Sapir-Whorf summary

Michele Feist shelli at BABEL.LING.NWU.EDU
Fri Apr 4 22:40:28 UTC 1997


Greetings.

A few weeks ago, I posted the query to these lists:

 I'm a graduate student at Northwestern University doing work in
 psycholinguistics. I would like to find out about the current status of
 the Sapir-Whorf 'hypothesis'. Specifically, what has been done recently in
 connection with this idea ('Neo-Whorfianism'), and what is the status of
 that research?

I'm sorry to have taken so long on the summary - as you'll see, my query
generated quite a few responses.

Many thanks to all those who responded:

Tom Givon  TGIVON at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Alan C.L. Yu  charon at uclink4.berkeley.edu
David Kronenfeld  KFELD at ucrac1.ucr.edu
Phyllis Wilcox  pwilcox at unm.edu
Morton Ann Gernsbacher   MAGernsb at facstaff.wisc.edu
Herb Stahlke  hstahlke at wp.bsu.edu
Richard Scherl  scherl at homer.njit.edu
Bill Turkel  bill at hivnet.ubc.ca
Dan I. SLOBIN  slobin at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU
Paul Peranteau   paul at benjamins.com
Irene Pepperberg  imp at biosci.arizona.edu
Douglas S. Oliver   DOUGLASO at ucrac1.ucr.edu
Catherine Harris  charris at bu.edu
Lawrence W. Barsalou  L-Barsalou at uchicago.edu
George Lakoff   lakoff at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU
Jeri L. Moxley  jmoxley at garnet.berkeley.edu
Art Glenberg   glenberg at facstaff.wisc.edu
Don Peterkin   dpeterkin at ucsd.edu
Maria D. Sera  Maria.D.Sera-1 at tc.umn.edu
Jiansheng Guo   Jiansheng.Guo at vuw.ac.nz
Paul R. Hays  hays at lit.sugiyama-u.ac.jp
Gary B. Palmer  gbp at nevada.edu
H Stephen Straight  sstraigh at binghamton.edu
Michael Hall  s_mjhall at eduserv.its.unimelb.EDU.AU
Matthias Huening  matthias.huenin at univie.ac.at
Carsten Hansen  carhan at coco.ihi.ku.dk
Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen   eep at cphling.dk
Joseph Hilferty   hilferty at lingua.fil.ub.es
Steen Wackerhausen  FILSW at hum.aau.dk
Dick Hudson  dick at linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
Michelina Bonanno  bonannom at gusun.acc.georgetown.edu
Jane A. Edwards  edwards at cogsci.Berkeley.EDU
Caitlin Hines  chines at autobahn.org
Patricia Kilroe  kilroe at csd.uwm.edu
John Lucy   John.Lucy at mpi.nl
Christopher Sinha   psykcgs at aau.dk

In addition to the references that I list below, I received the following
suggestions:

Consult work by Dan Slobin, Eric Pederson, Stephen Levinson, Suzette
Elgin, and Melissa Bowerman, in addition to Piaget's work on child
language development and work on Systemic Functional Linguistics, which
was founded by Michael Halliday.

The first Bohmian Science Dialogue Between Indigenous and Western
Scientists involved Native American (academic and traditional) leaders and
selected physicists, linguists, psychologists and others -- all of whom
took Benjamin Whorf seriously.  For a transcript, write to Carol Hegedus,
Fetzer Institute, 9292 West KL Ave, Kalamazoo MI 49009.

Caitlin Hines is chairing a panel on Whorf in Amsterdam this summer.

There has been discussion of Whorf on the Linguist List, which can be
accessed at http://linguistlist.org/; there will also be a 'topic page' on
this subject at the Linguist-site soon:
http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/topics/sapir-whorf/

Finally, I was given the following references (I have lots of reading
ahead of me now!):

Alford, Dan Moonhawk,  "Stealing the Fire, A Linguistic Overview of
This Century's Advances in Physics", given AAA/SAC March 25, 1996.

Alford, Dan Moonhawk.  "The Demise of Whorf Hypothesis". Proceedings
of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society,
Feb. 1978: 485-499.

Alford, Dan Moonhawk, "Is Whorf's Relativity Einstein's Relativity?",
Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society Feb. 1981, 13-26.

Berlin, Brent and Paul Kay.  Basic Color Terms.  Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1991[1969].
Black, Max.  Models and Metaphor.  New York: Cornell University Press,
1962.

Black, Max. "Some Troubles with Whorfianism" in Language and
Philosophy.  Ed. Sidney Hook. New York: New York University Press,
1969: 30-35.

Bloom, Alfred H. The linguistic shaping of thought: A study in the
impact of language on thinking in China and the west.  Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1981.

Brown, C. H.  "Folk Zoological Life-forms: Their Universality and
Growth."  American Anthropologist 81 (1979): 791-817.

Brown, C.H. "Folk Botanical Life-forms: Their Universality and Growth"
American Anthropologist 79 (1977): 317-342.

Brown, Roger.  Words and Things.  Glencoe: Free Press, 1958.

Brown, R. and E. H. Lenneberg.  "A Study in Language and Cognition."
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (1954): 454-462.

