Language, Thought, and Culture: Views and Arguments

This study follows two aims: one to review some late views on the relations among language, thought, and culture; and the other, to offer a new strategy, in a novel model, based on last achievements in the minimalist approach. Studying views and arguments, three dichotomies are discussed: 1) the views which confirm the relation between culture and language in opposition to the views that deny this; 2) distinguishing the symmetry-procedural view and the transforming views of language; and 3) distinction among the social-communicational, and the biological-genetic motivations of language. The hypothesis for the novel strategy is that considering what the minimalist program has offered, especially from 2000 onwards, it is possible that language affects thought, while coding the and that culture affects language (which is called ethno-grammar) . This is in addition to the biological-genetic base. From this point of view, language’s main function is neither to provide communication, nor to express thought, but to connect cognitive and socio-cultural terminals together