| >Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish. // I don't think your conclusion follows. We elicit a sentence that externally shortcuts the designation of who does what by using pronouns where it seems still clear. But that doesn't mean we reason any differently internally about the subjects and objects. With a sentence like: "The mother gave the sommelier a wave." Being spoken as: "She gave him a wave." It seems quite reasonable to imagine that we perceive in our mind's eye the subject and object in the same way but extract the pertinent information as appropriate. A simpler sentence could be the result of a more complex process. But then we come across this sort of issue within English too because we come across ambiguous situations "they gave me the other's key". Or perhaps ... A: "She gave me her key" B: "Who?" A: "The girl gave me her key." B: "Why did the girl have a key?" A: "No I mean the girl gave me the mother's key." The reasoning about the people was clearly about a girl and a mother in the first sentence but the expression of that reason wasn't elicited until the final one - I don't think the mental model has changed anywhere is such an exchange. Thus I don't see why there needs be a different internal model being used in your [david-given's] example. In your red example if someone tells me "he has red hair" red refers to a different thing to "his door is red" - red _hair_ is what we call ginger hair usually. It's not that Gael's think of red differently IMO it's just a limitation of English expression. The expression doesn't reflect the internal model well. |