Does Language Influence Culture?

[Kathryn Woolard]

For starters on this problem of public awareness, maybe some of you
participating in this discussion would like to write letters to the WSJ
and/or the author of the article, commenting on this line of research in
ling. anthro? Not of complaint, but of the collaborative/co-optive, ²we¹re
pleased to see this new attention to one of our longstanding research
topics² type, and suggesting some principal sources where interested readers
could find some of it?  It¹s unlikely  that  the article¹s author is unaware
of that lit., since a lot of the work cited on. e.g,  cardinal orientiations
or color terms, comes from ling. anthro. It¹s more likely that she just
doesn¹t consider it conclusive about cognition, especially on the causal
point, which is fair ­ it¹s been the field¹s own perennial criticism. But it
is odd that Whorf wasn¹t even mentioned in a popularizing piece. And there¹s
even a tradition of psycholinguistic research not mentioned;  it¹s nearly 50
years ago that Sue Ervin-Tripp found that first generation Japanese-American
women gave significantly different responses to TAT  psychological tests in
their two languages.

If you do write to WSJ, please also send your letter  (and/or bibliographic
essay?!)  to the SLA webmaster. Even if not published by the WSJ, an
informed discussion could make for a good SLA blog posting around the
article that googlers might come across.   You can reach the webmaster, Alex
Enkerli, at: 

slawebguru at gmail.com

Best to all,
Kit Woolard


On 7/28/10 7:57 AM, "Steve Bialostok" <stevebialostok at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

> 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/
> 
> 
> 
>       

 
Kathryn A. Woolard, Professor
kwoolard at ucsd.edu
Department of Anthropology, 0532                              Phone: (858)
534-4639           
UCSD               
Fax :  (858) 534-5946
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La Jolla, CA 92093-0532