The child will certainly continue, and in fact continue throughout life, to construct a very large number of cognitive schemas, on his own, free of any influence exerted by the language/s he learns to speak. He will construct schemas for making beds, for typing papers, for recognizing that his car is skidding on a patch of ice, and for storing motor information as to how to deal with it... -- schemas that will remain, in other words, components of his inordinately complex array of nonlabeled thoughts.23 Bloom's cognitive schemas -- that is, those which are associated with linguistic schemas -- are related in some way to Whorf's notion of cryptotypes. He called them categories of semantic organization, and they correspond to no specific word, yet are shown by linguistic analysis to be functionally important in grammar.24 The English-language categories of transitive and intransitive verbs, for example, would constitute two separate cryptotypes. Cryptotypes differ from Bloom's cognitive schemas in that they float somewhere below the level of specific words and are not overtly labeled in the language, whence their name. Cognitive schemas bear a much closer resemblance to the ICM's, or Idealized Cognitive Models, of George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley.25 His book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is a fascinating overview of just about every important theory of mind to arise in the last century, and it presents, among other things, some interesting new ideas on the relation of language to thought and reality. I cannot begin to do justice to his work here, but I will note just one of the similarities of Lakoff's ICM's to Bloom's cognitive schemas. ICM's are node-like entities linked with and contingent upon other ICM's in a complex network of concepts. The ICM for bachelor, for example, is defined with respect to an ICM in which there is a human society with monogomous marriages, a typical marriagable age, typical marriagable types of males, etc. In such an ICM, Moslem men who are permitted four wives and only have three would not be considered bachelors, and neither would the Pope, though he is certainly an unmarried male. Similarly, what Bloom calls cognitive schemas are just such interlocked, embedded, and mutually dependent cognitive entities. The cognitive schema for Gross National Product, for example, would be defined with respect to other cognitive schemas such as country and industry. Given the fact that, as mentioned above, not all cognitive schemas have linguistic labels, what exactly is the relationship of language to cognitive schemas? In other words, how does Bloom make his case for a Whorfian effect of the Chinese language on its speakers? What the Chinese lack, says Bloom, is an achieved integration of the idea of an implication linking two events with the idea that neither of these events constitutes a factual occurrence. What he means by this is not that Chinese speakers in the Chinese psycholinguistic world are unable to use or understand counterfactuals, but rather that the process involved is somewhat more indirect than that of their English-speaking counterparts. That is, Chinese speakers

understand counterfactual statements by inferring from the informational context that the proposition is contrary to known facts and therefore must be a statement about what might have been but wasn't. English speakers have no need for such an indirect process, since the counterfactuality of the sentence is handed to them on a silver platter by virtue of their grammar: When the English speaker hears the sentence If you had warned them earlier, perhaps the accident would have been avoided, he is left with the cognitive burden of having to resolve what kind of warning might have been effective, how effective it is likely to have been, how responsible he personally should feel for the fact that the warning was not given, etc.; but he is not left with the burden of having to resolve that the sentence is counterfactual. The labels had...would have signal to him directly and unambiguously that a counterfactual interpretation is intended. And his language has already prepared him, through its use of those labels, to interpret directly, as a single unit, without requiring any further cognitive act, the integration of negated premise and implication based upon it. For the English speaker, the counterfactuality of a sentence constitutes, as it were, one of the elementary components on the basis of which he constructs his interpretation of the sentence heard, while for the Chinese speaker, it consititutes one of the results of his interpretive act.26 What Bloom is contending is that this difference in the way Chinese speakers interpret counterfactual sentences implies that they might experience difficulties with texts involving a string of complex counterfactual arguments, in which the counterfactuality of the arguments is not a priori clear. English provides explicit counterfactual markers that can be used as a stable point of orientation in interpreting such texts; Chinese does not. Hence Bloom's Whorfian claim, and hence the nature of his experiments. An analogous example in English might make this clearer. There are several cognitive schemas associated with the word if, as evidenced by the following examples: If a mouse is deprived of food for one week, then it will die. (If-then, consequential. What follows the if clause is a necessary consequence of it.) If a mouse is deprived of food for one week, then it has been without sustenance for seven days. (If-then, definitional. What follows the if clause is true by definition.) There is nothing grammatically to distinguish these two different types of if for us; we must deduce the meaning of these sentences from what we know about the situation, the world, the intentions of the speaker, etc. We are not explicitly directed to one or the other cognitive schema (to use Bloom's term)

merely by the presence of the word if; therefore we must wait until the entire sentence has been said before we can disambiguate it. Or, to use one of Bloom's examples, a child knows that the sentence If you hold this glass with only one hand you will break it, does not imply that there are no other ways of breaking it, but a child who hears the sentence If you eat your dinner you can go to the movies, in context will infer that eating dinner is the only way to be permitted to go to the movies. Later on, if the child goes on to study logic in college, he or she will have to assimilate a few more possible meanings of if, such as if-and-only-if, (commonly written iff). Other hard-to-categorize usages are found in such sentences as: If you like that cake, there's some more in the fridge. Most native speakers have probably never consciously noticed these different meanings of the word if, yet they are able to use and understand such sentences with little difficulty.27 Does this mean that English speakers have no separate cognitive schemas for the two different meanings of if? This surely cannot be what Bloom means to say. For one thing, he makes it very clear that not all cognitive schemas are represented linguistically. Secondly, we must surely have something like cognitive schemas in our heads for the two different meanings of if, even though they are undifferentiated in the language, since native speakers routinely use and understand such sentences. Similarly, Chinese speakers must have a schema for counterfactual, even though it is unmarked in their language, since they use counterfactuals all the time. Perhaps Bloom means to argue that because Chinese lacks an explicit counterfactual marker, Chinese speakers are thus not consciously aware of the distinction when they make it (similar to the way an English speaker unconsciously disambiguates the word if). But even if this is true, does it necessarily imply a difference in the performance of counterfactual reasoning tasks? Most of our use of language is rapid and unconscious, and none the worse for it. Is it Bloom's contention that we might experience greater difficulty in bringing to bear any unlabeled schema than any labeled schema? It may be true that, as he says, ...they [Chinese speakers] would not typically perceive the distinction between counterfactual and implicational as one of the divisions into which their cognitive world is divided, but that is quite different from saying that they don't possess an implicit, functional command of something like a counterfactual schema. Put another way, the question for Bloom is this: Is it the case that Chinese speakers have no cognitive schema for the counterfactual, or is it merely that, for

them, the counterfactual is one of many unlabeled cognitive schemas? Bloom makes a case that labeled schemas have a special status in language: Although...linguistic labels certainly do not act as the medium in which we think, or act to exclusively determine the way in which we think, they do lead us to extend our cognitive repertories in language-specific ways, to develop many schemas through which we come to cognize the world, store information about it and plan our reactions to it that we would be unlikely to develop without their aid. But the influence of linguistic labels on our cognitive lives appears to extend even beyond the role they play in shaping the schematic foundations of those lives, for linguistic labels not only guide the development of many of our schemas, but they provide those schemas whose development they direct, and specific others besides, with names. And the very fact that a schema is named seems to imply that it can perform some very special cognitive functions that unnamed schemas cannot perform.28 Presumably, for Chinese speakers the counterfactual schema is included in this group of unnamed schemas. So what happened to the claim that Chinese speakers have no cognitive schema for the counterfactual? There may be just a problem of inconsistent use of terminology here, but I find Bloom's account of cognitive schemas hard to follow with regard to this point. Leaving this aside for the moment, what exactly are these special cognitive functions that named schemas can perform and unnamed schemas cannot? When a schema has a name, says Bloom, the other cognitive schemas that constitute it are conveniently chunked together as a unit, and can be used in thought and reasoning more directly and easily: [O]nce a language has led us to the creation of specific cognitive integrations, no matter how complex they are, or how long it has taken us to build them, we seem to be able to make use of those integrations as tools of our thoughts without any greater investment of cognitive energy than we expend in making use of their simpler components. Once the word bachelor has led us to integrate the notions man, unmarried, never married, and adult, we are spared the cognitive effort, while thinking about bachelors, of having to keep those four component dimensions, at least consciously-speaking, simultaneously in mind -- we are able to think about bachelors, draw up theories about bachelors, and remember things about bachelors as easily as we can think about, draw up theories about or remember things about men or adults, or unmarried people taken separately.29 The account sounds intuitively plausible as long as Bloom is using lexical items like bachelor as examples. But remember that he is using this example to illustrate how grammatical structures like If such-and-such had been the case... could also serve as stable points of cognitive orientation in thought. Is there some fundamental difference between lexical items and grammatical structures that would make it inappropriate to equate the two in this way? Is it possible that grammatical structures are used in thought in a way that individual words are not?

There are still many problems and uncertainties that revolve around Bloom's use of the term cognitive schema, but he does seem to be saying that the presence of a grammatical schema for the counterfactual is somehow causally linked to the existence of a cognitive schema for it (at least in this case). And here, for me is where some of the confusion arises. Which is it that bestows a psycholinguistic advantage on English speakers, the presence of a cognitive schema for the counterfactual, or the explicit marker for it? These two are not the same, after all. Recall that Bloom contends that his Chinese subjects who spoke English extended their cognitive schemas for the counterfactual to their Chinese psycholinguistic world. Yet how would this provide any advantage in interpreting complex counterfactual arguments such as those presented in the Bier paragraph, since the explicit linguistic markers Bloom says serve as stable points of orientation are still absent from Chinese? Bloom has an answer to this: Chinese bilingual speakers, who use the counterfactual in English and who find themselves in situations which call upon them to translate abstract English arguments into Chinese, might be expected over time to begin to extend their use of the counterfactual into their Chinese linguistic world by, for example , attaching the counterfactual as a second meaning to their Chinese labels for if-then. At that point, their Chinese label if-then would become, for them, an explicitly ambiguous signal of both the implicational and the counterfactual...30 I contend that what Bloom is describing is really not an unusual state of affairs. In fact, all Chinese people, whether they know English or not, sometimes perceive the if-then construction as counterfactual and sometimes as implicational. This is manifestly true, since, as I have said repeatedly, use of the counterfactual is quite common in Chinese and the if-then construction is often used to express it. It's simply that the Chinese don't consciously make the distinction, just as English speakers are not always aware of the different uses of if. Since it is ludicrous to contend that Chinese speakers do not have a integrated notion of the concept x was not the case, but might have been, it seems Bloom is left with only the argument that this explicit bringing-to-bear of the counterfactual might result in some advantage for English speakers. The whole issue of how a language might influence the construction of cognitive schemas is a very important one, of course, and it is by no means restricted to a few esoteric cases in Chinese and English. Just to pick a couple of examples at random, English speakers, when first studying French, invariably experience some difficulty in mastering the use of the verbs savoir and connatre. Does the fact that the meanings of both these words are usually subsumed under the one word know imply that English speakers do not have cognitive schemas for the two meanings? Are there any situations in which the cognitive performance of French people would differ from that of English speakers due to this difference? Another example involves the third-person singular -- in English, he, she or it. Oral Chinese does not make this distinction; all three meanings are carried by one word, ta. It is well-known that Chinese people, when speaking English, have a strong tendency to confuse he and she, whereas

speakers of other Western languages have virtually no difficulty in this regard when speaking English. Even Chinese with a good command of English will still occasionally make this slip, whereas, say, a French person speaking English has no trouble remembering to apply he to a male and she to a female -- after all, this distinction is a feature of their language, as well. Why this difficulty on the part of Chinese speakers? Is it possible that their cognitive schema for third-person singular has no slot for male and female? Could it be that speakers of Western languages have at least two different cognitive schemas in this case -- one for male and one for female, whereas the Chinese only have one -he/she/it? If so, what possible psycholinguistic consequences might this have? The Whorfian literature is filled with such examples of linguistic differences, but so far, evidence for measurable cognitive differences between cultures attributable to language has been hard to find. Bloom believes that one of the reasons such evidence has been so difficult to ferret out is that researchers have been looking in the wrong place: If...we are to uncover the more significant effects of language on the way we think, we have to turn our attention away from the cognitive effects of linguistic labels, such as color names, that stake out simple categorizations of the perceptual world, and direct our attention instead to the cognitive effects of linguistic labels that lead us to build those highly complex, abstractly derived perspectives on reality that we [are] unlikely to construct without their aid....[W]e have to turn our attention as well, away from tasks such as those of color memory in which perceptual encodings of task-relevant information can compete with, or substitute for, linguistic encodings, and direct our attention instead to tasks in which successful performance depends on the use of information that can neither be represented in perceptual terms nor easily disengaged and maintained in mind without the aid of associated linguistic labels.31 [F]or cognitive activities for which perceptually definable categorizations of reality suffice (such as those that have served as the focus of previous experimental investigations into the effects of distinct languages on thinking), there is no particular reason that a speaker should use linguistically shaped schemas as the bases of his thinking. For cognitive activities which depend on highly abstracted representations of reality, however, only linguistically shaped schemas can effectively serve, and so it is in such activities that a speaker's thinking might be expected to be most reflective of the constraints and conveniences inherent in his/her language.32 A remark of Charles Hockett's echoes these statements of Bloom's: The impact of inherited linguistic pattern on activities is, in general, least important in the most practical contexts, and most important in such goings-on as story-telling, religion, and philosophizing...33 This is, of course, a terribly complex issue, and the best Bloom can hope to do is to present his experimental results as evidence for his conjecture. Later on,

however, I will try to show that there are other possible interpretations for his results. 2. Translation problems As I mentioned, the Bier paragraph I've dealt with in this paper is not the only version Bloom used for his testing, though it is the most central to the BloomAu debate. He actually wrote three versions, though only the results from versions 2 and 3 were used in his book. (See the appendices for the texts of both paragraphs). Au raises some valid criticisms of version two which merit some mention here. Those with no knowledge of Chinese may want to skip this short section. Au's main criticism of version 2 is that it is not in the counterfactual mode, that is, it is missing some grammatical clues that would have made it easier for Chinese readers to interpret the text counterfactually. What Au says is missing from the several implications of the paragraph (such as If Bier had been able to read Chinese, he would have....) is the crucial word hui, which roughly corresponds to the English will/shall or might, and is commonly used to mark an implication as hypothetical. Bloom used instead the word jiu, which can also be sufficient to mark the implication as hypothetical (as in Ruguo tamen lai, women jiu zou), but here is too easily confused with its other meaning, only, just, or precisely. So when Bloom writes Youqi zui yingxiang ta de jiu shi..., it might be interpreted by the Chinese reader not as What would have influenced him most..., but rather, What most influenced him was precisely.... The problem, it seems (at least based on the opinions of my Chinese friends), is that Bloom's use of jiu can sometimes be sufficient to get the idea across, in rapid, casual conversation, and when the counterfactuality of the implication is wellknown to the speaker. But all my Chinese informants complain that, in the context of version 2 a paragraph written in a very academic style and presenting totally unfamiliar material the use of jiu simply isn't strong enough to carry the hypothetical implication, and they become very confused when they encounter it in this context. It seems that, in stretching the limits of what could be considered grammatical Chinese in order to be as parsimonious as possible with counterfactual clues, Bloom went a bit too far. It's possible that the Chinese people who translated it for him were so familiar with the material that they honestly did not see that the result was unspecific to the point of being ungrammatical, or close to the point of being ungrammatical. It's still my opinion that there are no outright errors in version 3 of the paragraph, but it does seem that version 2 is simply an unacceptable translation. Granted, Bloom intentionally tuned these paragraphs by adjusting their levels of comprehensibility and grammaticality. But the fact that version 2 seems flawed in this way does tend to cast some doubt on the other translations. This brings up a point I raised earlier, namely, wording a text grammatically and comprehensibly is not the same task as wording it the way a native speaker would. Any good translator will testify to the fact that merely checking to make sure there is a rough isomorphism between the two texts is not a

good indicator of translational fidelity. There is no reliable metric to measure the relative effects of two phrases in two different languages. Suppose a superlative Chinese-English bilingual were to say to Bloom, Your translation, while seemingly straightforward and correct, is actually inappropriate. Because Chinese does not have a clear counterfactual marker, you simply cannot say 'Bier couldn't speak Chinese. If he had been able to, he would have done such-and-such.' You must say something more like 'Bier couldn't speak Chinese, but please do a little counterfactualizing for a moment and imagine that he had been able to...' Only then will you succeed in getting the 'same' idea across to the Chinese reader. But where do you draw the line? Would it be reasonable to add several sentences to the Chinese version setting up the reader to adopt a counterfactual interpretation and still consider it a faithful translation? How about a whole paragraph? And at what point would one simply concede Bloom's point: that Chinese speakers have trouble dealing with the counterfactual in some cases where English speakers don't? Yet suppose we allow Bloom this hypothesis. Does it really suggest that Chinese, in their natural linguistic environment, somehow deal with counterfactuals differently than we do? Or does it merely prove a rather obvious point, namely that any number of artificial translation situations can be created such that the speakers of one language will be forced to flail around and produce difficult, unidiomatic prose in order to accomodate a structure that seems perfectly natural in another language? Pat Cheng also raises these issues in her critique of Bloom's work. In discussing possible tests for the Whorfian hypothesis, she says: [N]ot only must materials in both languages be grammatical and idiomatic, they must also be as clearly written as possible in each language, even if this implies that the versions are not literal translations of each other. After all, even subjects who are given two versions of different clarity in the same language may show better performance on the more clearly written version. Such a difference obviously does not demonstrate that language shapes thought.34 These are difficult issues, and part of the difficulty is that the domain Bloom is interested in seems to be located precisely at one of those places where questions of grammar and style collide. I will deal more with this point later. 3. Other ways of expressing the counterfactual in Chinese Closely related to these issues is the question of the various ways in which the counterfactual is expressed in Chinese, some of which are very different from those discussed so far. In fact, I find the entire issue of different counterfactual markers curiously absent from both Bloom's and Au's discussions. As mentioned earlier, there are many ways of expressing counterfactuality in Chinese, and an exhaustive examination of them is well outside the scope of this paper (as well as being beyond my ability to present). I will briefly raise a few relevant issues, with hopes of expanding on this point at a later time. (Those with no knowledge of Chinese might wish to skip this section.)

