Fwd: Sapir-Whorf/Boas-Silverstein

[Richard J. Senghas]

[Forwarding from Alan Rumsey. (More aliasing collateral.) BTW: in case you
folks have been wondering if it has been worth this hassle, I've managed to
intercept quite a few "inappropriate" posting attempts! -RJS]

Hi All. Reading the recent interesting discussion on this list about the
so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I am reminded of a passage in the
original 1988 version of my paper 'Wording, Meaning and Linguistic
Ideology', most of which did not make into the published version (in
American Anthropologist 92:346) because I had to cut the paper in half to
meet their length limit. One the things I do in the passage is to contrast
the usual cognitivist-cum-linguistic-determinist reading of Whorf with the
Silversteinian one that takes him to be addressing himself to the Boasian
problem of the relationship between language as "primary ethnological
phenomenon" and the "secondary rationalizations" in terms of which speakers
of the language understand it to operate --- or, in Silverstein's terms,
the relation between language structure and linguistic ideology.

While I found the Silversteinian reading of Whorf more productive for my
purposes than the cognitivist one, I think that Whorf's own writings are
actually rather ambiguous on the matter, and that passages can be found to
support either reading. In a footnote I point out that one place where
Whorf seems to support a reading in terms of individual perception or
cognitive processing is at the beginning of his paper 'The relation of
habitual thought and behavior to language', where he approvingly quotes
Sapir's claim that: "we see and hear ... very largely as we do [sic]
because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of
interpretation" (Whorf 1956:134). I go on to say "It should be borne in
mind, however, that, in its original context [Spier ed 1941 Language,
Culture and Personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir], Whorf was using
this quote as the epigraph to a memorial piece for his late teacher and
friend - a piece in which he then goes on to develop connections between
language structure and "habitual thought and behavior" rather than "seeing"
and "hearing" in any literal sense of those terms.

Below is the full passage from my unexpurgated paper, followed by the
footnote. I would be interested to hear what others on this list [and you
too Michael if you're on it] think of Silverstein's construal of Whorf as a
seminal theorist of linguistic ideology, as this played a big part in
Silverstein's original 1979 paper on the subject, but seems to have receded
from view in the now-burgeoning literature on language ideologies. And also
of where and how one would place Sapir on this genealogy.


Here's the passage:

In common with Whorf (1956), I believe that the best way to study the
relationship between language structure and other aspects of social life is
not by starting with particular lexico-grammatical features, such as how
many words there are in a language for `snow' or `rice', or even how it
encodes actor-action relations, but rather by looking for what Whorf called
"fashions of speaking": global complexes of features which "cut across the
typical grammatical classifications, so that such a "fashion" may include
lexical, morphological, syntactic and otherwise systemically diverse means
coordinated in a certain frame of consistency" (Whorf 1956:158). For
example, Whorf argued that there was one such "frame of consistency",
typical of "Standard Average European" (SAE) languages, which coordinated
features as diverse as: 1) the  opposition between mass and count nouns; 2)
the prevalence of spatial metaphors; 3) the "binomial" form of the SAE noun
phrase. It is these consistently patterned "fashions of speaking" which
Whorf saw as most intimately related to other aspects of cultures.
 Exactly what it was that he tried to relate them to is a matter on which
Whorf has been read in differing ways. In most of the research which has
been done on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this has been addressed
as a hypothesis about individual perception, or "cognitive processing" and
how these might be related to language structure. Some aspects of Whorf's
argument may lend themselves to that interpretation1. But I believe that a
far more interesting and fruitful reading of Whorf (which is compatible
with the stated results of his own analyses) is one which takes him to be
addressing himself to the Boasian problem of the relation between language
as "primary ethnological phenomenon" (Boas 1974[1911]:23ff) and the
"secondary rationalizations" in terms of which speakers of the language
understand it to operate (ibid). This is the revisionist reading of Whorf
which is propounded in Silverstein (1979).
 Following Silverstein, I will assume for purposes of this discussion that,
whatever connection there might be (if any) between language structure and
perception or cognitive processing, one can expect to find a certain amount
of dialectical interplay between language structure and "linguistic
ideology" --- shared bodies of common sense notions about the nature of
language and its relationship to other aspects of social life and the world
in general.2 Thus, to cite one of Whorf's examples, it can hardly be a
coincidence that the form-substance dichotomy and related species of
dualism should so readily pass for the "hard, practical, common sense"
(Whorf 1956:152) of people whose language displays the structural features
cited above --- especially the "binomial form" of the SAE noun phrase,
which encodes the cryptotypic categories of substance-less form and
formless substance in distinct form/order classes (e.g., "stick of wood",
"cake of soap", "glass of water", etc.)(Silverstein 1979:201).
===========================================
Footnote 1: An example is his apparent endorsement of Sapir's famous
formulation: "we see and hear ... very largely as we do [sic] because the
language habits of our community predispose certain choices of
interpretation" (Whorf 1956:134). It should be borne in mind, however,
that, in its original context (Whorf 1941), Whorf was using this quote as
the epigraph to a memorial piece for his late teacher and friend - a piece
in which he then goes on to develop connections between language structure
and "habitual thought and behavior" rather than "seeing" and "hearing" in
any literal sense of those terms.


References

Boas, F. (1974[1911]). Introduction to the handbook of American Indian
languages. Excerpted in Blount, B. (ed.), Language in
 culture and society. Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop.

Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In
 Clyne, P., Hanks, W. and Hofbauer, C. (eds). The elements: a
 parasession on linguistic units and levels. Chicago: Chicago
 Linguistic Society.

Whorf, B. L. (1941). The relation of habitual thought and behaviour to
 language. In Spier, L. et al (eds.), Language, culture, and
 personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir. Menasha, Wis.:
 Sapir Memorial Publication Fund. 134-59.

Whorf, B.L. (1956).Language, thought, and reality. Cambridge, Mass.:
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.



Alan Rumsey
Dept. of Anthropology, RSPAS
Australian National University

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