Does Language Influence Culture?

[Kathryn Woolard]

My post doesn¹t seem to have gone through, so I¹m trying again. Apologies if
multiple copies appear.
KW


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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