Consider the following counterfactual sentence by the Chinese playwright Lao She: Jiaruo zhe xianxiang bing bu cunzai, women de xiqu gaige gongzuo dao xianzai jiu yiding hui you geng duo ren canjia. (If this phenomenon were not so, there would have been [up to now] many more people taking part in the task of reforming traditional opera.) Even though there is no one specific marker anywhere in the sentence which unambiguously marks the utterance as counterfactual, the various grammatical markers for tense and aspect jiaruo (if, supposing), dao xianzai (up to now, a time marker), jiu (then, therefore), yiding hui (definitely would/may/might) when taken together, mark the sentence as counterfactual just as clearly as the presence of would have does in English. A Chinese speaker encountering this sentence is compelled to adopt a counterfactual interpretation because of the various counterfactual cues working in consort. One might say that counterfactuality in a Chinese sentence is sometimes more diffuse, more spread out than in a corresponding English sentence. It is true that the counterfactuality of a Chinese sentence is usually more context-dependent (that is, fewer counterfactual cues are employed), but sentences such as the one above, in which there really is no ambiguity, are also common. Consider this sentence from a Taiwanese comic book: Yaobushi laoban chu mian, zao jiu ba nimen lia song guanfu le. (If the boss hadn't come out, [I] would have sent you both to the authorities long ago.) The yaobushi (if not for the fact that...) clearly carries a strong feeling of past tense counterfactuality to a Chinese speaker, and the zao jiu (earlier/already + then) which follows makes it even more clear that the sentence is to be interpreted counterfactually. Phrases like danyuan (if only, I wish) and wo yuanyi zuo (I wish I were..., literally I'm willing to be... as in wo yuanyi zuo yi zhi xiao yang..., I wish I were a little lamb) have strong counterfactual associations, and are probably about as strongly counterfactual as a phrase in English like If I had my own room..., which has a strong default counterfactual interpretation, but which can also express simple past tense, as in I don't remember my early childhood, but if I had my own room, then I'm sure my older brother was jealous. Of course, absolutely any counterfactual in Chinese can be made explicit by prefacing it with Time word + X is not the case, if X is the case... It is true that the counterfactual nature of a sentence in Chinese must typically be gleaned with much more meager cues, but there are a surprising number of ways in which the counterfactual can be strongly evoked or indicated, most of which bear little resemblance to structures that signal counterfactuality in English. Neither Bloom nor Au deal with this issue in their studies.

4. Problems with Bloom's contention that Chinese who know English did better on his tests because of their exposure to the English conditional The most obvious problem with this contention of Bloom's is that there is no way to separate knowledge of English from general educational level. Chinese who are better educated have, perforce, a better knowledge of English; there simply does not exist a control group of highly-educated yet totally monolingual subjects. This means that in the tests where Bloom compared the results from a group of hotel workers in Taiwan to those of students at Taiwan National University, the higher scores of the university students might have merely reflected their educational level rather than their exposure to English. These students also presumably would have been more accustomed to taking reading-comprehension tests of all sorts. Being in the academic world themselves, they might have taken a greater interest in the project and thus would have been more motivated to perform well. Something else to consider is the fact that, education is correlated with greater exposure to Western ideas and a more easy familiarity with Western research methods, including, perhaps, tricky pencil-and-paper tests wherein researchers ask all sorts of seemingly strange and unmotivated questions designed to test a subject's ability to abstract and to reason logically from given premises, no matter how absurd they may be. 5. Questions of cross-cultural generality If what Bloom is saying is true, one would expect that similar results could be found by testing speakers of other languages that lack explicit counterfactual markers. Tagalog, for example, is similar to Chinese in this respect,35 though any proposed tests on native speakers would be subject to the same problems of the possible confounding of cultural and linguistic effects, as well as to possible influences of other languages, including English. Actually, Bloom has already repeated at least some of his experiments on Japanese subjects, with results very similar to those obtained with his Chinese subjects.36 A moderately complex Japanese version of the Bier paragraph was given to 151 Japanese college students, with only 40% of them arriving at the counterfactual interpretation. Further discussion based on interviews with Chinese In the discussion that follows, I will present some of my own impressions and intuitions about various aspects of the issues raised above, based largely on conversations with Chinese friends. I tend to view all psychological testing with a certain degree of suspicion. Results can vary enormously from subject to subject, group to group, and situation to situation, and it is virtually impossible to eliminate from the test situation every factor that might bias the test in one way or another. (I had a friend who used to say he trusted only psychological tests which were clown-invariant; that is, tests in which the outcome could not possibly be affected by the tester's wearing a clown suit.) The tests Bloom and Au have done are intriguing and can be repeated, refined, and extended, but I feel some of their results may have been affected by the sheer strangeness of the test materials. It would be helpful if in

future tests the stimulus included both spoken and written materials, and dealt with examples from more daily, routine linguistic situations, instead of abstract paragraphs about Eighteenth-century German philosophers and African cannibals (some of Bloom's points notwithstanding). The Bier paragraph There are a number of possible reasons for Bloom's results on the Bier paragraph, and there is no reason to think any one of them is most important. His results could be due to a confluence of effects, some linguistic, some cultural. I have informally given many Chinese friends the Bier paragraph (as well as Bloom's other tests), and questioned them at great length afterward, and it still is not clear to me exactly what's going on. My impression is that Chinese speakers do not arrive at a counterfactual reading of the entire paragraph as quickly and effortlessly as Americans reading the English translation do, but they do almost invariably arrive at it. The interesting thing is that after they do, they still often balk at opting for answer 5 (the only one consistent with the counterfactual reading of the paragraph) for other reasons having to do with subtle assumptions about the nature of the test. I gave the Bier paragraph to a Taiwanese student, Chen, who chose answer 1 (a non-counterfactual response) as the correct answer. I then tape-recorded his explanation as to why he had chosen that response. Chen: It stresses here that he investigated the principles of the universe and the laws of nature. So I think the first answer is more appropriate...uh, to the subject, I mean, all the questions. Therefore he led Western philosophers to pay attention to ... because he specialized in this aspect ... the principles of nature, therefore he led Western philosophers to pay attention to natural phenomena as individual entities. [At this point he goes on to explain why he rejected answers 2, 3, and 4.] Me: How about number 5? Chen: Number 5 isn't anything. If the above four answers are not appropriate... Me: Uh-huh. So what's wrong with number 5? Chen: (Somewhat peeved) What's number 5? It means you only...only choose answer number 5 if you don't agree with the other four. Me: Uh-huh. Chen: So I already agreed with an answer ... there's absolutely no reason to consider number 5. [He goes on to explain this a bit more.] Me: But it says...it says clearly that Bier couldn't speak Chinese... Chen: Hm. Me: ...couldn't speak Chinese. So how could he influence...uh, Western philosophers? Chen: No, no, no, no. He liked to...he...you still don't understand. Right here it says, Eighteenth-century philosopher... Me: Uh-huh. Chen: He liked to study stars [he says the word in English], you know, that sort of ... natural laws. Meaning he originally in Germany, he produced his own books.

He liked to research it, he certainly must have written his own books on the subject, and so on. Me: Uh-huh. So it...he...it...the paragraph says...says he couldn't speak Chinese. Chen: Right! Me: If he had been able to speak Chinese, he certainly would have discovered... Chen: This... Me: ...Meaning he actually didn't accomplish this thing. Chen: No, no, no. See here? He couldn't read Chinese. If he had been able to read Chinese he would have found that Chinese philosophers were describing nature...But now, this says, he was a Western philosopher...because...he himself was a Western philosopher, he was studying Western principles of nature.37 Note that Chen seemed to understand the counterfactual nature of the paragraph, but attempted to circumvent its conclusions by grasping at straws, so to speak, trying to find some plausible interpretation that would have Bier accomplishing something -- namely by noting that he was, after all, a famous philosopher who presumably had his own influential works on the subject. Note also that Chen seemed to reject answer number 5 almost out of hand, as not being a serious contender. (This became even clearer in subsequent questioning.) His comments indicate to me that he brought a couple of strong a priori attitudes to the test, namely, (1) the none-of-the-above answer (number 5) was just an obligatory inclusion on a multiple-choice test and was thus not really a viable candidate, and (2) the paragraph must be about what Bier actually did, otherwise the whole thing would be pointless. I have noticed this reaction on the part of many Chinese who read the test. Oh, it's a trick, they say, once they realize the paragraph isn't really about anything. Bloom himself notes that Chinese are more likely to consider as more satisfying an interpretation that attributes some achievements to Bier, since if the paragraph is not about what Bier did, why write it at all?38 To virtually all the Americans who read the paragraph in English, the constant appearance of would have makes it obvious that the thrust of the paragraph is counterfactual, and thus any labored speculation about what Bier did accomplish (even though the paragraph clearly mentions nothing he actually accomplished, but only what he might have done) is inappropriate. This overall thrust may not have been quite as obvious to Chen, and thus he looked for other solutions; or it may have been obvious enough, but perhaps he assumed that he was being encouraged to look harder for some plausible answer other than number 5. It is impossible to tell. Very few of the people to whom I have personally given the test have failed completely to notice that Bier couldn't speak Chinese, or that the implications were speculative. Perhaps what can be said for Bloom's interpretation is that -- at least in my experience observing Chinese who take the test -- there is seldom a solid click of understanding, with the concomitant willingness to abandon almost the entire contents of the paragraph to counterfactuality. Quite the contrary, sometimes the Chinese people to whom I give the test to seem feel that what is being tested is their ingenuity in discovering what Bier must have been able to do amidst a lot of distracting and irrelevent information about what he didn't do.

Here is the reaction of another Taiwanese friend, Pei, who also had just chosen answer 1 as the correct response: Me: So why did you choose number one? Pei: Uh, because I just saw this phrase, uh, created a theory which not only [bu jin in the Chinese text]...explained natural phenomena as individual entities, but which also made clear their interrelationships. This gave me an...an impression [she says the word in English] that he...he at that point, because he didn't understand Chinese, therefore he was only able to explain natural phenomena as individual entities, but if he had been able to understand Chinese, he would have also been able to make clear their interrelationships.39 Her response is typical of the kinds of things my Chinese friends say when they try to evaluate this paragraph. Here Pei opts for a rather unlikely interpretation based upon a slight ambiguity in the wording of the text. It is technically possible that the phrase ...and [would] have created a theory which not only explained natural phenomena as individual entities, but which also made clear their interrelationships is implying that Bier did at some time succeed in creating a theory which only explained natural phenomena as entities, but that interpretation is, of course, wildly improbable, given the overall tone of the paragraph. But note here that Pei understood very well that Bier couldn't speak Chinese and obviously knew that the implications were all hypothetical, given that supposition. Subsequent questioning revealed that she had simply assumed that her solution was exactly the kind of interpretive trick that was expected of her, and that answer number 5 was included as the obvious correct answer for those unwary test-takers prone to jump to hasty solutions rather than searching a little longer for the more correct answer. And, again, what bolstered her decision was the assumption that the paragraph couldn't possibly be only about what Bier might have done. What confused Pei was not the counterfactual language of the paragraph, but the overall intent of the test. This situation is reminiscent to me of the famous series of experiments by Kahneman and Tversky which probed the way people apply, or don't apply, statistical principles and rules of deduction in everyday situations.40 In one experiment, subjects were given a brief description of an individual named Linda, who is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy in college, and as a student she was deeply involved in issues of discrimination and social justice. She also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Given this information, subjects were then asked to rank, from most probable to least probable, a series of statements which included these two: Linda is a bank teller, and Linda is a feminist bank teller. From a logical standpoint, it is much more probable that Linda is a bank teller than that Linda is both a bank teller and a feminist. The question reduces simply to Which is more probable, x alone or x and y? Yet more than 80% of subjects, including some who were versed in statistics, thought it more probable that Linda was both a bank teller and a feminist. One of the conclusions drawn by Kahneman and Tversky is

that people are not very good at applying simple logical principles to everyday situations. These studies are interesting and much discussed in psychological circles, but I, for one, take exception to this particular conclusion about the results. It seems obvious to me that in such test situations people assume, with some justification, that the information being given to them is being provided for a reason; that they are to use it somehow in reasoning or reaching a conclusion. To choose the possibility that Linda is a bank teller only over the possibility that she is also a feminist seems to render the information given about Linda largely irrelevent. The inclusion of a list of Linda's attributes seems to indicate that the operative questions are things like Is Linda more likely to be a non-feminist bank teller or a feminist bank teller? or How likely is it that Linda is a feminist? Otherwise, why provide the information? Similarly, I think it is possible that Bloom's Chinese subjects, given certain cultural biases, were simply operating on a very strong assumption -- namely that the information given to them in the paragraph must have had relevance to something Bier actually did, for otherwise the whole exercise would be somewhat pointless. Interestingly, one of Bloom's own experiments provides more evidence for the contention that differences in performance on such tests can come about not from language-based comprehension problems but from subjects' default assumptions about the nature of the test materials. Bloom gave 159 Taiwanese subjects, 68 Hong Kong subjects, and 112 American subjects the following question in their native language: Everyone has his or her own method for teaching children to respect morality. Some people punish the child for immoral behavior, thereby leading him to fear the consequences of such behavior. Others reward the child for moral behavior, thereby leading him to want to behave morally. Even though both of these methods lead the child to respect morality, the first method can lead to some negative psychological consequences --- it may lower the child's self-esteem. According to the above paragraph, what do the two methods have in common? Please select only one answer. A. Both methods are useless. B. They have nothing in common, because the first leads to negative psychological consequences. C. Both can reach the goal of leading the child to respect morality. D. It is better to use the second. E. None of the above answers makes sense. (If you choose this answer, please explain.)41 97% of the American subjects chose C as the correct answer, a seemingly obvious choice since that answer is given explicitly in the paragraph. Yet only 55% of the Taiwanese subjects and 65% of the Hong Kong subjects responded with answer C. Why the difference? Bloom's analysis of the results is interesting:

Most of the remaining Chinese-speaking subjects chose D or E and then went on to explain, based on their own experience and often at great length and evidently after much reflection, why, for instance, the second method might be better, or why neither method works, or why both methods have to be used in conjunction with each other, or perhaps, why some other specified means is preferable. For the majority of these subjects, as was evident from later interviewing, it was not that they did not see the paragraph as stating that both methods lead the child to respect morality, but they felt that choosing that alternative and leaving it at that would be misleading since in their experience that response was untrue. As they saw it, what was expected, desired, must be at a minimum an answer reflecting their personal considered opinion, if not a more elaborated explanation of their own experiences relevant to the matter at hand. Why else would anyone ask the question? American subjects, by contrast, readily accepted the question as a purely theoretical exercise to be responded to according to the assumptions of the world it creates rather than in terms of their own experiences with the actual world.42 Bloom goes on to speculate that these results have something to say about the different cognitive proclivities of Chinese speakers and English speakers. The Americans, he says, had less difficulty in leaving the the actual world aside to work within the constraints of the theoretical world provided, no matter how simplistic or even inaccurate they might hold the content of that world to be.43 This is certainly a possible interpretation. But, to apply Occam's Razor, it seems also possible that the results were due not to differences in the Chinese subjects' proclivities for theoretical reasoning per se, but rather a lack of consensus between the two groups as to what the test was all about. The Chinese subjects who rejected C obviously thought they were answering a question something like What is your opinion on the issue? rather than What opinion is expressed in the paragraph? Despite the explicit request to answer according to the view expressed in the text, the subjects held a strong default assumption that what was being tested was their own knowledge based on personal experience, and not their ability to passively parrot the views of the paragraph. (A Chinese friend to whom I gave the above test said to me, Because this question is a hotly-debated topic among child psychologists, I assumed your purpose in giving it to me was to get the Chinese viewpoint on the matter.) This difference could perhaps reflect what some perceive as different educational traditions -- the somewhat more valueneutral American system vs. the relatively value-laden Chinese one44 -- and thus might have little bearing on anything other than test performance. It would be interesting to see if Chinese perform any differently when given more bland and morally-neutral test materials. The triangle-to-circle question My personal experience with this question is that Chinese people do indeed tend to say no or at least balk at it much more than Americans do. My impression is that, Au's tests notwithstanding, the results are very robust and have

little to do with translation problems.45 I have seen numerous Chinese friends pose the question to their classmates in a variety of settings, with different degrees of contextualization and various wordings. I have informally given the question myself to Chinese of various ages and backgrounds, both orally and in written form, using different wordings, both Bloom's and Au's, as well as my own. And, of course, I have at some point given the question to almost everyone I know, American and European. The results are always the same: the Americans and Europeans, though usually noting the strangeness of the question, almost invariably answer with Yes, Of course, or It would have to be. Half or more of the Chinese, on the other hand, respond with a sharp No, or complain that it is a meaningless question, and those who do answer Yes seem to do so after much more reflection and with more reluctance than their Western counterparts. Furthermore, Chinese people fluent in English, when asked the question in that language, still often balk at it or complain that it makes no sense. A rather famous professor of psychology at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, a scholar who had studied in the United States and co-authored papers with Nobel prize-winner Herbert Simon, was quite taken aback when I told him that most Americans answered yes to the question. It just seems so obvious to me that the answer is 'no', he said. I find it baffling that anyone could say 'Yes'. What are you Americans thinking? I once gave an informal talk about the Bloom-Au controversy in the psychology department at the University of Michigan. In the room was a graduate student from Hong Kong, someone familiar with Bloom's book. She had discussed the issue with me a few times and had even attended a lecture given by Terry Au when Au visited the University of Michigan Psychology Department. I asked the triangle-to-circle question to those attending the talk. There was the usual almost-unanimous affirmative response, and we began to speculate as to why the Chinese might see the question differently. After about thirty minutes, the Chinese graduate student timidly raised her hand and asked, Could you please explain to me why you Americans say 'Yes' to this question? I've never really understood why. This state of affairs was very puzzling and even troubling to me when I first encountered it. One simply does not expect to find such a striking crosscultural difference in performance on what seems to be a relatively simple, albeit bizarre, logical problem. The hypothesis that this difference might be due to differences in Chinese and Western languages seemed even more strange. My conversations and interviews with Chinese friends about the triangleto-circle question have, at least in part, tended to confirm some of Bloom's hypotheses. The following is part of a conversation I had with Pei, a young Taiwanese architect living in the United States. She answered Yes to the question, and then allowed me to tape her reaction. Her comments are fairly typical of the responses I've encountered: Pei: When I first heard this question I couldn't come up with an answer because I couldn't understand what was being asked, because I thought to myself, What? A triangle is a circle? There's no connection between the two...what's... I

couldn't tell what you were asking...Then I thought again of the second sentence, Ruguo zheige sanjiaoxing shi yuanquan de hua [If this triangle is/were a circle]... Then this time I thought of the question in English. I immediately reasoned from a logical standpoint, because when I thought of the question in English, I immediately knew...if...if... Me: Let me interrupt for a second. Why did you think of the question in English? Pei: Because I didn't understand...Saying it in Chinese doesn't make any sense, but when the two different shapes didn't match up I knew I was supposed to use English, the English were, this subjunctive tense to reason from. Because I knew in English the subjunctive represents...if you use were it means it's contrary to the facts. So I thought of it in English and it seemed immediately clear. Oh! I shouldn't say, 'If this is this', I should say 'If this thing [she says it in English]... If I think of it in English, I do away with shape [in English], the idea of shape. Then I can reason from there, just say Oh, yeah, the triangle is large. But it has nothing to do with shape....This made me think of...I immediately thought of the fact that this concept of logic is something we studied in grade school...Our teacher said to us, If one plus one didn't equal two, if one plus one equaled three...and two is still two times one, then tell me, how much is two plus two? Many of the students couldn't reason this out because they felt one plus one can only be two. This is what you've always told us, so now if you say one plus one is three, it's meaningless. But back then I suddenly realized, this is a new Western logical concept. It's not at all saying one plus one is two, it's...this...this...Pretend 1 is a symbol --- This square added to this square is two. [She draws two squares on a sheet of paper.]...When you use symbols to represent the numbers it's very easy to carry out the logic. But because ever since I was small I've known this was a Western concept, when it comes to something like the situation just now, I have to think of it in English. Afterwards I can...I know this is Western logic.46 I had never discussed the question with her before, and her response was completely spontaneous. Several things are interesting to note. First of all, she clearly associates the kind of reasoning required in this question with Western logic. This is consistent with the some of the reactions Bloom records in his book: It's unChinese, We don't think that way, etc. Secondly, note that, in keeping with Bloom's claims, she does explicitly invoke the English subjunctive mood signaled by the use of were, and she speaks as if the concept associated with it is something unavailable to her in Chinese, as if she somehow had to import it in order to arrive at a reasonable answer. Thirdly, just as Bloom says, the counterfactual nature of the question is not clear to her at first. She seems genuinely puzzled as to what is being asked. Her question What? A triangle is a circle? is, I think, revealing, and is an extremely common reaction on the part of Chinese people. It would seem that at least some of those who say But a triangle isn't a circle! are interpreting the Chinese sentence Jiaru zheige xiao sanjiaoxing shi yuanquan de hua, as If this small triangle is a circle rather than If this triangle were a circle, and thus the whole thing appears to them to be pernicious

nonsense until the counterfactual interpretation has somehow been arrived at. I will deal with these three issues first. Pei's statement that answering this question somehow involves invoking Western logic is, on the face of it, absurd. The kind of counterfactual reasoning involved is no different in kind from that brought to bear in such questions as If we had initiated the one-child policy ten years earlier, and if the Cultural Revolution had never happened, would China be a stronger country now? This kind of counterfactual question is asked all the time, engendering no linguistic irritation, at least. Nor are Chinese particularly averse to certain seemingly outlandish counterfactuals. As an experiment, I once went around asking my Chinese friends the question If Mao Zedong had been a woman, do you think he would have been more in favor of birth control? None of them responded with anything like What? But Mao Zedong wasn't a woman! The question makes no sense! The difference, I think, is that Chinese speakers are willing to entertain (and easily able to understand) virtually any counterfactual that is sufficiently contexted and motivated. The lack of an explicit counterfactual marker makes uncontexted, out-of-the-blue counterfactuals, especially those counter to logic, harder to interpret as such. In other words, Chinese seem to have a default implicational interpretation for if-then constructions, and a greater degree of contextual pressure is needed in order to evoke the alternate, counterfactual interpretation. To give an example in English, the sentence If I had a million dollars, then I was rich, might sound strange and ungrammatical, unless the tenseambiguous phrase If I had a million dollars were embedded in a context which called for a past-tense interpretation instead of a subjunctive one (perhaps a mystery story about an amnesia-afflicted former millionaire trying to put the pieces of his life together). Similarly Pei, faced with a curious and grammatically ambiguous sentence, had some trouble integrating all the information necessary to arrive at a counterfactual interpretation because there were not enough contextual clues; the two antecedents seemed unmotivated and unrelated to one another. If the question had been prefaced with a statement like The following question involves reasoning logically from certain counter-to-fact premises, she no doubt would have had little trouble understanding what was being asked, and the need to invoke the English subjunctive would not have arisen. Why, then, did she feel the need to translate the sentence into English? It is possible that, surmising that the question had originally been in English, she back-translated it and guessed that the untranslatable subjunctive verb were might be the source of her problems. No doubt similar problems had arisen for her before in her reading of translated texts, and subsequent questioning by me did indeed reveal that she strongly associated this type of question with the sort found in her American textbooks. Another interesting thing to note about Pei's comments is the fact that once she had determined the question was counterfactual, she adopted the strategy of reducing the elements in question (circle, triangle) to meaningless symbols to which she could then assign arbitrary values. Pei's husband, Yucheng, voiced similar comments about his way of dealing with the task:

I feel I can't answer the question because a triangle isn't a circle. So the second hypothetical statement is untenable, so there's no way I can reason it through...If you didn't say If this triangle is a circle, [switches to English] if you say If this thing is a circle, then I might have another answer. But when you say triangle I have already something in my mind. Triangle is a triangle, not a circle. But if you say If this thing is a circle, or If this one is a... I might have a different answer.47 Many Chinese (and a few Americans) I've talked to have voiced similar objections to this kind of counterfactual, which drastically tampers with or totally negates the core identity of the thing being talked about. A counterfactual like If this triangle were larger... doesn't seem to do much violence to the essence, the triangleness of the triangle, whereas the phrase If this triangle were a circle... negates it completely. Perhaps this somewhat greater Chinese reluctance to entertain such counterfactuals explains another subtle difference I perceive in the way Chinese people approach this question. The difference seems to be this: When I introspect, I find myself to be thinking something like If all circles were large (never mind how), and this small triangle were a circle (never mind how), would it be large? When I ask my Chinese friends (those who answer yes to the question) to introspect, however, they seem to be thinking something more like If all circles were large (But they aren't! It's too problematic to imagine circles with this property. The question must not be referring to circles as I know them; substitute X), and this triangle were a circle (A triangle isn't a circle! The question must have nothing to do with triangles. Substitute another placeholder, Y), would it be large? Introspection, of course, is a notoriously unreliable tool for probing the mechanisms of mind. It could be that the account I give when asked to introspect differs greatly from what is actually going on inside my head, and likewise for the Chinese speakers. It is very probable that both I and my Chinese acquaintances (those who arrive at the same conclusion I do) simply reduce the question to If all X's have property Y, and Z were an instance of X, would it have property Y? Yet it seems somehow significant to me that my introspective account is so much more streamlined than theirs. It might, for example, indicate that for me the reasoning process involved has been more internalized, and thus feels more natural. It's difficult to say for sure. All of this seems to have some bearing on Bloom's contention that Chinese speakers have no cognitive schema for the counterfactual. While it is my opinion that, by any reasonable account of the term cognitive schema, Chinese speakers must certainly have it, it does seem at least plausible that they don't have the kind of direct access to it that English speakers do, and this might possibly shed some light on some of the differences noted above. Bloom's interpretation is somewhat stronger: Americans for their part generally accept without question both the counterfactual premise that all circles are large and the counterfactual and, in fact, counter-logical premise that a specific triangle is a circle, despite its obvious inherent logical inconsistency, and then go on to reason within the counterfactual world thus

created. Invocation of their counterfactual schema seems, as it were, to both permit and legitimize that indulgence.48 One common objection to the triangle-to-circle question is that it is just too weird; that it is so far outside of the scope of everyday discourse that all bets are off, so to speak, and that any results from the experiment have little to say about the reality of the routine Chinese (or English) psycholinguistic environment. I, too, share some of these reservations, and, as I mentioned above, it would be interesting to devise similar tests dealing with more mundane linguistic contexts. But remember that part of Bloom's Whorfian case is that one would expect language-induced differences in cognition to be most significant in precisely those more abstract areas of language usage requiring speakers to assume and perform mental operations on things like entified relationships or chains of counterfactuals. Providing solid experimental evidence for this position gives rise to a host of methodological problems and difficulties in devising appropriate test materials, but I don't think Bloom can be faulted on the strangeness of his questions per se. But this aspect of Bloom's test materials raises another possible objection to his results, and that is the fact that people with a lower level of education, or those with a non-Western educational background, often tend to be test shy. That is, they cannot answer, or refuse to answer seemingly irrelevant questions about topics outside their personal experience, and they often balk at performing mental tasks that seem meaningless to them or that have no immediate payoff. It is easy to forget that it is primarily highly-educated people (i.e., those most accustomed to taking all kinds of evaluative written tests) who are most likely to voluntarily submit to such tasks. In other words, I have no problem believing Bloom when he says that just about every one of his American friends answers yes to the triangle-to-circle question; the same has been true in my experience. Yet it is obvious that the people Bloom and I are most likely to encounter are a very self-selecting group of highly-educated academics, and not representative of the vast group of native English speakers as a whole. Indeed, I've noticed that most of the Americans who say no to or balk at the triangle-to-circle question are those most outside of academia. (My very non-academic 80-year-old grandmother, for example, refused to even consider the question, apologizing that she was never any good at geometry.) For better or worse, college students are used as subjects in the vast majority of psychological tests of this kind, and Bloom's studies are no exception. This is not a problem in and of itself, since the assumption is that students of the same age cross-culturally constitute comparable groups. But at least one researcher, Pat Cheng, has called into question this assumption of Bloom's tests: At least two cultural differences might have contributed to Bloom's results. First, college students in the United States and in China are products of different education systems. Chinese students receive less practice in answering questions based on essay comprehension. Whereas American education places greater emphasis on comprehension, Chinese education places greater emphasis on memorization, with corresponding differences reflected in the criteria for selecting

college students. Accordingly, it should not be surprising if Chinese students are outperformed to some extent by their counterparts at Swarthmore on comprehension questions. Second, Chinese culture tends to be more practical than Western culture, as Bloom himself points out. This practical orientation may at least in part account for Chinese subjects' unwillingness to answer such questions as If all circles were large and this small triangle were a circle, would it be large? and If the Hong Kong government were to pass a law requiring that all citizens born outside of Hong Kong make weekly reports of their activities to the police, how would you react? (The latter being extremely unlikely in reality.)49 The statement that Chinese culture is more practical than Western culture is an interesting, if ultimately unprovable, conjecture, and has important ramifications for the Bloom-Au debate. On Au's account, the difference Bloom found in the responses of Chinese and English speakers to the triangle-to-circle question is either a fluke or the result of bad translation, and as such there is no proof that any real difference exists. Cheng, however, seems to imply that the effect is real enough, but that it is due to cultural and educational differences rather than linguistic ones. It may well turn out that Bloom's results are both real and significant, but largely irrelevant to his Whorfian concerns. It would not be the first time that an experiment ostensibly proving something in one domain actually turned out to be more important and revelatory in some other domain. Cheng also alludes to the issue of emotional involvement with the question being asked, and notes its relevance to Bloom's experience in Hong Kong. The issue is worth considering. Someone might have little difficulty answering an emotionally-neutral counterfactual question such as If your state passed a no-fault divorce law, would you be in favor of it?, but the counterfactual question If your spouse suddenly wished to divorce you for no clear reason, would you fight it in court? might engender answers like But that would never happen! or What do you mean? Why should I think about that?, etc. Pointless questions about triangles turning into circles might also raise irritation levels to the point where similar effects surface.50 The results of my own informal tests While at Beijing University in the summer of 1987, I had the chance to administer -- informally, at least -- a set of counterfactual questions of my own devising. Due to a lack of preparation and training on my part, and because I was there for entirely different reasons, the test was not carried out with even the minimum degree of rigor required. I didn't have access to a sufficient number of subjects, and the results were far from conclusive, but they are perhaps worth mentioning briefly here.51 I first gave subjects (all Beijing University students) the triangle-to-circle question, with some slight changes in wording suggested by one of the people I was working with at the time, a Beijing University graduate student in logic and computer science.52 Eleven out of 24, or about 46% of the students tested said yes, (though one of them had written no first and then crossed it out). This is a higher percentage than Bloom's 25%, but far lower than Au's 73%.

