Language And Thought: An Interactive Perspective

With regard to the relationship between language and thought, there have been two opposite views. Some scholars believe that language and thought are mutually independent; some others, however, believe that language and thought are inseparable.This paper refutes the above two views and finally derives its own conclusion: language is independent of some forms of thought. In other words, language is only partially independent of thought. In the meantime, language is contained in certain thought forms. In short, language and thought have both co-existential and independent features, and any extreme views do not seem to reflect complicated reality.Then, it explores the relationship between linguistic thought and non-linguistic thought and maintains that the former has centrifugal force and the latter has centripetal force with experience as the central point, and that the driving force of linguistic thought is cognitive pressure and that of non-linguistic thought is sensory-motor system, and when the two forces are kept in equilibrium, the thought per se has both linguistic thought and non-linguistic thought.Finally, to test the validity of the above view, the author conducts an empirical study, the result of which supports the author's hypotheses.