The Whorf Hypothesis

[Wallace Chafe]

I didn't want to get involved in this discussion, much of which struck me
as puerile, but Bob's recent message touched a raw nerve. In my opinion,
associating recent quite responsible research on this important question
with post-modernism does it a serious disservice. A couple basic sources
are Gumperz and Levinson, "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity", and Putz (u
umlaut) and Verspoor, "Explorations in Linguistic Relativity". In the first
book, the papers by Slobin and by Bowerman are especially cogent. In the
second there's even a paper by me. I should also mention the survey by
Penny Lee, "The Whorf Theory Complex".

I see it like this. Nobody would dispute the observation that languages
organize sounds differently. Why, then, shouldn't they organize thoughts
differently as well? The way languages organize thoughts produces semantic
structures, which I should think anyone who's worked with more than one
language would agree are different. So as long as one is "thinking for
speaking" (Slobin's term), one necessarily thinks differently in different
languages. But not all thought is linguistic, and the remaining question
ought to be, how much are one's thoughts as a whole influenced by the way
one organizes them for speaking? Whorf didn't exactly put it that way, and
surely he at times exaggerated the influence. But sixty years after his
death we really ought to go beyond arguing about what Whorf really meant
(he wasn't always consistent), and examining carefully the relation between
linguistically determined semantic structures and thought in general. The
MIT bunch doesn't care about such things, they're so hung up on universals,
but the rest of us certainly should care.
Wally