Bloom mentions in his book that when the question is asked in a somewhat less abstract form, for example If all chairs were red and this table were a chair, would it be red?, similar cross-cultural differences arise. I had wondered whether or not the effect might be due to the compounding of two counterfactual assumptions. Would performance improve if there were only one? I made up a new, equally illogical question with only one counterfactual condition: If teacups were dogs, would they have four legs?53 The results were identical to those of the triangle-to-circle question: 11 out of 24, or about 46% said yes. (One no answer included the comment Only if you had a dog named Teacup could a Teacup have four legs.) It also seemed to me that in order to test the relative frequency of counterfactual utterances in the two languages, it would be useful to provide various scenarios intentionally designed to elicit counterfactual responses and then let native speakers answer in their own words, putting themselves in the role of the protagonist in the scenario. For example, one of the scenarios went as follows: A mother gives each of her two daughters a bag of candy, expecting it to last them all day. After a few hours, one of the daughters has eaten all her candy and is crying because her sister still has some left. What does the mother say to the crying daughter? I anticipated that among the multitude of possible answers there might be some counterfactual responses such as If you hadn't eaten your candy so fast, you'd still have some left, like your sister. Would English speakers be more likely to produce such utterances than Chinese speakers? Other scenarios were designed to evoke similar counterfactual responses. There are a number of pitfalls with this approach, of course, and the results proved almost useless. For one thing, it is exceedingly hard to tune a scenario in such a way that any answer within a reasonable range of possible responses can be classified clearly as either counterfactual or non-counterfactual. The number of possible associations and reactions to even a simple real-life scenario is almost impossibly huge. Another problem is that it is very difficult to say to what degree an utterance is counterfactual, or even to say whether or not it is counterfactual at all. Counterfactual utterances are by no means strictly identified with grammatical structures such as If x had been the case... Counterfactuality can be conveyed in surprisingly diverse and subtle ways. These issues will be dealt with more later, but for me the experience of trying to formulate these tests simply underscored the difficulty of what I already knew to be a formidable task. Does the construction of counterfactual worlds constitute a cognitive skill? That Chinese speakers routinely produce and understand counterfactual utterances is so obvious as to go without saying. I bring it up here and elsewhere only because Bloom has sometimes been misunderstood (by those with little knowledge of his research and even less knowledge about language) as saying that Chinese speakers somehow can't understand or use counterfactual sentences. Counterfactual arguments are found everywhere in contemporary Chinese literature and philosophy, and abound even in wenyanwen, the special literary language of the classical Chinese texts.54 It is absurd, of course, to imagine a natural language without such a capability, given the absolutely essential role of

counterfactual thinking in human affairs. George Steiner, in his book After Babel, speaks in celebratory terms about this aspect of language and thought: Counter-factual conditionals --- if Napoleon was now in the field, the business in Vietnam would take a different turn --- do more than occasion philosophical and grammatical perplexity. No less than future tenses to which they are, one feels, related, and with which they ought probably to be classed in the larger set of suppositionals or alternates, these if propositions are fundamental to the dynamics of human feeling. They are the elbow room of the mind, its literal Lebensraum.55 Language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is. Without that refusal, without the unceasing generation by the mind of counterworlds --- a generation which cannot be divorced from the grammar of counterfactual and optative forms --- we would turn forever on the treadmill of the present. Reality would be (to use Wittgenstein's phrase in an illicit sense), all that is the case and nothing more. Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or unsay the world, to image and speak it otherwise.56 Douglas Hofstadter also sees the counterfactual mode of thinking as a deep and essential aspect of human cognition:
Consider how natural it feels to slip from the valueless declarative I don't know Russian to the more charged conditional I would like to know Russian to the emotional subjunctive I wish I knew Russian and finally to the rich counterfactual If I knew Russian, I would read Chekhov and Lermontov in the original. How flat and dead would be a mind that saw nothing in a negation but an opaque barrier! A live mind can see a window onto a world of possibilities.57

Is this cognitive proclivity to unsay the world an innate aspect of human thinking for which natural languages are mere neutral carriers? Are speakers of any language able to produce and process counterfactual arguments, chain them together, embed them in complex grammatical structures, remember them, retrieve them, and reason within the mental worlds they create, all with equal facility? Is it possible that counterfactual reasoning might constitute a kind of cognitive muscle that can be exercised and improved? Anyone who studies a foreign language encounters a large number of novel structures, some of which are easier to assimilate and use than others. English speakers who learn French soon become accustomed to putting adjectives after nouns instead of before them, but correct use of the subjonctif may take much longer. Most often, when learning such new structures, one has the impression that this is just a new way of saying the same thing, but occasionally there is the feeling that some new structure is unlike anything in one's native language, and that what is being learned constitutes a new mental skill. As fluency increases, one is able to use this new structure with increasing ease and naturalness, and it is easy to forget that the structure in question ever presented any problem. It is extremely difficult to tease apart particular cognitive skills from the linguistic structures

associated with them, and, as certain mental skills are acquired concomitantly with linguistic ones, it may in some cases be meaningless even to try. According to Bloom, a Chinese speaker learning the English subjunctive and conditional is not just acquiring a new way of saying the same thing, but must actually assimilate a new cognitive skill: [I]f the lack of a distinct marking for the counterfactual in Chinese were merely a linguistic fact, with no further cognitive consequences for speakers of Chinese, one might expect that the Chinese equivalent of the sentence If John went to the library he saw Mary, since it would have to carry both the implicational and counterfactual interpretations (i.e., If he had gone, he would have [seen]... and If he went, he saw...), would be perceived as ambiguous by Chinese subjects, just as the sentence Everyone loves his wife is perceived as ambiguous by English speakers, at least once the ambiguity is pointed out. Yet the large majority of monolingual Chinese subjects interviewed did not perceive such sentences as ambiguous nor, when the two interpretations were pointed out, was there that ready click of comprehension of the distinction which is evident among speakers of Western languages under similar circumstances. In fact, after a week of working with sample sentences, my highly intelligent, monolingual research assistant was still encountering considerable difficulty in maintaining clearly in mind the idea of a counterfactual interpretation as distinct from a negative implicational one (i.e., If he had/had not gone vs. If he didn't go). In effect, for the monolingual Chinese speakers interviewed, coming to recognize the distinction between counterfactual and implicational sentences seemed not to be just a question of associating new formal terms with already explicitly developed modes of categorizing experience, but rather a question of building new cognitive schemas to fit those formal terms, parallel perhaps to the predicament of the English-speaking student of logic who has to build new cognitive schemas in order to come to recognize the distinction carried by the formal labels if-then, if-andonly-if-then and only-if-then.58 I have already mentioned certain problems with this interpretation of the phenomenon, but Bloom's anecdotal accounts are interesting and confirm some of my own impressions. Most Chinese will readily admit that the subjunctiveconditional combination is for them one of the hardest aspects of English grammar to understand and use correctly. And it is true that Chinese people have much more trouble with this structure than foreigners from, say, Europe, where most of the languages have structures corresponding to the English subjunctive and conditional. Are the difficulties indicative of anything other than superficial differences in grammar? Many aspects of English tense differ greatly from those of Chinese; why the special difficulty with this particular aspect? It is a well-known fact that certain grammatical structures, such as passive sentences and the use of certain relative clauses, are more difficult for children to learn, and even adults tend to be unable to use them as easily or efficiently as they use other structures.59 The ability to understand sentences with embedded relative clauses, such as The deer that kicked the man chased the boy, is a good example

of a cognitive skill that adults have mastered to the point where understanding seems effortless and natural, but that requires a certain amount of exposure and practice for young children, who will often misinterpret such a sentence, extracting as part of its meaning The man chased the boy. And children and adults alike find it more difficult to parse sentences in which the embedded relative clauses are not marked by relative pronouns, as in The safe the crook cracked opened. Now consider a sentence like: People words people bees sting shout embarass blush. The sentence appears to be merely a nonsensical word list until you are told that it is a matter of several embedded relative clauses, and even then the sentence is almost impossible to parse. It's a bit easier if you start with the innermost embedded sentence: Bees sting. People (whom) bees sting shout. Words (which) people (whom) bees sting shout embarass. People (whom) words (which) people (whom) bees sting shout embarass blush. Note that understanding is facilitated somewhat by the inclusion of explicit markers (whom, which) for the relative clauses. Without them, the relationships between the various nouns must be deduced from the context -- from the overall semantics of the sentence -- and thus involves some extra cognitive time and effort. Also note that the basic interpretive task is one that English speakers perform every day. The difficulty is due merely to the fact that the number of embedded clauses is much higher than we are accustomed to dealing with. Furthermore, it has been my experience that with some effort, one can get better at parsing this sentence and similar sentences, though there is naturally an upper limit on the number of embedded clauses.60 Now consider the following counterfactual sentence: If he had known after she left him that if he had only told her he loved her she wouldn't have left him, he would have felt even worse. This may seem like an impossibly unlikely utterance, but it is an only slightly more complex version of a sentence I actually overheard one day. Most of the Americans I've given the sentence to can successfully parse it on hearing it a second or third time. No doubt given a reasonable and vivid context (i.e., close familiarity with the people involved and the situation), most people would have little trouble understanding it the first time, and might not even consider it all that unusual. At any rate, it is obvious that successfully parsing this example involves the ability hold several counterfactual propositions in mind at the same time, and the sentence strains the abilities of most English speakers to do so. Now imagine the same sentence translated into Chinese (an interesting and non-trivial task).

Would the lack of explicit counterfactual markers make it more difficult for Chinese people to understand the sentence out of context? If so, would this indicate that it might also be somewhat more difficult for them in context? It might be that, while the sentence in English is just barely acceptable, the sentence in Chinese would have to be expressed in two or more sentences for various other grammatical reasons, and it might be true that such embedding is more difficult in general in Chinese. Is this significant? Does it say anything about the complexity and frequency of counterfactual utterances Chinese people are likely to make on their own? More interestingly (and controversially), does it say anything about the kinds of counterfactual thoughts Chinese people are likely to generate and entertain? Note that the above example cannot be expressed other than counterfactually. Certainly a Chinese can entertain the thoughts contained in the sentence, and can express them in Chinese, though perhaps not as succinctly. But how much validity is there to Bloom's claim that English speakers, because of the direct counterfactual labels available to them, are able to use them as a stable point of cognitive orientation in constructing and understanding complex counterfactual arguments? And to what extent is our ability to structure, chain, and chunk counterfactual propositions a cognitive skill aided and facilitated by our use of these explicit counterfactual labels? I will deal more with all these issues in the next section. It is important to remember that Bloom's experiments involve linguistic materials that are in some sense carefully tuned to test the limits of easy comprehensibility. In everyday language, where utterances and written language are produced in highly-contexted settings, people are amazingly adept at disambiguation and at pulling the intended meaning from sentences. They are so good, in fact, that they usually are not even aware that what they are reading or hearing is ambiguous or problematic in any way. The telegraphic English of newspaper headlines is a good example of a domain where people routinely and effortlessly deal with extremely ambiguous phrases. Headline-ese is a very terse language which provides only the most essential syntactic clues as to how the sentence is to be parsed. Conjunctions, articles, and relative pronouns are constantly omitted, giving rise to the possibility of a host of alternate parsings, most of which are so semantically improbable or ridiculous that most people never even see them. Only occasionally does this ambiguity become a problem, as in headlines like this one: DELAYS DOG DEAF-MUTE MURDER TRIAL where it usually takes a bit of effort for people to arrive at a correct parsing. The Columbia Journalism Review has put out two books of genuine headlines from the nation's press, which give examples of headlines with humorous double parsings. The books are entitled Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim and Red Tape Holds Up Bridge, and included in them are headlines like these: BRITISH LEFT WAFFLES ON FALKLANDS FARMER BILL DIES IN HOUSE

GREEKS FINE HOOKERS MILK DRINKERS TURN TO POWDER LAWMEN FROM MEXICO BARBEQUE GUESTS MAN ROBS, THEN KILLS HIMSELF ALL UTAH CONDEMNED TO FACE FIRING SQUAD STATE DINNER FEATURED CAT, AMERICAN FOOD Obviously, the people who wrote these headlines were too familiar with the intended meanings to see the risky ambiguity of what they had written. But it is worth noting that this kind of headline where an alternate interpretation becomes evident is actually a very rare occurrence. I mention all this simply to underscore the point that the lack of an explicit counterfactual marker in Chinese does not imply that Chinese speakers commonly experience confusion in everyday language when counterfactual utterances arise. Another series of experiments by Bloom addresses the possibility of another domain in which the cognitive skills of Chinese and English speakers might differ: the entification of conditions and events. When we in English switch from saying Interest rates rose to talking about The rise of interest rates in the future, or when we note that Mary is sincere and then go on to speak of Mary's sincerity, we have moved from straightforward descriptions of conditions and events to the projection of those conditions and events as theoretical notions. We have entified something that happened or was the case, extracting the idea or event as a semantic element to be manipulated much more abstractly, independent of truth commitments to the real world. The entification of events and conditions is most often rendered in Chinese with the de construction, a linguistic form using the particle de which roughly expresses the equivalent of the English possessive and the descriptive subordinate clause. The noun to be modified is placed after the particle de, and the name of the possessor or the subordinated descriptive clause is placed before the de. For example, The closing of the American mind is expressed as The American mind de closing and the rise of interest rates becomes interest rates de rise. The fact that Chinese descriptive clauses precede rather than follow the nouns they modify results in a left-embedding phenomenon --- the hearer or reader must hold in memory the content of the descriptive clause before it is revealed what is being described. In other words, Chinese readers must code a description before discovering what the description applies to, and this processing burden seems to place some constraints on just how complex subordinated descriptive clauses can become. The English sentence Congress just passed a law that imposes a tax on private cars and encourages the use of public transportation would become, literally translated, Congress just passed an impose tax on private cars and encourage (people) use public transportation de law. Faced with the possibility of an overly-complex descriptive clause, the native speaker is likely to avoid this construction, perhaps preferring a structure more like Congress just passed a law; that law did x, y, and z. Bloom describes a short experiment that demonstrated some difficulty on the part of Chinese speakers in dealing with such structures:

English speakers have little trouble comprehending what, specifically, is to be discussed when they hear the sentence We will put off to next week discussion of the further implications of the new method for calculating the relationship between the rate of economic development and individual standard of living. But the direct Chinese translation equivalent, which, by the use of multiple de constructions, leaves the levels of internal subordination of the English sentence intact --- We will put off discussing until next week calcuate economic development de rate and individual standard of living de relationship de new method de further implications --- not only direly offends the aesthetic sensitivities of Chinese speakers, but left 58% (70 out of 120) of the Taiwanese subjects queried unsure as to what exactly will be discussed --- further implication, and/or a new method and/or a relationship between economic development and individual standard of living and/or all three, etc. Fluent Chinese might present the relationship first, then in a second sentence talk of the new method of calculating it, and then in perhaps a third sentence state that next week we will talk specifically about the further implications of that method.61 Most important to Bloom's work, however, are not comprehension problems with complex descriptive clauses using the de construction, but rather the use of that construction in entified forms. It is important to know that, before the influence of the West on China, and even to a large extent today, these entified forms were by and large not used much in Chinese. A sentence like Mary's sincerity cannot be doubted, though perfectly expressible in Chinese as Mary de sincerity, cannot doubt (it), is more idiomatically rendered as Mary is so sincere, (you) cannot doubt (her). However, due to the enormous number of books in translation, entified structures are becoming more and more common in everyday Chinese usage, especially among young people, but it is safe to say they are considered aesthetically somewhat unattractive examples of Westernized Chinese. Bloom asked his subjects to rate sentences using some of these entified forms, and he noted the following reactions: 1) As soon as the speaker goes beyond the relatively small set of widely used entified structures and attempts to coin new ones, Chinese subjects tend to rate them as unacceptable. 2) As soon as a speaker tries to move from entification of events such as The rise of interest rates --- in which the interest rates are doing the rising --- to the entification of events such as The approval of this measure --- in which the measure itself is not doing the approving --- acceptability tends to decline. 3) As soon as a speaker attempts to embed one entified construction into another, Chinese subjects not only find the utterance grammatically unacceptable, but difficult to comprehend as well. Thus, the entified forms the importance of interest rates and the rise of interest rates are both considered acceptable, but the phrase the importance of the rise of interest rates is not.

