To better illustrate this idea, let’s think of how new technologies have changed our perception of time.
Arrival linguist how to#
The civilization of Abbot and Costello, the aliens portrayed in the movie, might have figured out how to warp the space-time fabric and that means that time to them works differently. The second argument might be related to our technological limitations. It has a physiological aspect that could not possibly be affected by learning an incredibly different language. Time is perceived by us through our senses and internal biological clock which are intrinsically connected to our lifespans. The first argument we might throw at Villeneuve’s production and scriptwriters against the depiction of this alien encounter is that it’s quite unlikely for our species to fathom and be guided by a concept of time that is not based on our tridimensional existence. These concepts we share are developed as we interact and create schemas (Croft, 2007, Dabrowska, 2004, Fodor, 2008, Langacker, 2007) and they can always change depending on the language that will be used and the interlocutor.
When people engage in a conversation, some linguistic features such as phonemes, lexis, concepts, etc., must be shared otherwise it will not have an effective outcome (there will be misunderstandings). If we analyze the retrieval of concepts backwards, from words and grammar to concepts, the understanding of a new language will reshape epistemic parameters in order to grant effective communication (Dabrowska, 2004). When Amy Adams learns this new language, her epistemic notion of time shifts since the concept of time that she possesses gets updated, remolded by the alien language. For instance, if they want to communicate ‘yesterday we saw that’ they would simply produce the words ‘we’, ‘that’, ‘see’ without any time modality because for them, time is perceived differently and it does not have an essential apparent role in their oral language. In the film, when aliens use their language, time is not essential for communication. When one learns a second language (L2), its initial stage is never the same as the initial stage of the learning process of a native language (L1) for concepts have already been learned and time, as an epistemic conceptualization, is part of it.
Arrival linguist movie#
It is important to highlight, though, that this hypothesis is still a matter of debate and we could claim that the movie goes one step, or perhaps several, too far in suggesting humans would be able to rewire the linear perspective of time hammered into the brain since birth (and even from the womb) by being exposed to an alien language for a relatively short period of time. It could be argued then that what Arrival promotes is based on our current understanding of how languages influence cognition and based on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Insterestingly, logograms are shaped as circles, which gives the linguist the impression of time circularity Amy Adams tries to decode their written language: the logograms. According to Fodor (2008),Įxperience affects concept learning only as it is mentally represented (Fodor, 2008: 135)Īnd in the case of the alien language in the film, in which chronological time is not essential for understanding, the main character (Amy Adams as a linguist) has a whole different perception of time. Apart from the sci-fi aspect of the movie when they talk about time traveling based on how the alien language is perceived, first we can focus on the issue of how our perception is changed based on the new linguistic experiences. Watching this amazing film can be interesting not only to language teachers but to all who actually like Neurocognitive Linguistics. It seems that learning languages have significant effects on cognition, however, what would happen if humans could access, be exposed to, and even learn an alien language? This premise is explored in one of Denis Villeneuve’s latest productions: the film Arrival (2016, Paramount). Several authors have also been able to find a high correlation between bilingual brains and executive functions (updating, switching, and inhibiting) as well as cognitive reserve, which buys the brain a few years before it develops dementia, thus, extending its protective effects (Perani & Abutalebi, 2015 Bialystok et al. Linguists and cognitive scientists have long proposed the notion that language determines thoughts or at least shapes them depending on how adept they are to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Boroditsky, 2001).
The idea that multilingualism develops cognitive potential and influences perception is well explored in the specialized literature. Written by André Hedlund and Rodolfo Mattiello
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