Does Language Influence Culture?

[Steve Bialostok]

To be honest, I don't know why this would be a surprise to any of us. That is, 
lack of awareness, paradigm differences, and so forth plague our field, along 
with many others. (When, in the academe, has the left hand never attended to 
what the right hand has, does, or ever shall say?)

Look, for example, at Steve Pinker's The Language Instinct, a book I used to 
assign. His dismantling of Whorf's theories and issues of linguistic relativity 
in general are not only uninformed but just plain wrong. You could read his 
chapter on Mentalese and not even know that any post-Whorf research of *any* 
kind ever had been done. And who takes him to task? To my knowledge, no one. 
(Perhaps if his hair was cut, all his academic powers would leave his body.) But 
he operates out of a completely different paradigm, psychology, which from its 
very beginning had identity issues and continues to want to be appreciated as a 
science that espouses universal truth.

Steve



________________________________
From: Steve Black <sblack at UCLA.EDU>
To: LINGANTH at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG
Sent: Wed, July 28, 2010 8:36:51 AM
Subject: Re: Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ.com

Dear all,
I think one of the larger issues we need to face that is represented in Rudi's 
initial commentary is the general lack of publicly available, easier to digest 
information about our foci of study.  Linguistic relativity is one of the most 
complex and still argued concepts within anthropology, and the relationship 
between language and thought takes many other forms as well (for instance, the 
issues of awareness of grammatical forms and intentionality/ reflexivity).  
Perhaps as a beginning to a solution, we should prepare a short statement about 
some of the diverse work that has been done?
Best,
Steve Black

On Jul 28, 2010, at 9:31 AM, Kephart, Ronald wrote:

> On 7/28/10 8:58 AM, "Sarah Wagner" <swagner at MAIL.UTEXAS.EDU> wrote:
> 
>> I find it frustrating that she wouldn't refer to any linguist except
>> Chomsky, who could care less what people do with their language.
> 
> I find it frustrating, and also unfortunate, that folks misrepresent Chomsky
> in this way. For one thing, NC has over the years stressed three research
> questions: (1) What do people know when they know a language?  (2) How do
> people acquire this knowledge?  (3) How do people put this knowledge to use?
> NC himself has always admitted  that he's only one person (why should he
> have to?), that he can only do so much, and that he prefers to work on (1)
> and (2).
> 
> For another, NC has for many years taught us about the ways elites use
> language to control what people know and think about their government's
> activities, both at home and out in the world. See his discussions, in all
> sorts of places, of the use of the word "terrorism," for example.
> 
> There's plenty about NC's formal linguistics that I don't understand very
> well, and there's some that I think I understand and disagree with; but to
> say that he doesn't care at all about how language is used in the world is
> simply false.
> 
> Ron
> --
> Ronald Kephart
> Associate Professor of Anthropology
>   and Linguistics
> University of North Florida
> http://crankylinguist.blogspot.com/