Does the entification of events and conditions constitute a cognitive skill? Although the entification schema is readily available to Chinese speakers in their psycholinguistic world, is it possible that, for various cultural and linguistic reasons, Chinese are not able to use it with the same facility as English speakers? Bloom presented Chinese and American subjects with the following sample transformation in their own languages: Paul and Priscilla got married ---> The marriage of Paul and Priscilla This thing is important ---> The importance of this thing Subjects were then asked to transform the following sentences according to the principle exemplified in the above examples: A. It is possible that he already arrived ---> B. Jeremy succeeded ---> C. His attitude towards that issue is sincere ---> 87%, or 101 out of 116, of the American subjects were able to correctly transform all three of the sentences into entified phrases. (It is possible that he already arrived ---> The possibility that he already arrived; Jeremy succeeded ---> Jeremy's success; and His attitude is sincere toward that issue ---> The sincerity of his attitude towards that issue.) Only 34 out of 321, or 11%, of the Chinese subjects were able to correctly transform all three sentences, although 61% got at least one sentence correct. The results seemed to indicate that, though the linguistic schemas (to use Bloom's term) for entification were available to them, Chinese subjects were not as adept at employing them as their American counterparts were. Of course, there always remains the possibility that the results are some artifact of faulty translation. Clark (1969, 1974) provided evidence that the way a logical problem is stated can significantly affect the ease with which it is solved. For example, the question If Lee is better than Joe, then who is best? is much easier to answer than the question If Lee isn't as bad as Joe, then who is best? The two questions are essentially equivalent, but activate different conceptual orientations, which affect ease of understanding. If it is the case that different languages have different idiomatic ways of expressing certain kinds of relationships and attributes, could these differences affect cross-cultural performance on such logical tasks? I have more to say about these issues below, but two anecdotes seem somehow relevant. A few years ago I was helping a language-fanatic friend of mine collect examples of what he called scarecrow words -- that is, nouns made up of two words, verb + noun, where the noun is the object of the verb. Thus, a scarecrow is something that scares crows. This type of word is extremely common in French -- for example, a corkscrew is a tire-bouchon (pull-cork) -but in English such words are very scarce, thus the task of finding them was rather challenging. (Two other examples are pickpocket, one who picks pockets, and carry-all something which carries all.) I found that when I would give my friends the challenge, they would, at first, almost invariably come up with several

invalid examples like jumprope or throwrug, even though the principle had been explained carefully and several examples given. (A jumprope doesn't jump ropes; a throwrug doesn't throw rugs.) It seemed to take them a few seconds to make a mental model of the problem, a small cognitive schema for scarecrow words, after which they no longer volunteered incorrect examples. Needless to say, when I asked French people for instances of such words in their own language, there was never a similar period of confusion, since the form is so common. Finally, back to the subject of counterfactuals. A couple from Shanghai told me they had seen in China a videotape of the film Murder on the Orient Express, a movie adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel, dubbed into Chinese. When the final denouement came, and Hercule Poirot (played by Peter Ustinov) was unraveling for the assembled suspects the tangled threads of the murder investigation, the Shanghai couple suddenly found themselves unable to parse what he was saying, and they had to rewind the tape and listen to the scene several times before they finally understood what was being said. The problem, they told me, was that his speech was full of counterfactual speculations like If the murderer had known about the gun, he would have attempted to hide it -- that is, if there had been enough time during the train's passage through the tunnel, and had the conductor been conveniently in the dining car attending to other matters..., etc. Of course, the film could well have been incompetently dubbed. And, too, such scenes where the detective reveals the intricate machinations of the killer's plot are always intrinsically convoluted and hard to follow -- that's part of the fun of it. Still, it's interesting how often Chinese speakers' problems with material translated from English arise precisely at those points where counterfactual propositions come into play. Is the rate of counterfactuals lower in Chinese? Bloom gives much anecdotal evidence in his book for the case that Chinese less frequently employ counterfactual forms, the most compelling of which comes from reactions of Chinese-English bilinguals: Bilinguals report that they feel perfectly comfortable using counterfactual statements in English such as If the lecture had ended earlier, Bill would have had a chance to prepare for the exam, but they feel more comfortable converting such statements into descriptive alternatives such as The lecture ended too late, so Bill did not have a chance to prepare for the exam in order to express the same ideas naturally in Chinese; and native Chinese, Chinese-English bilinguals who were presented with matched pairs of English counterfactual and descriptive statements and asked, for each pair, if either of the pair seems closer to the way such facts are expressed in Chinese, consistently selected the descriptive form as the one that captures the way we say, think about such things in Chinese. Ironically, it is in fact Westerners who have had little experience in the Chinese language and culture who are usually the most reluctant to believe that there could be something unChinese about the counterfactual, while the Chinese themselves with few exceptions readily and cheerfully confirm that it is the case.62

The account is interesting, and is consistent with some comments I have heard from Chinese friends, but one has to be somewhat cautious about reaching any conclusions if just translated materials were used, especially if the translations were from English into Chinese. As I mentioned earlier, there are a great many ways of expressing counterfactuality in Chinese, only a few of which correspond to the English structure If X had been the case, Y would have been the case. Chinese speakers exposed to a set of examples in Chinese that are isomorphic to the various English language structures which express the counterfactual would of course find them correct but less natural and less idiomatic than some of the other typically Chinese forms which had been excluded from the materials. In another somewhat suspect piece of evidence, Bloom claims that an informal content analysis of a newspaper in Taiwan over a three-week period revealed only one example of a counterfactual argument (of the form X is not the case, but if X were the case, then Y would be the case), and that turned out to be in a translation of a speech by Henry Kissinger.63 Again, if Bloom and his informants were searching for structures corresponding exactly to the above standard English-language form, it is perhaps not too surprising that few could be found. It is almost certain that a closer inspection would have revealed numerous counterfactual propositions lurking in linguistic structures less easily spotted and catalogued. In fact, counterfactuals are such subtly pervasive and intrinsically blurry things that they almost defy identification by any conceivable set of grammatical markers. The linguist Gilles Fauconnier, who is fascinated by natural-language use in such areas as auto-accident insurance reports, notes that the sentence I drove into a driveway that wasn't mine and hit a tree that wasn't there is really just another way of saying the counterfactual sentence If I had driven into my own driveway like I intended, there wouldn't have been a tree there for me to run into. Fauconnier notes that even recognizing that there is a dent in a car involves the activation of a fleeting, subconscious counterfactual: a quick mental image of what the car would look like without the dent.64 William Baxter notes that a sentence like He was reading when I shot him carries with it the implicit counterfactual consequent ...and would have continued had I not shot him. It is also interesting to note that a strong counterfactual tone can be established with merely one word or a tone of voice, as in the case where one hears about a decision or course of action that seems unwise or foolish, and replies with, Now me,... Any attempt to tabulate of the frequency of counterfactuals in a given language would be further confounded by the fact that many utterances that appear counterfactual in nature may not be genuine counterfactuals. For example, it could be argued that in most cases the phrase If I were you... generates no contrary-tofact imagery, but is merely another way of saying It is my opinion that you should do such-and-such. Or it may be counterfactual but only mildly so; certainly the phrase If I were you... in its usual mundane contexts does not seem to demand the same degree of complex counterfactual-world building as a phrase like If I were president of the United States...

All these considerations seem to indicate that it is hard enough to determine which utterances express counterfactuality within a given language, much less arrive at a reliable inter-linguistic metric that would allow us to say which language was more conducive to counterfactuals in general. Consider the following dialogue in which a dinner guest arrives late: A: Sorry to be late. I'd have been here sooner but I got stuck in traffic. B: Well, if you'd come on time the dinner wouldn't have been quite ready yet, and you would've had to wait, so it's just as well you're late. A: Yeah, but if I'd come sooner I could've helped you. B: Well then, I wish you'd come a lot sooner. You could've just done the whole thing! A: Oh, no. If I'd cooked the meal, it would have been a disaster! B: It may be a disaster anyway. If I'd known you were going to be so late, I wouldn't have started the chicken so soon. Just look, it's pretty overdone. A: Darn, if I'd phoned to tell you I was going to be late, as I had meant to, you could have waited. Sorry. The dialogue is invented, but not, I think, too far-fetched. I have had many such conversations where one counterfactual gives rise to another in rapid succession. Would Chinese speakers be less likely to engage in such an exchange? Translated literally into Chinese, the above dialogue might sound unacceptably awkward. Here is the same conversation, slightly modified: A: Sorry I'm late. There was a traffic jam. B: Well, the dinner wasn't ready on time, so it doesn't matter that you came late. A: But I wanted to come sooner to help you out. B: You mean cook the whole meal? Great! A: Oh no, I'm a disastrous cook. You wouldn't want that. B: Well, it's a disaster anyway. Look at this chicken. I put it in so it would be ready on time, but now I'm afraid it's pretty overdone. A: Darn, I thought of calling you, but I didn't. Sorry. The question is, is this dialogue the same as the first one? That is, does it make the same thing happen in the head of a native speaker who hears it or reads it? Of course, it is true that almost any change in wording brings with it some change in meaning, but is there some special quality about the counterfactual dialogue that the second dialogue lacks, or are both basically equivalent? Most people would say that they are the same, and perhaps that is correct. Given mundane situations, highly constrained by real-world, real-time exigencies and priorities, one would not expect actions or attitudes to vary much across cultures, and the relative frequency of counterfactual utterances might not be very important or have much influence on thinking. But what about in the context of more abstract language use -- doing philosophy, writing a poem, or developing a theory of history? Might the relative frequency of production and use of counterfactual

propositions have any effect on the results of these kinds of activities? And even if that were the case, and it could be shown that the differences were languagerelated, how could one ever demonstrate that any idea, policy, aesthetic tendency, or philosophical orientation was a direct consequence of these different rates or propensities? Imagine a father in China scolding his son for failing a test at school. What a terrible grade, he says (in Chinese, of course). Let this be a lesson. Studying ahead of time is the only way to pass a test. Another father in America is also reprimanding his son for a poor showing on a test. What a terrible grade. Let this be a lesson. If you'd started studying earlier, you might have passed. Is there any difference in these two admonitions? Does anything different go on in the minds of the two children who hear them? Both statements have as their purpose correcting the mistakes of the child, of course, but there seems to be a subtle difference. In the first statement, the child is given a kind of principle for guiding correct action, a formula to be learned and applied in all similar situations. In the second sentence, the counterfactual one, the child is also being taught a behavioral principle, but in a somewhat different way. The child is being asked to mentally construct an alternative past, one in which the conditions were slightly different, and then follow the implications of that difference to a new conclusion about the world. The task constitutes a certain mode of reasoning, which the child will soon learn to extend to other domains, other situations. The Chinese child is also being asked to reason, of course, but in a different way. He is being asked to extend and flexibly apply certain efficacious principles to new problems as they arise. Now imagine that this state of affairs continues, with each child encountering a preponderance of one type of reasoning over the other throughout his childhood and adolescence. What effect can this difference be expected to have on the mental proclivities of the two sons by the time they have reached adulthood? I do not mean to imply that the scenario presented in this little thought experiment necessarily represents the true state of affairs in the two countries. I present it merely as a way of imagining how a large number of locally insignificant linguistic causes might give rise to global Whorfian effects. Can certain linguistic structures or usages characteristic of a particular language be more than just vehicles for expressing thoughts? Can they, because of their relative frequency and accessibility, actually begin to encourage certain kinds of thoughts and associations? My inclination is to say yes (with some reservations), but there are those who might take issue with the scenario I painted above. They might say that one cannot so simplistically associate a particular usage with its literal meaning, and that we simply have no way of telling for sure that a counterfactual world is mentally created when a child hears If you'd started studying sooner, you might have passed. The sentence in question might really be simply another way of saying Study ahead of time for your tests. This last issue is related somewhat to the problem of sexist language in English. From the time I began to read, I was told that the word man in phrases like the dawn of man and the concept of man in Greek culture was intended to include females as well as males; that man in such cases really meant men and

women or human beings. Many people have come to realize that this is simply not the case, but how would one go about proving it one way or the other? When asked to introspect, many people will adamantly maintain that when they hear the word man used in this supposedly generic way, they are really imagining both men and women, or at least a gender-neutral human being. Two sociologists at Drake University, Joseph Schneider and Sally Hacker, asked 300 college students to select from magazines and newspapers a variety of photographs to illustrate the different chapters of a sociology textbook. Half of the students were assigned chapter headings like Social Man, Industrial Man, and Political Man. The other half were given headings like Society, People in Industry, and Political Behavior. The not-too-surprising result was that those given the headings containing the word man overwhelmingly chose photographs of men engaged in the activities in question, whereas the students who had been given the sex-neutral headings chose more photographs which included women.65 The point is that people can be sensitive to literal meanings of even the most clichd and formulaic usages. Do the phrases You're welcome, Don't mention it, Think nothing of it, It was nothing, Glad to do it, Any time, No problem, No need to thank me, Forget it, My pleasure, all mean the same thing? Functionally many of them are basically equivalent, but is there in the mind some light activation of the literal sense of these phrases when they are heard or said? Phrases that seem to have lost their literal meanings can suddenly regain them in certain contexts. Note the collision of literal and figurative meanings in the following sentences: She can put on makeup till she's blue in the face, she's still not going to look like Liz Taylor. We like to beef up these vegetarian dishes with a little broccoli. (BBC broadcaster): Welcome to Israel, a mecca for tourists! The word mecca has a haze of Arab associations around it, an aspect of the word that is totally ignored in most contexts. All this has some bearing on the issue of counterfactual utterances, as well. Does the linguistic structure associated with counterfactuals invariably provoke the construction of an alternate reality in the mind, however briefly? Does the phrase If I were you... require the hearer to fleetingly imagine a different world in which the speaker is somehow in the hearer's shoes? Or does it simply code for some phrase like I think you should do such-and-such...? It is difficult to tell. At any rate, there are most certainly structures which more clearly indicate counterfactual thinking, and one could argue that at least those might be subject to cross-cultural comparisons. Is it really possible that something as fundamental to human cognition as counterfactual thinking might be more a part of one culture's cognitive style than another's? One possible way of looking at the issue of cross-cultural frequency of counterfactuals is to compare the language use and linguistic styles of individual

people. It seems obvious that some people are more prone than others to use counterfactuals in their everyday life. Whether for reasons of upbringing, level of education, personality, or social milieu, some people tend to use counterfactuals a great deal to make points, underscore arguments, express strong emotions, etc. Others tend to use them much less often, and eschew playful, bizarre, or illogical ones. If one accepts this view, then it would seem reasonable to extend the same idea to cultures and language groups, since, in a very real sense, the character of a country is very much like the character of an individual. A person's actions and verbal behavior are the result of billions of micro-events in the brain and countless interactions with the surrounding environment. Many years and a gigantic number of pressures work together to create an identifiable personality -- a dynamic one, always in flux to be sure, but one which is readily recognizable, despite a vast amount of similarity and overlap with other personalities. The personality of a culture is really no different in this respect. It, too, is the result of billions of micro-events at a low level --- scientific advancements, policy changes, natural disasters, social changes, jokes --- and all of these contribute to that constantlyshifting but always-familiar high-level style that characterizes each country. Just as we would expect that all individuals share a large set of human attributes, so languages can be expected to share a large set of linguistic characteristics. After all, people and languages must exist and function in the same world. But, of course, there are very real differences, and one wouldn't expect that every aspect of linguistic or cognitive performance is invariant worldwide. It is not a priori implausible that there might be some intercultural differences in the way people use and understand counterfactuals, though one would not expect the difference to be large.66 The American linguistic environment is extremely rich in counterfactuals. A placard in a supermarket near the dog food section begins, If you were a dog... An advertisement for boots announces, If trails could choose the boots you wear, they'd choose the new Kastinger ultralights! An ad for mineral water begins, What if there were five seasons instead of four? And two moons instead of just one? Even those bastions of reality and sober truth-telling, the newspapers, abound in counterfactuals. An entire column by Roger Altman in the New York Times, entitled If Reagan Were F.D.R., was dedicated to counterfactual speculation about what the country would be like if Roosevelt were in charge. Another column by Anthony Lewis in the same newspaper was entitled What Might Have Been, and asks its readers to imagine how things would be different if Robert Kennedy had not been killed. And so on. Counterfactuals are used in all sorts of rhetorical contexts to persuade, to ridicule, to illustrate. Does this use of counterfactuals reflect a deeply American style? Are Chinese newspapers and magazines as likely to entertain the kind of extended, full-blown counterfactualizing so common in the American media? Are Chinese people in everyday conversation as likely to use counterfactuals to express regret, to admonish and instruct, to score rhetorical points? The question of the frequency of counterfactuals in Chinese, however one chooses to define them, cannot be answered by the kinds of tests Bloom and Au have carried out. One needs to look to data which involve native speakers

