"Does your language distinguish between dark and light blues? Do your verbs require a report on where and how you got your information? Can you easily talk about non-actual situations in your language? What does this mean for the way you see the world, if anything? Linguistic relativity, also known as Whorfianism by some, is actually a group of related positions that postulate that one's native language generates some set of important directions or limitations on one's cognition. In its extreme form, it even suggests that languages can create distinct (and possibly incompatible) worldviews. Recent cross-linguistic experiments on subtle grammatical distinctions between colour words or the presence of subjunctive conditionals have reignited the once furious debate on just how much our languages can shape the way we see the world. This book traces the development of the concept of linguistic relativity through the centuries, paying particular attention to Benjamin Whorf and the evidence for or against the various claims he made in this realm. We follow that with the application of linguistic relativity to modern attempts to verify it, as well as to certain social and intellectual endeavours that are prominent in the current philosophic, linguistic, and cognitive science literature"--
The concept of linguistic relativity (or Whorfianism) has its roots in the linguistic anthropology of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf in the early twentieth century. However, questions over the relationship between natural language and human cognition go much further and deeper. Unfortunately, linguistic relativity has about as many misinterpretations as it does labels (linguistic relativity, linguistic relativism, linguistic determinism, Whorfianism, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - weak and strong).
The idea that language determines thought through an environmentally constrained feedback system is at the heart of most concepts associated with linguistic relativity. The real philosophical questions, however, only seem to present themselves at a level beyond the trivial truism that linguistic structure has an effect on thought, i.e. different languages might encode environmental information differently resulting in variation in things like processing times, measured in psycholinguistic experiments.
These questions are important for a number of related disciplines, yet the concept itself is one of the most misunderstood in modern anthropology, sociology, philosophy of language, linguistics, and cognitive science. This book contributes much needed clarity to a theoretical landscape at the center of insights into what makes us human, both linguistically and cognitively.
Linguistic Relativity is an introduction to linguistic relativism which delves into its historical antecedents as well as its contemporary applications