Carroll, John B.  & Joseph B. Casagrande.  "The function of language
classifications in behavior", in E.E. Maccoby, T.M. Newcomb, &
E.L.Hartley, eds., Readings in social psychology, 3rd edition, Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 18-31, 1958.

Casell, Eric J. 1976. Dease as an "it": concepts of dease revealed by
patients' presentation of symptoms. Society Science and Medicine, 10,
143-146.  (Journal title may not be completely accurate)

Chawla, Saroj, 1991. Linguistic and philosophical roots of our
environmental crisis. Environmental Ethids, 13, 253-262.

R.L.Cooper and B.Spolsky (eds) The influence of language on culture
and thought: essays in honor of Joshua A.Fishman's 65th birthday.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991.

Croft, William A. A noun is a noun is a noun - or is it? Some reflections
on the universality of semantics. Berkely Linguistics Soeciety 19, 1993,
369-380.

Culler, Jonathan.  Saussure.  London:  Fontana Press, 1976.

Davidson, Donald, 'On the very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' in
Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation , Oxford University Press, 1984.

Devitt, Michael & Kim Sterelny, Language and Reality,
Blackwell, 1987.

Ekkehardt Malotki , Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal
concepts in the Hopi Language Mouton, 1983.

Fasold, Ralph.  The Sociolinguistics of Society. Oxford: Blackwell,
1984.

Garro, Linda.  1986.  Language, memory, and focality:  A
       reexamination.  _American Anthropologist_ 88:128-136.

Guiora, Alexander Z., B. Beit-Hallahmi, R. Fried, &
C. Yoder. "Language environment and gender identity attainment", in
Language Learning, 32:2, 289-304, 1982.

Gumperz, J. and Levinson, S.  (eds.)  (1996).  Rethinking Linguistic
Relativity.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Hayward, William G. and Michael J. Tarr.  "Spatial Language and
Spatial Representation."  Cognition 55 (1995): 39-84.

Hill, Jane H. and Bruce Mannheim: Language and World View in: Annual
Review of Anthropology, 1992, 21:381-406.

Hill, Jane H.  1988.  "Language, culture, and world-view."  In
Frederick J.  Newmeyer, ed., Linguistics: The Cambridge survey, Volume
IV: Language: The socio-cultural context, pp. 14-36.  Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Language and Culture, ed. Harry Hoijer, University of Chicago, circa
1955.

Sidney Hook (ed.), Language and Philosophy , New York University
Press, 1971.

Hunt, Earl and Franca Agnoli.  (1991).  "The Whorfian Hypothesis:  A
Cognitive Psychology Perspective."  Psychological Review.  98 (3),
377-389.

Hymes, Dell and John Fought. American Structuralism. The Hague:
Mouton, 1981.

Kay, Paul and Willett Kempton. "What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?",
American Anthropologist 86:1, 65-79, 1984.

Kempton, Willett.  The Folk Classification of Ceramics: A Study of
Cognitive Prototypes. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

Kess, J. F.  Psycholinguistics.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company, 1992.

Khosroshahi, Fatemeh. "Penguins don't care, but women do: A social
identity analysis of a Whorfian problem", Language in Society 18:4,
505-525, 1989.

Kronenfeld, David B.  1969 (1970)  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN KINSHIP
CATEGORIES AND BEHAVIOR AMONG THE FANTI.  Ph. D. Dissertation, Department
of Anthropology, Stanford
University.  Ann Arbor, University Microfilms.

Kronenfeld, David B.  1975  Kroeber vs. Radcliffe-Brown on Kinship
Behavior:  The Fanti Test Case.
MAN 10:257-284.

Kronenfeld, David B.  1973  Fanti Kinship:  The Structure of Terminology
and Behavior.  AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST 75:1577-1595.

Kronenfeld, David B.  1996  PLASTIC DRINKING GLASSES AND CHURCH FATHERS:
SEMANTIC EXTENSION FROM THE ETHNOSCIENCE TRADITION.  Oxford Studies in
Anthropological Linguistics Series, Oxford University Press (New York).

Kronenfeld, David B., James D. Armstrong and Stan Wilmoth.   1985
Exploring the Internal Structure of Linguistic Categories:  An
Extensionist Semantic View. In DIRECTIONS IN COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY,
edited by Janet W.D. Dougherty.  Urbana and Chicago:  University. of
Illinois Press. pp. 21-110.

Kuki, Shuuzou.  "Iki" no Kouzou (The Structure of "Iki").  Tokyo:
Iwanami, 1979[1930].

Kuno, Susumu.  The Structure of the Japanese Language.  Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 1973.

Lakoff, George.  "Classifiers as a Reflection of Mind."  Typological
Studies in Language, Vol. 7, Noun Classes and Categorization.
Ed. Craig, C.  Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1986, 13-51.

Lakoff, George.  Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories
Reveal about the Mind.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1987.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson.  Metaphor We Live By. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Lee, Dorothy, Freedom and Culture.

Lee, Dorothy, Valuing the Self.