spontaneously generating their own utterances in real-life situations. An ideal experiment to shed light on this issue would involve recording and analysis of many hours of natural-language use in both China and America, including a variety of settings such as street-corner conversations, sports broadcasts, radio and TV dramas, speeches, newspaper and magazine articles, classroom interactions, parties, and work situations. If the samples were varied and large enough, one could begin to answer questions about the relative frequency of counterfactuals in both languages, the kinds of situations that engender them, and the possible differences in the style of counterfactual utterances that native speakers of the two languages are likely to make. Of course, such a survey would be a very daunting endeavor, and is not very likely to be carried out. Another way to probe this might be to examine spontaneous utterances by bilinguals given roughly equivalent Chinese-language and English-language stimulus materials. In other words, one could attempt to formally provide evidence for or against Bloom's anecdotal indications that Chinese-English bilinguals tend to eschew counterfactuals when speaking in Chinese. This approach would be fraught with methodological problems, of course. Bilingual is a catch-all term for many kinds of speakers, not all of whom use both languages with equal facility, and it is actually rather difficult to find Chinese-English bilinguals whose sociolinguistic environments are the same with regard to both languages. Furthermore, just as total bilinguals do not always make the best translators, so also they might not be the best informants for such an investigation. For example, Bloom might claim that, although bilinguals might feel less comfortable using counterfactuals in Chinese, they nonetheless are influenced by their familiarity with English, and because of this are not truly representative Chinese speakers. Whatever methodological attack on the problem one adopts in devising psychological testing, there are several conceptual problems that must be dealt with, and the following short list of them can also serve as a summary of the issues discussed so far in this paper. 1. It is difficult to determine what is being thought based only on what is said. There is simply no fixed set of grammatical constructions that unambiguously and exclusively express counterfactuality. Consider the following sentences: You should've taken the bus -- it's faster. If I were you, I would've taken the bus. Next time, you should take the bus. It's faster. You're late. Didn't take the bus, eh? If only you'd taken the bus. It's faster. Me, I always take the bus when I'm in a hurry. If you'd taken the bus, you would have been here sooner. The bus gets you here sooner, you know. Which of these sentences indicate counterfactual thinking and which do not? Are some more counterfactual than others? It may be difficult to tell, even given a

context. Also, some structures that at the literal level seem to express counterfactuality may simply be chunked phrases or clichs that have lost their counterfactual quality. 2. It is impossible to find two linguistic situations that are exactly equivalent. A mother scolding her child, a sports announcer giving a play-by-play account of a game, someone asking a friend advice about a love affair -- such language situations are universal, yet in each culture there are different underlying assumptions brought to bear: different attitudes concerning the participants, different importances attached to the activities, and so on. These differences may be enormous or subtle, but they will always be there. A scenario involving a mother scolding her child might be interpreted differently in the United States than in China, where respect for one's elders is emphasized to a greater extent. Sports announcers in the U.S. tend to be colorful, outspoken characters known to the public, whereas in China they might tend to be more matter-of-fact and subdued, because of their relative anonymity. These differences mean that one cannot expect the linguistic behavior of those involved to be perfectly commensurable. This lack of a clear cross-cultural metric means it is difficult to make statements like In such-and-such a situation, native speakers of English are more likely to produce/understand counterfactual utterances than native speakers of Chinese are. Recall Bloom's informal content analysis of a Taiwanese newspaper, which revealed only one counterfactual statement in a three-week period. Supposing for a moment that this was really the case, it is not a priori clear that newspapers play precisely the same role in Taiwanese society as they do in ours. There may well be cultural, political, or sociological reasons why one should expect fewer instances of hypotheticals and counterfactuals in Taiwanese newspapers, none of which would necessarily have any bearing on the frequency of such utterances in daily conversation. 3. In using translated materials, it is important to realize that there is a difference between translations that are grammatically correct and comprehensible, and those that are truly idiomatic. In psycholinguistic testing, subjects' responses can be extraordinarily sensitive to nuances of phrasing and emphasis. Translations that seem perfectly faithful can be misleading, and the task requires someone extremely competent in both languages to judge the fidelity and appropriateness of the translated text. This is a central concern of Au's in her rebuttals to Bloom. 4. In testing for performance in counterfactual thinking, one factor that needs to be taken into account is the relative degree of counterfactuality expressed by the examples. It seems clear that certain counterfactuals are more contrary-to-fact than others, though the criteria by which one makes this judgment are rather illdefined, context-dependent, and subjective. In a counterfactual situation such as the triangle-to-circle test, the question of differential performance may hinge on this issue, since it is possible that any difference in Chinese responses might be due to the outlandishness or seemingly illogical nature of the counterfactual rather than a disinclination toward counterfactual thinking per se. In other words, what

engenders remarks like It's unChinese or It's Western logic might be simply counterfactuals that are different in degree rather than different in kind. The following ladder of ascending counterfactuality illustrates the kind of progression I have in mind: If I stood on tip-toes, I could reach that book on the top shelf. If that book were on the bottom shelf, I could reach it. If I had a stepladder, I could reach that book on the top shelf. If the bookcase were lower, I could reach that book on the top shelf. If I were two inches taller, I could reach that book on the top shelf. If I were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, I could reach that book on the top shelf. If I could levitate off the ground, I could reach that book on the top shelf. If books had legs, that book on the top shelf could jump down into my waiting arms. If I were a bookcase, I wouldn't allow books on my top shelf. If the universe were somehow upside-down, that book on the top shelf would be on the bottom shelf. And so on. Or, to give another similar ladder of sentences with increasing counterfactuality: If I had more time, I would read that book on the top shelf. If I were interested in linguistics, I would read that book on the top shelf. If I were a linguist, I would have written that book on the top shelf. If I were Alfred Bloom, I would have written that book on the top shelf, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought. If I were a book, I would be that book on the top shelf. If I were a counterfactual, I would be this very counterfactual. Is there a point in the progression where the counterfactuals presented become too ridiculous to ever be seriously entertained? Somewhere along the way, the core identity of the I in question becomes severely violated, and the

world one is being asked to imagine seems very remote from the real world. One can easily imagine being a few inches taller, but what would it mean to be someone else? To be of the opposite sex? To be an inanimate object? To not exist at all? Is it ever meaningful or useful to talk about a world in which the laws of physics are different? Or a world in which all circles are large? Some individuals are quite prone to use such counterfactuals as part of their linguistic style; their jokes, their analyses of past situations, their attempts to persuade or enlighten are all pervaded by such usages. Other people are more pragmatic, and tend to find such hypotheticals unconvincing, puzzling, or just plain silly. And just as there are differences in the cognitive preferences of individuals, cultures, too, can perhaps exhibit different tendencies. Counterfactuals are often engendered by situations associated with strong feelings. Terrible mistakes, missed opportunities, failed love affairs, lucky breaks, narrow escapes -- all these types of situation inevitably give rise to intense speculations about what might have been. This process is a very spontaneous one, an inseparable part of the way we model events, situations, and contingencies in our minds.
Driving down a country road, you run into a swarm of bees. You don't just duly take note of it: the whole situation is immediately placed in perspective by a swarm of replays that crowd into your mind. Typically, you think, Sure am lucky my window wasn't open! -- or worse, the reverse: Too bad my window wasn't closed! Lucky I wasn't on my bike! Too bad I didn't come along five seconds earlier. Strange but possible replays: If that had been a deer, I could have been killed! I bet those bees would have rather had a collision with a rosebush. Even stranger replays: Too bad those bees weren't dollar bills! Lucky those bees weren't made of cement! Too bad it wasn't just one bee instead of a swarm Lucky I wasn't the swarm instead of being me. What slips naturally and what doesn't -- and why?67

In any situation in which counterfactual propositions come up, there will be a number of what if's that seem reasonable given the particular set of circumstances, and those are likely to arise naturally and spontaneously. Others are implicitly pruned -- that is to say, rather than being entertained briefly and then rejected, they never even come to mind at all because they simply seem too bizarre, too remote from the reality of what occurred. However, given the complexity of human activity and experience, some very strange and impossibleseeming hypotheticals can arise very naturally. And it is not unreasonable to assume that language and culture have some effect on whether these more highly contrary-to-fact counterfactuals get used in arguments, taken seriously, written down, discussed, uttered, or even though of in the first place. The case for the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis So much nonsense has been written about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that most linguists now regard new evidence for it with the same weary skepticism mathematicians bring to a new proof of Fermat's last theorem, or physicists to a new scheme for a perpetual-motion machine. Some feel that Whorf's notion is not the sort of hypothesis that can be proven or disproven, and thus doesn't really belong in the realm of science. Others take the position that the thesis is perfectly plausible, but that the methodological problems of providing solid evidence are so intractable as to be hopeless.

Western accounts of the Chinese language and its relation to Chinese thought have been particularly guilty of a kind of simplistic misapplication of the Whorfian perspective. Most such accounts have centered on real or imagined features of the Chinese writing system and their putative effects on Chinese philosophy and thinking.68 The exotic appeal of China in the West, combined with a misunderstanding of the Chinese language as well as a certain navet about language in general, has tended to produce a body of research which emphasizes only the differences between Chinese and Western languages, and that promote gross oversimplifications about the importance of those differences. And yet there manifestly are differences between languages, and these differences are the meat and potatoes of translators. Each language has a certain texture, a set of characteristic tools and fine distinctions that sometimes seem to gently nudge the speaker in one cognitive direction or another. The fact that highquality translation is possible -- that is, that any given natural language is flexible and rich enough to express meanings originally formulated in another language, -does not diminish the fact that any particular language will more easily accommodate certain kinds of utterances than will another language. This point of view is, in large part, the basis for the so-called weak formulation of the SapirWhorf hypothesis, namely that languages differ not so much in what can be said in them as in what is relatively easy to say in them. Another supposition that underlies the Whorfian hypothesis, and one that has much intuitive appeal as well as some scientific evidence, is that language is not merely a neutral medium for ideas, but is actually connected to thought in a non-trivial way. In other words, as Whorf believed, linguistic structures, once learned and internalized, are not merely vehicles for thoughts, but are actually used in thought to formulate concepts and make complex mental models of the world; this is part of what it means to be thinking in a language. It follows from this that there are thoughts that would be difficult or impossible to formulate without the aid of language, although, as Bloom and others point out, this is most likely to occur in those more abstract areas of language use most divorced from immediate perception. Related to these suppositions is the idea that, except in the simplest examples, any time you change the wording of something, you also subtly alter its meaning. This point is crucial to Bloom's Whorfian case, as it is related to the issue of whether or not a sentence like Mary is so sincere, you can't doubt her is significantly different from its entified form The sincerity of Mary cannot be doubted. Someone might agree that there is a difference, but still deny its Whorfian implications, saying Of course, any time the wording is changed there is some slight difference in meaning, and this has implications for translation as well, since the very act of translating entails certain changes. It's just that the differences, for all practical purposes, are trivial. But once the admission has been made that differences in wording are often reflective of differences in thinking, i.e., the mentalese is different, then the question of what is trivial or not becomes an open one. Decisions in poetry and translation hinge on just these kinds of trivial distinctions.

George Steiner, the polyglot author and critic, in his book After Babel examines in detail these subtle issues of language differences and translation problems. The following is an excerpt from a fascinating discussion of the various translations of the famous passage in Genesis that begins And God said: Let there be light:
Fiat lux. Et facta est lux. Et facta est lux has a memorable sequentiality. The phonetic and grammatical exterior proclaim a phenomenon at once stunning and perfectly self-evident... Italian Sia luce. E fu luce uses five words as against six and is, in that sense, even more lapidary. But the initial sibilant, the soft c and the stress on gender in luce, feminizes and musicalizes the imperiousness of the Vulgate. Es werde Licht. Und es ward Licht is perfectly concordant with the Latin except in one detail. The semantically elusive Es has to be there. Werde Licht would misrepresent the whole tenor and significance of the Creator's illocution. The Es preserves the mystery of creation without previous substance. Let there be light: and there was light in the Authorized Version, or Let there be light, and there was light in the New English Bible, expand on the Latin. There are now eight words in the place of six. And the punctuation is lightened. The purpose, presumably, is to give a sense of instant consequence. But the omission of the full-stop together with lower-case and sacrifice the Latin pedal point. In the original the note of cosmic command is fully held while the division into two short sentences makes for a dynamic surge... The French version is also eight words long and opts for a punctuation precisely medial between the two English variants. Que la lumire soit; et la lumire fut. But much has altered. Latin, Italian, German, and English preserve the characteristically Hebraic repetition of the cardinal word light at the climax of the sentence(s). In each of the four cases, the word-order is powerfully imitative of the action expressed. Light has its pride of place in God's order and realization. In the French text the drama of accomplishment, of shattering obviousness is that of the verb: it turns on the movement from the imperative subjunctive of soit to the perfectedness of fut. But the major difference comes with the use of the definite article. Let there be light, and the light was. The diminution of impact is obvious... Que la lumire soit has an intellectuality altogether lacking from either the blank imperative of Fiat lux or the unforced immediacy of Let there be light.69

