Benjamin Lee Whorf was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer. He is known for "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis," the idea that differences between the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. This principle has been named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, which was initially called linguistic relativity by Whorf because he saw the idea as having implications similar to Einstein’s principle of physical relativity. The idea, however, follows from post-Hegelian 19th-century philosophy, especially from Wilhelm von Humboldt; and from Wilhelm Wundt's Völkerpsychologie.
Edward Sapir was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States.
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind.
Visual thinking, also called visual or spatial learning or picture thinking, is the phenomenon of thinking through visual processing. Visual thinking has been described as seeing words as a series of pictures. It is common in approximately 60–65% of the general population. "Real picture thinkers", those who use visual thinking almost to the exclusion of other kinds of thinking, make up a smaller percentage of the population. Research by child development theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be true "picture thinkers".
Adele Eva Goldberg is an American linguist known for her development of construction grammar and the constructionist approach in the tradition of cognitive linguistics.
Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, United States.
The study of how language influences thought has a long history in a variety of fields. There are two bodies of thought forming around this debate. One body of thought stems from linguistics and is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. There is a strong and a weak version of the hypothesis which argue for more or less influence of language on thought. The strong version, linguistic determinism, argues that without language there is and can be no thought while the weak version, linguistic relativity, supports the idea that there are some influences from language on thought. And on the opposing side, there are 'language of thought' theories (LOTH) which believe that public language is inessential to private thought. LOTH theories address the debate of whether thought is possible without language which is related to the question of whether language evolved for thought. These ideas are difficult to study because it proves challenging to parse the effects of culture versus thought versus language in all academic fields.
Linguistic determinism is the concept that language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, as well as thought processes such as categorization, memory, and perception. The term implies that people's native languages will affect their thought process and therefore people will have different thought processes based on their mother tongues.
Uto-Aztecan, Uto-Aztekan or Uto-Nahuatl is a family of indigenous languages of the Americas, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family was created to show that it includes both the Ute language of Utah and the Nahuan languages of Mexico.
Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.
Charles J. Fillmore was an American linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961. Fillmore spent ten years at Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.
Frame semantics is a theory of linguistic meaning developed by Charles J. Fillmore that extends his earlier case grammar. It relates linguistic semantics to encyclopedic knowledge. The basic idea is that one cannot understand the meaning of a single word without access to all the essential knowledge that relates to that word. For example, one would not be able to understand the word "sell" without knowing anything about the situation of commercial transfer, which also involves, among other things, a seller, a buyer, goods, money, the relation between the money and the goods, the relations between the seller and the goods and the money, the relation between the buyer and the goods and the money and so on. Thus, a word activates, or evokes, a frame of semantic knowledge relating to the specific concept to which it refers.
Case grammar is a system of linguistic analysis, focusing on the link between the valence, or number of subjects, objects, etc., of a verb and the grammatical context it requires. The system was created by the American linguist Charles J. Fillmore in the context of Transformational Grammar (1968). This theory analyzes the surface syntactic structure of sentences by studying the combination of deep cases which are required by a specific verb. For instance, the verb "give" in English requires an Agent (A) and Object (O), and a Beneficiary (B); e.g. "Jones (A) gave money (O) to the school (B).
James Alan Matisoff is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.
John Bissell Carroll was an American psychologist known for his contributions to psychology, linguistics and psychometrics.
Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how. This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy. Among the most debated theories in this area of work is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. This theory states that the language a person speaks will affect the way that this person thinks. The theory varies between two main proposals: that language structure determines how individuals perceive the world and that language structure influences the world view of speakers of a given language but does not determine it.
Proto-Uto-Aztecan is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Uto-Aztecan languages. Authorities on the history of the language group have usually placed the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland in the border region between the United States and Mexico, namely the upland regions of Arizona and New Mexico and the adjacent areas of the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, roughly corresponding to the Sonoran Desert and the western part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It would have been spoken by Mesolithic foragers in Aridoamerica, about 5,000 years ago.
The Hopi time controversy is the academic debate about how the Hopi language grammaticalizes the concept of time, and about whether the differences between the ways the English and Hopi languages describe time are an example of linguistic relativity or not. In popular discourse the debate is often framed as a question about whether the Hopi "had a concept of time," despite it now being well established that they do.