Lee, Penny "New work on the linguistic relativity question", in
Historiographia Linguistica , 1994, 20,1.

Lee, Penny "The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction", John
Benjamins Publishing Company.  1996.

Leisi, Ernst. Der Wortinhalt: Seine Struktur im Deuttschen und
Englischen.  1952.

Levi-Strauss, Claude.  The savage mind.  Trans. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1966[1962].

Levinson, Stephen C.  Pragmatics.  Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983.

Linn, M.  and Miller-Cleary, Linda, "Applied Linguistics for Teachers", 1994.

Longacre, Robert E.  "Review of Language and Reality, by Wilbur
M. Urban and Four Articles on Metalinguistics, by Benjamin Lee Whorf."
Language 32, (1956): 298-308.

Lucy, J. A.: Language diversity and thought - A reformulation of the
linguistic relativity hypothesis, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press,
1992

Lucy, J. A..  Grammatical Categories and Cognition.  Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Lucy, J. A. and Richard A. Shweder.  "Whorf and His Critics:
Linguistics and Nonlinguistic Influence on Color Memory." American
Anthropologist 81 (1979): 581-615.

Lucy, John and Richard Schweder.  "The effect of incidental
conversation on memory for focal colors", American Anthropologist 90,
923-931, 1988.

Macnamara, John.  "Linguistic Relativity Revisited."  in The Influence
of Language on Culture and Thought.  Ed. Cooper, Robert L. and Bernard
Spolsky.  New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991.  45-60.

Malmkjaer, Kirsten, The Linguistics Encyclopedia.

Martin, Laura. 1986. "Eskimo Words for Snow:  A case study in the genesis
and decay of an antropological example.     American Anthropologist, 88,
418-422.

McNeil, N. B.  "Color and color terminology."  Journal of Linguistics
8 (1972), 21-33.

McNeil, N.B.  Psycholinguistics: A New Approach.  New York: Harper &
Row, Publishers, 1987.

Meiland, Jack W. and Michael Krausz., eds.  Relativism.  University of
Notre Dame Press, 1982.

Newmeyer, Frederick J.  The politics of linguistics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Palmer, Gary. Toward a Theory of Culture Change (U.T. Press. 1996)

Penn, Julia M.  Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas.  The Hague:
Mouton & Co, N. V., Publishers, 1972.

Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind creates Language,
William Morrow and Company, New York, 1994.

Rosch, Eleanor. "Linguistic relativity", in A. Silverstein, ed., Human
communication: Theoretical explorations, Lawrence Erlbaum, 95-121,
1974.

Rumsey, A.  "Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology." American
Anthropologist , 92 , (1990): 346-361.

Sampson, Geoffrey.  Schools of Linguistics. London: Hutchinson, 1980.
(In particluar, Chapter 4)

Sapir, E.  Language.  New York: Harcourt Brace,  circa 1949.

Saussure, Ferdinand de.  Course de linguistique generale.  Trans.
Kobayashi Hideo.  Tokyo: Iwanami, 1940.

Schlesinger, I. M.  "The Wax and Wane of Whorfian Views." in The
Influence of Language on Culture and Thought, Eds. Cooper, Robert
L. and Bernard Spolsky.  New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. 7-44.

Sera, Maria D.  (1992).  To be or to be:  Use and acquisition of the
Spanish copulas.  Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 408-427.

Sera, Maria D., Bales, Diane W., and del Castillo Pintado, Javier.  (in
press).  Ser helps Spanish speakers identify "real" properties.  Child
Development.

Sera, Maria D., Berge, Christian A.H., and del Castillo Pintado, Javier.
(1994).  Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by
English and Spanish speakers.  Cognitive Development, 9, 261-292.

Sera, Maria D., Reittinger, Eric L., and del Castillo Pintado, Javier.
(1991).  Developing definitions of objects and events in English and
Spanish speakers.  Cognitive Development, 6, 119-142.

Shultz, Emily.  Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf, Bakhtin, and Linguistic
Relativity (UW press).  1990.

Slobin, D. I.  Psycholinguistics.  Scott, Foresman and Company, 1971.

Steinberg, Danny D.  Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind and Word.  New
York: Longman, 1982.

Tailor, John R.  Linguistic Categorization.  Oxford: Claredon Press,
1989.

Taylor, Talbot J.  Mutual Misunderstanding.  London: Duke University
Press, 1992.

R.L. Trask.  Language: The Basics. Routledge, 1995.

Ullmann, Stephen.  Semantics.   Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1962.

Vygotsky,  "Thought and language" .

Werner, Heinz and Bernard Kaplan.  Symbol formation.  Trans.  Kakizaki
et al.  Tokyo: Minerva Shobo Ltd, 1974.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee.  Language, Mind and Reality: selected writings of
Benjamin Lee Whorf.  Ed. J. B. Carroll.  New York: MIT Press, 1956.

Wierzbicka, Anna.  Lingua Mentalis.  New York: Academic press, 1980.
-, CURRENT TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS, Vol. 13, Part 2 (1975)


Thanks again to all who replied!

Michele Feist
m-feist at nwu.edu



More information about the Funknet mailing list