All these delicate considerations, the daily fare of those who work in translation, seem to argue against the very possibility of ever saying the same thing in two different languages. But how important are these differences? It seems clear that, although a single sentence (such as Let there be light, and there was light) might be difficult to translate from one language to another, when one considers a longer passage (the book of Genesis, or, say, the entire Bible itself), which is composed of many, many utterances and thoughts, the individual differences tend to cancel each other out or to become much less important. When the passages are examined at the fine-grained sentence level, there is an infinitude of difference; when they are regarded at the more coarse-grained level of the entire work, it is possible that the two versions will be grosso modo equivalent. This is why the translation of the title of a novel can be more difficult than any particular sentence in the book itself. The meaning in the title is usually very grainy and fragile with respect to choice of words, while the meaning of the novel as a whole is more robust and much more immune to the effects of the particular language it is written in.70 This idea of fine-grained vs. coarse-grained perspective has important ramifications for the Whorf hypothesis, because it suggests something about the sort of ideas that reside at a level independent of the influence of any particular language. It also has a bearing on Bloom's contention that certain cognitive schemas are strongly linked to linguistic schemas. To restate the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in Bloom's terms, how plausible is the notion that linguistic schemas, which are, of course, language-specific, can actually encourage the formulation of higher-level cognitive schemas, which are language-

independent? Stated this way, the question may seem paradoxical, but the hypothesis is that any idea or concept, once formulated in any specific language can be expressed, more or less, in any other language; it is just that some languages, because of the linguistic tools available in them, are more conducive to the formulation of that idea or concept. The fact that languages carve up reality in different ways is usually demonstrated by citing lexical items in one language for which there are no correspondences in other languages, and there are innumerable examples of this sort. There is no English word that embodies the set of meanings covered by the ubiquitous Chinese word keqi. The French word chez has no English counterpart that captures both the literal meaning and all the metaphorical extensions of the French word. And so on. However, for various reasons, including the fact that the lexicon is one of the most mutable aspects of a language, Whorf and the linguistic researchers who followed him have been much more interested in examining the role of grammatical structures in shaping thought. In his book, Bloom deals with a number of other grammatical differences between Chinese and English and explores their possible Whorfian implications. One of the forms he deals with is the use of the article the in English to signal what he calls the generic concept. One of the many uses of the word the in English is to indicate an abstract idea conceptually extracted from the realm of actual or even imaginary things, as in The buffalo is slowly disappearing, or The automobile has changed the character of American society, or The flying saucer represents a wish-fulfillment fantasy for many people. To English speakers, there seem to be rather distinct differences between A buffalo is dying (indicating a particular instance of the species), The buffalo is dying (indicating a particular buffalo in the presence of the listener, or a buffalo already referred to or seen), Buffalos are dying (indicating the buffalos in the world), and The buffalo is dying (indicating not any particular buffalo, but a theoretical entity, an abstract notion of buffalo-ness, a generic concept of buffalo). The difference between the last two meanings may seem rather subtle, but there is a very real distinction. Consider the difference between Chinese people don't like loud rock music, and The Chinese people don't like loud rock music. The Chinese people seems to be a notion too theoretical and timeless to allow for such statements concerning rather recent and specific cultural fads. In the sentence Alphabets are useful tools for writing down languages, the word alphabets seems to conjure up an image of the dazzling profusion of phonetic writing systems currently in use throughout the world, whereas in the sentence The alphabet was invented by the Phoenicians, the word alphabet represents a pure abstraction, the thread of commonality shared by all alphabets. In Chinese, the distinction between singular and plural usually remains unstated and is inferred from the context, though it can be made explicit with the use of demonstratives or qualifiers like this, that, several, all, etc. The unmodified word daishu, for example, is generally used to cover the range of situations where in English we would say a kangaroo, the kangaroo, kangaroos, or the kangaroos, though one is perfectly able to say this kangaroo, these kangaroos, or a kangaroo. The distinction between sentences

like A kangaroo has arrived and The kangaroo has arrived is usually handled by word order. Daishu lai le, Kangaroo/s has/have arrived indicates a definite or expected kangaroo(s), while Lai le daishu, has/have arrived kangaroo/s indicates the arrival of an indefinite or unexpected kangaroo(s). There are several other aspects of Chinese grammar that could be mentioned here, but the main point is that all singular/plural and definite/indefinite distinctions can be made explicit in Chinese if need be. But there is grammatically no direct way to signal the generic concept in Chinese. That is, there is no grammatical structure that can indicate a theoretical or abstract kangaroo (The kangaroo evolved in an interesting way), in contrast to a particular kangaroo or all kangaroos (Kangaroos are found in Australia). The Chinese sentence Daishu shi chi luobo de dongwu, literally Kangaroo/s is/are eat-turnip (de) animal/s, can either be translated as Kangaroos are animals that eat turnips, or The kangaroo is an animal that eats turnips. Bloom recounts how a friend of his, a Chinese professor who was assisting him in his research, asked his wife, a woman with a modest command of English, how she interpreted the above sentence in Chinese: From the generality of the content of the statement and the lack of any kangaroos in the vicinity or previous mention of any, she inferred that the sentence must be referring to plural kangaroos; in fact, to all kangaroos (soyu ti taishu). He then asked if it could alternatively be talking about a conceptual kangaroo (kuannien shang ti taishu), something other than an actual or all actual kangaroos; and she replied, What do you mean by 'conceptual' kangaroo'? Either you are talking about a single kangaroo or about all kangaroos. What else is there?71 Bloom eventually followed up this experience with an experiment. He asked 110 Taiwanese subjects, with varying levels of English ability whether or not the same sentence, Daishu shi chi luobo de dongwu, could refer not only to an actual kangaroo or all actual kangaroos, but also to a more abstract kangaroo, a conceptual kangaroo. Bloom reported that, despite the suggestive wording of the question, only 41, or 37% of the subjects, answered Yes, and most of those who did had had extensive exposure to English. It appears Bloom did not undertake a similar experiment with American subjects, and it is possible that, despite my earlier comments, a significant number of Americans might react in a similar manner, maintaining that in such a context the phrase the kangaroo is really just another way of saying kangaroos. Is there a difference? Introspection tells me there is, but as I mentioned earlier, introspection is a notoriously unreliable tool. Even if the difference is real, how important is it? Can differences of this kind be linked to higher-level cognitive differences in Chinese speakers and English speakers? Bloom speculates on this: Perhaps the fact that English has a distinct way of marking the generic concept plays an important role in leading English speakers, by contrast to their Chinese counterparts, to develop schemas specifically designed for creating extracted

theoretical entities, such as the theoretical buffalo, and hence for coming to view and use such entities as supplementary elements of their cognitive worlds. [And the footnote Extracting theoretical entities from one's baseline model is quite different from creating an imaginary entity such as a spirit, a ghost or a dragon and placing it within one's baseline model.]72 Note that the point is not that the idea of a conceptual kangaroo cannot be expressed in Chinese, or that no Chinese person ever comes to formulate such a notion, or even that such a notion is fundamentally at odds with their way of thinking. One can, of course, introduce or explain the notion of a theoretical kangaroo, and obviously many Chinese already have such a notion. The question being asked is this: Is it possible that the presence in English of a grammatical form that signals the generic concept might facilitate and even encourage the formulation of such abstract entities for the purposes of reasoning and philosophizing? Or, on a somewhat larger scale: Can a case be made for a causal link between certain consistent characteristics of Chinese or Western thinking and any aspect of the respective linguistic traditions of the two cultures? Chad Hansen, in his book Language and Logic in Ancient China, sets out to make just such a case.73 The book is an ambitious and carefully-crafted argument for adopting a kind of Whorfian framework in dealing with certain problematic issues in Chinese philosophy. I will deal with at least part of Hansen's thesis in some detail, as it has some bearing on Bloom's work and is an interesting application of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its weak form. Hansen begins with an observation common among historians and philosophers who study China -- namely that the concern with abstraction and absolutes that characterizes the Platonic tradition and that contributed to the development of Western science is almost totally absent from the Chinese philosophical tradition. Nowhere in the entire corpus of Chinese philosophical works are there systematic treatments of the problems of meaning, truth and falsity, concepts and ideas, or any of the other core concerns of Western philosophy. And despite the fact that China, through most of its long history, held a clear superiority over the West in fields like astronomy, mathematics, and agriculture, it never went on to develop anything like a rational scientific tradition that included a systematic accumulation of knowledge for its own sake. As the historian of Chinese philosophy, Fung Yu-lan has said, Chinese philosophers loved the certainty of perception, not that of conception, and therefore, they would not and did not translate their concrete vision into the form of science.74 Bloom puts this Chinese indifference to the concerns of scientific inquiry in stark terms: Neither formal logic, nor religious philosophy, nor moral philosophy, nor political philosophy, nor economics, nor sociology, nor psychology as theoretical systems independent of each other, bearing their own internal systemic constraints and entailments, divorced from the factual content they seek to explain, emerged in China other than as a consequence of importation from the West.75

Donald Munro and others have argued that the Chinese never developed an interest in abstractions and principles because the role of knowledge in Chinese culture was different: [I]n China knowing, the activity of the mind, was not a process of grasping nature's scientific principles or mathematical truths, of knowing for the sake of knowing. The activity of mind in Confucian thought was a seeking for nature's ethical qualities and relationships; it was knowing for the sake of guiding conduct.76 Hansen likewise subscribes to this view of the role of knowledge in ancient China. The function of mind, he says, was mainly discriminatory: its role was to divide up the world so as to guide evaluations and actions. Chinese philosophers viewed the mind not as a repository of entities called ideas, but rather as the faculty to differentiate between one thing and another. Abstract Platonic notions about the Idea as an internal representation of the Reality in the world never come up in Chinese philosophy; there is no theory of abstract or mental entities. Rather, says Hansen, the Chinese adopted a mereological, or part-whole, ontology, which stands in contrast to the one-many ontology of Platonism, wherein one abstract property or essence exists in relation to the many concrete instances of that property or essence. For the Chinese, the undifferentiated stuff of the world had to be divided up and named, and this for the purpose of assuring appropriate behavior; hence, Hansen uses the term behavioral nominalism to refer to this ontological framework. According to Hansen, the Chinese viewed language as consisting of names (ming), each of which designated all the members of a discontinuous set of stuff (shi ). For example, the word horse (ma) can be said to designate horse-ness; that is, it designates a member or several members of a class of horse-stuff. Thus, the task of the mind (and of language) is to discriminate between one type of stuff (say, horse-stuff) and another (say oxstuff). There is nothing in the Chinese view that corresponds to a universal or an abstraction; the mind contains no Platonic concept horse, only the ability to distinguish horse-stuff from non-horse-stuff Hansen contends that this ontology can be explained by certain features of the logical structure of Chinese nouns.77 Specifically, all Chinese nouns are treated very much as mass nouns are treated in English, in that they do not take pluralization and cannot be directly preceded by numbers or indefinite articles. In English, nouns like pencil and teacup are regular nouns; they can be pluralized (pencils) and preceded by numbers or indefinite articles (one pencil, several teacups). Mass nouns are words like water, furniture, and rice. They are not pluralizable and cannot be immediately preceded by numbers or indefinite articles (one water and several furnitures are grammatically unacceptable forms). Instead, mass nouns take certain measure words (Hansen calls them sortals) which allow for counting these nouns as units (a cup of water, a suite of furniture, a bowl of rice). Chinese nouns are similar to mass nouns in English in every one of these respects. The sentence Kangaroos are cute in Chinese grammatically treats the

word kangaroo exactly as English treats the mass noun water in a sentence like Water is wet, in that there is no plural form. And, just as the English sentence A water is wet is unacceptable and requires the use of a sortal such as drop to yield A drop of water is wet, so in Chinese the sentence A kangaroo is cute cannot be expressed without a measure word directly preceding the word kangaroo to yield, literally, A (measure word for animals) kangaroo is cute. Another distinction between mass nouns and regular nouns in English is that mass nouns take the quantifiers much and little, whereas regular nouns take many and few. In Chinese the same two terms go with all nouns: duo (much, many), and shao, (little, few). Hansen then goes on to make his Whorfian point: that this fundamental difference between the syntax of nouns in Chinese and in Western languages had an influence on the kinds of issues addressed in the two philosophical traditions, East and West. Essentially, I contend that a one-many paradigm for stating philosophical questions goes along with a count noun (nouns to which the many-few dichotomy applies) syntax. The Chinese language, during this classical period, tends toward a mass noun syntax (based on nouns to which the much-little dichotomy applies). Mass nouns suggest a stuff ontology and what I call a division or discrimination view of the semantic function of words (terms and predicates).78 Hansen wants to show that there was nothing in the mass-noun grammar of ancient Chinese to motivate Chinese philosophers to postulate such things as essences, properties, or abstractions. However, Hansen is very careful to point out that this does not mean that the Chinese language was incapable of expressing such notions, or that Chinese philosophers couldn't have come up with such concepts if somehow motivated to do so. He is merely saying that there is nothing in the mass-noun structure of Chinese that would have channeled their theories in this direction. The issues they did raise concerning language, Hansen says, are just those one could predict would arise given a mass-stuff ontology: I argue that the mass-noun-like syntax of Chinese nouns motivates an implicit substance ontology as opposed to our physical object ontology, and that it renders less appealing a whole host of philosophical views which have characterized Western thought from its outset. These conceptual differences include a different concept of mind, of language, and of thought. The argument rests on the claim that the Chinese assumptions are more coherent with (explained by) their language than our own assumptions are.79 Hansen then puts this evaluative framework to the test on various classical works, including the writings of Chuang-tzu, Mo-tzu, Confucius, and Lao-tzu. He shows that certain commonalities in these philosophers' views of language -- for example, the role of language in dividing up the world, and its prescriptive or regulative role (as in the Confucian notion of the rectification of names) -- are all

consistent with the behavioral nominalist framework and the part-whole ontology suggested by the grammar of Chinese. One of the more fascinating problems to which Hansen applies his theory is the infamous white horse paradox of Kung-sun Lung. Kung-sun Lung (Gongsun Long) was a member of the fourth-century B.C. school of Sophists, the only school in Chinese philosophy ever to study logical puzzles for their own sake. In one of his essays, Kung-sun Lung argues at length that a white horse is not a horse, since the shape named horse and the color named white are distinct, and therefore what is called a horse cannot be what is called white. Since this formulation does not strike most modern readers as paradoxical, interpreting and explaining what Kung-sun Lung might have had in mind has become a source of fascination for scholars. Not only did the contemporaries of Kung-sun Lung not reject the so-called paradox out of hand, it seemed to elicit in them the same kind of head-scratching puzzlement as the Greeks felt at Zeno's famous paradoxes of motion. Why would the Sophists consider the sentence bai ma fei ma, (white horse not horse), assertable? There is not enough space here to deal with the historical background of the paradox or Hansen's careful treatment of it, but the gist of his approach is that if one substitutes the translation horse-stuff for horse in the formulation and discussion of the paradox in the text, then the paradox, which at first had seemed ill-motivated, now seems engendered by legitimate linguistic concerns. And, Hansen maintains, these concerns are exactly what one would expect, given a mass-stuff ontology. In the Sophists' scheme, there were no Platonic categories like white, of which the whiteness of a particular horse could be an instance. A horse could not have an abstract quality called whiteness. There was only white-stuff and horse-stuff. White horse was to be understood as the mass sum of white-stuff and horse-stuff. White-stuff is certainly not horsestuff, and therefore the union of white-stuff and horse-stuff is not the same as horse-stuff. A trick with language, to be sure, but the fact that Kung-sun Lung's contemporaries found no easy way out of this linguistic conundrum seems to indicate that a new framework is needed in order to understand what might have motivated this paradox in the first place. While Hansen makes an excellent case for the reading of Chinese classical texts within the interpretive framework of nominalism, he makes a less convincing case for his Whorfian proposal that the mass-noun feature of Chinese grammar gave rise to the mereological or part-whole ontology of Chinese thought. A multitude of questions arise. If the mereological perspective of ancient Chinese philosophers can be attributed to the noun syntax of Chinese, what are we to infer about the ontologies of Western philosophers, whose languages include both mass nouns and regular nouns? Shouldn't we start searching for evidence of a sort of hybrid stuff-object ontological view in their works? Explaining how a particular linguistic conundrum like the white horse paradox arose is one thing; it's quite another to postulate that in their daily life, people in ancient China thought about horses and colors in ways strange to us because of grammatical differences in their language. Also, it is important to remember that the language of classical Chinese texts was a very specialized literary language mastered by only a select few among

the educated class, and was very different from the kind of Chinese these philosophers actually spoke and thought in. Though the noun structure itself may have been basically the same in both forms of the language, it is perhaps dangerous to base Whorfian conjectures primarily on evidence from texts written in an artificial literary style. Also missing from Hansen's book is more general evidence that (a) grammatical features of a language are capable of exerting an influence on the style and content of the philosophizing that goes on in the language, and that (b) the grammatical features of Western languages (Hansen includes the languages of India in his generalizations) influenced the direction of Western philosophy vis-vis abstractions, universals, etc. Terribly difficult things to demonstrate, to be sure, but instead of providing such arguments, he merely assumes both (a) and (b) from the outset in his speculations about the influence of Chinese grammar on Chinese thought. Whenever he addresses the issue, he seems to assume the very Whorfian position he needs to prove: The features of Western languages which explain the traditional fascination with such issues [of abstraction and mental entities] are not features of Chinese.80 These kinds of theories, either in ontology, semantics, philosophy of mind, or theory of knowledge (epistemology), are motivated and stimulated by features of language which divide the Chinese family of languages from the Indo-European family.81 Well what exactly, are those features? Hansen doesn't say, unless he simply means to contrast Western and Chinese languages with regard to grammatically explicit mass nouns. And even having made the comparison, if one is left without a coherent psychological or linguistic account of how language affects thinking, the contention that the different grammatical features account for the different philosophical ontologies remains a tantalizing linguistic just-so story. Though his thesis is fascinating and meticulously-presented, it still suffers from the problem faced by all Whorfian theories: it is very difficult to demonstrate, simply on the basis of some correlation between a linguistic structure and a philosophical stance, that systems of thought are significantly shaped by the language in which they were formulated. Of course, there have been many accounts of the relationship of thought to language. On one end of the spectrum is the linguistic determinism associated with strong Whorfianism, which says that the particular language a person learns from birth plays the decisive role in shaping and determining thought and perception. This view has pretty much fallen completely out of favor, and the weight of evidence is strongly against it. On the other end of the spectrum is the belief that environment and biology are the ultimate shapers of human thinking. Proponents of this view tend to regard differences between languages as superficial and unimportant, maintaining that all natural languages are basically isomorphic to one another, and that meaning resides somewhere above the level of specific language differences.

