It is clear thus that our cognitive abilities are not limited in this strong sense

by our nativelanguage.However there is a weaker version to this hypothesis, namely

that: The language we speak influences the way we think.This idea is embraced by
many scholars and several experiments were made worldwide toprove this hypothesis
true. According to the objectivist view on language the world is pre-structured and
the conceptual system reflects the structure of the world. Language with
itscategories merely expresses or reflects the conceptual system. This view is
deeply rooted inEnlightenment philosophy and does not give terrain to any
variations due to language orculture. The experimentalist thinkers on the other
hand have an entirely different view on thelanguage- mind relationship. According
to them the world comes largely unstructured, it isobservers (humans) who do most
of the structuring. A large part of this structuring is due tothe linguistic system
(which is a subsystem of culture). Language can shape, and according tothe
principle of linguistic relativity, does shape the way we think.One example to
demonstrate this would be the above presentation of the differentconnotations of
the word bug respectively bog�r in English and Hungarian. As a furtherexample let
me just mention here one of the findings of some experiments conducted by
LeraBorodsky and her colleagues in 2003.11The experiment wanted to investigate
whether grammatical gender influences speaker'smental representations of objects.
Speakers of German and Spanish were asked to assignattributes to nouns that had
opposite genders in German and Spanish. The word thatcorresponds to the English
key is masculine in German (der Schl�ssel) and feminine inSpanish (la llave).
Speakers of German were more likely to describe the key as hard, jagged,metal,
heavy and useful, whereas speakers of Spanish were more likely to use words
asgolden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny and tiny in their descriptions. This
finding shows thatgender clearly influences the speaker's mental representations of
objects, which is one formof thinking.The Hungarian cognitive linguist Zolt�n
K�vecses in his highly interesting book: LanguageMind and Culture outlines a
theory of the relationships that hold between the abovephenomena, namely language,
mind and culture on the basis of some recent findings in11 Described in Kovecses
2006, pages 84-8526
cognitive linguistics. In the following sub-chapter I will attempt to outline some
of his basicideas and findings.2.2.2 Prototypes, frames, metaphors, and linguistic
relativity2.2.2.1 PrototypesOne of the essential abilities of the human beings is
the ability to categorize the objects andevents around us. By creating
conceptual categories we make sense of the world.Categorization has survival
value. The conceptual categories we establish are the backbone oflanguage and
thought. According to recent findings of cognitive linguistics what holds
ourcategories together are not the essential features (as it was considered by the
classical view oncategorization) but rather �family resemblance
relations�.12 The metaphor of familyresemblance was used to suggest that
membership in a family is not defined by a fix set ofproperties but rather a family
is held together by sharing some properties with some membersof the family and
sharing other properties with other members. The classical view ofcategorization
thus should be replaced by prototype categorization. In this new viewcategories are
defined not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions but with respect
toprototypes and various family resemblance relations to these prototypes.
Prototypical