Weak Whorfianism falls somewhere between these extremes. It recognizes that there are universals in human thinking that are tied to innate physical processes and routine interactions with the environment, and it acknowledges the role of culture as well, but at the same time it maintains that there are cognitive processes that are largely dependent on language for their function, and that these processes can be expected to show differences from one linguistic tradition to another. Put another way, weak Whorfianism holds that: (1) There are aspects of cognition and thought that are learned. They constitute, in a sense, the software of the brain. (2) Language and culture both contribute to the shaping of thought; together they constitute inseparable components of the informational legacy of a human community. (3) Some linguistic effects on thought may be isolated and studied, though they are likely to be linked to a host of sociopsychological reinforcements that will complicate the study. Bloom's comments further amplify these positions: Historically speaking, it is certainly not the case that structural differences between Chinese and English bear primary responsibility for creating the culturally-specific modes of thinking [dealt with here]. From a historical point of view, languages are much more the products of their cultures than determiners of them. What one can and cannot express distinctly in any particular language at any particular point in its development is the aggregate result of the totality of social, political, environmental, and intellectual influences that have, from generation to generation, affected its speakers' lives.... Historically speaking, the fact that Chinese has not offered its speakers incentives for thinking about the world in counterfactual and entificational ways is likely to have contributed substantially to sustaining an intellectual climate in which these modes of thinking were less likely to arise; but if Chinese speakers at some point in the past had felt a sufficient need to venture into the realm of the counterfactual or the theoretical, the Chinese language would have evolved to accommodate that need, as it is doing today.82 Note the language Bloom uses here. Language doesn't determine the course of thinking, but it can offer incentives to adopt certain modes of thought. We have already discussed something of what Bloom means by this, but it might be instructive to look at the issue in light of certain ergonomic considerations concerning language. The use of language is not some mysterious process immune to the constraints and practical considerations of other domains. Language must be formulated and used in real time by finite human beings who function under pressures of everyday-life situations with inherently limited perceptual and conceptual systems. An enormous number of possible decisions swarm around the stream of words being uttered: decisions on how to phrase a thought, what terms and structures to use, even high-level decisions as to what tone to take in

formulating an argument (that is, whether to adopt imperatives, suggestions, matter-of-fact implicationals, hypotheticals, or questions). All these decisions are made in milliseconds, and this means that practical considerations come into play. Shorter ways of saying things will tend to get selected over longer ways. Utterances will tend to be formed by drawing from the repertoire of commonlyused and easily-retrievable structures and stock phrases rather than novel forms. Speakers will naturally adhere to structures that the grammar of their language facilitates, rather than opting for structures that may be correct but are less idiomatic. In short, all things being equal, language use in general accords with certain ergonomic considerations: people will naturally tend toward those forms available in the language that are maximally communicative with a minimum of effort. There is a common belief that native speakers of different languages learn and master each of the various phonological and grammatical aspects of their respective languages with equal facility. This would mean, for example, that Spanish children would master the phonology of Spanish just as easily and quickly as Chinese children master that of Chinese, or that speakers of Russian would learn their inflectional system as quickly as German speakers learn theirs. In fact, though the differences are not large ones, there is much evidence that not all aspects of languages are as easy to learn and apply as others. Some grammatical forms, such as the passive, are universally more difficult. Some languages seem to have certain features that make particular linguistic skills more difficult for children to master. Overall, of course, the difficulties and advantages tend to cancel each other out, so that it is fairly safe to say there is no one language that is objectively easier to acquire than any other. But the individual differences are no less real for this. What follows is an extremely brief survey of some results that highlight some of these differences. Tse Sou-mee (1982) collected some evidence to indicate that the Cantonese phonological system is easier for children to master than that of English is. This is in part due to fact that English phonology is more complex than Cantonese phonology in most respects, and because the tonal system of Cantonese actually seems to assist the child in learning the segmental system. This second point is made more plausible by the results of Kaplan (1970), which show that stress, tone, and intonation are aspects of language that are learned relatively early. Chang (1984), in comparing the results of tests involving Chinese and American elementary-school students, found that Chinese students were still having trouble mastering the relative-clause construction at age 12, whereas English-speaking children normally master this structure by about age six. The relative clause in English is marked by a relative pronoun placed before the clause and after the noun, whereas in Chinese the relative clause is marked by the particle de placed before the noun and after the clause. Chang hypothesized that this fact would make comprehension of the relative clause in Chinese more susceptible to effects of interruption of the clause by other linguistic units. The disruptive effect of the interruption of one linguistic structure by another has been found in many languages (Slobin, 1973).

Chen and Ryback (1974) found sentence length to be much the same in English and Chinese children of the same age, but noted that Chinese children tend to make fewer mistakes in word order than do their American counterparts. Aaronson and Ferres (1986), on the basis of tests involving Chinese-English bilinguals and monolinguals of both languages, concluded that there was some evidence that individual words convey slightly more meaning and structure in English than in Chinese. The authors state: Although much of this paper provides evidence that individual words convey more meaning and structure in English than in Chinese sentences, evidence is simultaneously provided that Chinese is a more context-dependent language than English. We see no reasons why the total information communicated should be more or less in either language but the linguistic (and nonlinguistic) devices for communicating information differ.83 The authors based their conclusion that Chinese is a more contextdependent language on the following considerations: (1) Context is needed to disambiguate the relatively greater number of homonyms. (2) Since Chinese lacks articles, context is used to infer the definite-vs.-indefinite status of nouns. (3) Pronoun forms are few (in the spoken language) and optional. (4) Conjunctions and relative pronouns are often polysemous or optional, and thus their meaning must often be inferred from context. (5) Chinese content words often can serve as verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, and, since they generally lack inflection, the appropriate function must be gleaned from context. The authors also point out the aspect of Chinese that is the central concern of this paper -- namely, that Chinese lacks an explicit grammatical form that distinguishes the implicational from the counterfactual, and thus counterfactuality, too, must be determined by context. Perhaps of more direct relevance to the ergonomic question is the fact that many experiments have been done on the effect of the relatively short pronunciation duration of Chinese number names on arithmetic skills of Chinese speakers. Hoosain (1984) found that the duration of number names pronounced in Cantonese is shorter than that in English in both normal and rapid pronunciation of long sequences (though not every Cantonese number-name is shorter than every corresponding English number-name.) Liu and Shen (1977) also reported that numbers were read more quickly in Mandarin than in German. Hoosain (1979) found that the mean digit-span (the number of random digits that can be remembered) for Hong Kong undergraduates was 9.9, about two digits higher than that reported for comparable samples in the West. Stigler and Lee (1986) at the University of Michigan also arrived at the conclusion that the Chinese digit-span is about two digits more than for Americans. Ellis and Hennelly (1980) also found similar digit-span differences in Welsh-speaking and English-speaking children, which they attributed to the longer pronunciation times of Welsh number-names. The authors suggested that this might be a factor in the lower arithmetic grades of Welsh students in comparison to English-speaking students. It is generally agreed that when people hear or see words, the items that are thereby entered into short-term memory are coded in a sound-related form. If one

assumes that the capacity for these sounds coded in short-term memory is limited, it makes sense that items of shorter average duration would not overload this capacity as quicly as would items with long average duration. Furthermore, in problem-solving, information is not just passively stored in short-term memory, but is manipulated or processed towards a goal. It is obvious that our attention span is limited, and that a trade-off exists between simple storage and active processing-functions (that is, the greater the amount of resources allocated to storage, the less is the amount left for processing the stored information, and vice versa). Information coded by items of short sound duration can therefore be processed more easily than information coded by items of longer duration. The suggestion that digit-span capacity is related to mathematical ability or the capacity to manipulate numbers in problem-solving is somewhat more difficult to demonstrate directly. Hoosain (1984) found a correlation between English digit-span and mathematics achievement grades in Chinese-English bilinguals living in Hong Kong. Hoosain comments on these results: [W]hen superior performance of the Chinese in mathematics is noted, it is usually suggested that motivation or family interest might be the crucial factor. From this study, however, it would seem that, at least at some level of manipulation of numbers, the characteristics of the language and the corresponding perceptual processes might have some relation to performance.84 Perception of color is another domain that has been explored for possible Whorfian effects of language. As is well known, each language carves up the color spectrum slightly differently, and many researchers have looked into the possibility that the color-words a particular language has might have an influence on which colors people could most easily recognize and remember. The literature on color terminology is vast, building mainly on the work of Brown and Lenneberg, Berlin and Kay, and Burnham and Clark. I won't attempt to survey that literature here, though I will deal with a relatively recent experiment done by Kay and Kempton (1984) which seems to confirm some of Whorf's claims.85 Kay and Kempton's subjects for this test were English speakers and speakers of Tarahumara, a Uto-Aztecan language of Mexico. Tarahumara has no separate words for blue and green, but one term, siyname, which covers both terms. The test involved two slightly different tasks: one in which having different names for green and blue might help the English speakers, and one in which having names for the two colors would not provide any advantage. If a Whorfian effect were seen in the first test but disappeared completely in the second, this would provide strong evidence that the naming difference, and that alone, had affected performance in a nonlinguistic task. In both tasks, subjects were presented with three colored chips in the blueto-green range, the leftmost chip being greenest and the rightmost chip being bluest. In both tasks, subjects were asked to say which of the three chips was most different from the other two: in other words, whether the color of the middle chip was more like that of the leftmost chip or the rightmost chip. The colors were very similar in hue, but were carefully chosen so that there was a right answer.

It was hypothesized that English speakers would have a strategy for making the decision that speakers of Tarahumara would lack. Namely, they could use color-names for blue and green as part of the task, which would have the effect of accentuating the blue-green boundary. This means that colors near the boundary should be subjectively made more separate by English speakers but not Tarahumara speakers. Kay and Kempton called this strategy the name strategy: We propose that faced with this situation, the English-speaking subject reasons unconsciously as follows: It's hard to decide here which one looks the most different. Are there any other kinds of clues I might use? Aha! A and B are both called 'green', while C is called 'blue'. That solves my problem; I'll pick C as the most different.86 The results of the experiment confirmed this hypothesis. 29 out of 30 Englishspeaking subjects showed systematic distortion at the blue-green boundary they pushed colors on the blue side more toward blue, and colors on the green side more toward green. Among the Tarahumara speakers the split was split was 50-50 a random distribution. In task two, the apparatus for viewing the chips had a sliding window which permitted a view of only two of the chips at once. The following method was used for setting up the task: Experimenter exposes pair (A, B). You can see that this chip (points to A) is greener than this chip (points to B). (All subjects readily agreed.) Experimenter slides cover so that A is covered and C is exposed along with B; that is, the pair (B, C) is now exposed. You can see that this chip (points to C) is bluer than this chip (points to B). (Again all subjects agreed without problems.) Now, experimenter hands stimuli to subject, you may slide the cover back and forth as often as you like. I'd like you to tell me which is the bigger: the difference in greenness between the two chips on the left, or the difference in blueness between the two chips on the right.87 Kay and Kempton reasoned that the subjects now cannot use the naming strategy to make the decision, since they have already, in effect, used both green and blue to refer to the middle chip. The results of this experiment were that the difference in performance of the two groups of subjects disappeared -- the Whorfian effect was gone. The results show that a linguistic tool available in one language but not another can be used in cognition, and can affect performance in a nonlinguistic task. Conclusion The tool metaphor is perhaps a good one. Languages are like toolboxes, each of which contains tools which have been used and perfected by countless generations of speakers. No two languages share exactly the same set of tools, although it is a good bet that any two languages must have very similar capabilities, because any language must be able to communicate the full range of

human activity and thought. The speakers of any language need to be able to request things, to persuade others, to express doubt, to show regret, to cajole, tease, speculate, apologize, admonish, and fantasize. A language is a reflection of the minds of those who speak it, and one could no more imagine a language seriously deficient in any of these capabilities than one could imagine a human community without these needs. But the tools of each language are different, and some tools are somewhat handier than others, or easier to learn to use. People, of course, are very flexible tool-users, and one tool can have myriad uses, so for most cases these differences don't really matter much. But the fact remains that some tools are more conducive to the building of certain structures than others, and the construction of anything, be it a bridge, a chair, a poem, or a novel, involves a constant interplay between artisans and their tools. Bloom seems to be saying that, for Chinese speakers, the counterfactual as a cognitive tool, though available to them, has one drawback -- it doesn't have a handle. This would mean that in certain speech situations, when the Chinese speaker is groping in the toolbox for the right tool for the job, the counterfactual will get selected less often (for instance, in those cases where the lack of an unambiguous counterfactual marker risks engendering some confusion). This would perhaps also mean that Chinese speakers do not get as much practice using and extending the applications of this tool, which might make it feel somewhat awkward to them at times -- even un-Chinese. It might also mean that, when asked to perform an interpretive task on a complex counterfactual text, Chinese speakers might not find the counterfactual as close at hand as speakers of other languages do, and this fact might slow up the interpretive process somewhat. One common perception about Bloom and his work, and one that often arouses a strong emotional reaction, is that he seems to be saying that the Chinese language, when compared to Western languages, is somehow deficient in the realm of counterfactual thinking. Make no mistake about it -- I think this is just what he is saying. But, in the first place, it seems obvious that the psycholinguistic implications of this deficiency (if it exists) for the majority of everyday language use are minimal, and it in no way implies that the Chinese language as a whole is somehow impoverished, or that there aren't numerous apects of language in which Chinese might be superior to Western languages. And in the second place, even the broader Whorfian claims about the possible effects of this state of affairs on Chinese philosophy and thinking carries with it no value judgment, only a recognition of differences.88 The work of scholars like Bloom, Hansen, Kay, and Kempton, however flawed some of it might be, does point out interesting research directions. None of these researchers espouse the kind of absolute linguistic determinism which has made much writing on the Whorf hypothesis so distasteful to linguists and psychologists, and the theories they present are amenable to further research. There is no reason to close the book on the Whorf hypothesis simply because the methodological problems of testing for effects of language on thought are so fraught with difficulty, or simply because the effects one is looking for are so subtle. It is unfortunate, however, that the majority of research examining Whorfian implications of differences between Chinese and English are carried out

by Western researchers who take Western languages as their basis of comparison, and one would hope that the results of Alfred Bloom and others would prompt more researchers with a Chinese background (such as Terry Au) to undertake psycholinguistic experiments using the Chinese language as the basis of comparison. It is always easier to note seeming deficiencies -- the absence of a certain distinction or lack of a handy way of saying something -- in other languages than one's own. The English language evolved in tandem with Englishspeaking culture(s), both reflecting the needs of and to some extent shaping the minds of the people who who spoke it. The linguistic tools and cognitive strategies of one culture shouldn't be expected to perform identically in the context of a different culture. Chopsticks may be harder for Westerners to manage than a fork and spoon, and may even be intrinsically harder, but Chinese people wield them effortlessly and naturally. The fact that chopsticks do better with rice than with hamburgers does not in any way imply that chopsticks are somehow deficient as tools. And, of course, it is very likely that the use of chopsticks has had its effect on the very nature of Chinese food.

Words of thanks I wish to thank William Baxter, Kenneth DeWoskin, and Douglas Hofstadter for their helpful advice and instruction, and for patiently tolerating my chutzpah in delving into matters far outside my area of expertise. And special thanks to Doug for introducing me to these issues in the first place. I also wish to thank Melanie Mitchell for a constant supply of good judgment and insight. My thanks also to the many relatives and friends (especially the Chinese ones) who have put up with my persistent and often bizarre questions: Hong Yucheng, Chen Peiyu, Chen Zhizhong, Agnes Chan, Wang Li, Rex Moser, Dana Moser, Donna Moser, Debra Moser, James Moser, Huang Peidi, Gu Mianju, Andrea Goldman, Alan Bern, Larry Maloney, Dick Nisbett, Yang Ying-Shi, Yang Lili, Yan Yong, Liu Haoming, and Jing Qicheng.