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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.
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Michael Silverstein was an American linguist. He was the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology at the University of Chicago. He was a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic anthropology. Over the course of his career he created an original synthesis of research on the semiotics of communication, the sociology of interaction, Russian formalist literary theory, linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, early anthropological linguistics and structuralist grammatical theory, together with his own theoretical contributions, yielding a comprehensive account of the semiotics of human communication and its relation to culture. He presented the developing results of this project annually from 1970 until his death in a course entitled "Language in Culture." Among other achievements, he was instrumental in introducing the semiotic terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce, including especially the notion of indexicality, into the linguistic and anthropological literature; with coining the terms metapragmatics and metasemantics in drawing attention to the central importance of metasemiotic phenomena for any understanding of language or social life; and with introducing language ideology as a field of study. His works are noted for their terminological complexity and technical difficulty.
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.
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.
The question whether the use of language influences spatial cognition is closely related to theories of linguistic relativity—also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—which states that the structure of a language affects cognitive processes of the speaker. Debates about this topic are mainly focused on the extent to which language influences spatial cognition or if it does at all. Research also concerns differences between perspectives on spatial relations across cultures, what these imply, and the exploration of potentially partaking cognitive mechanisms.
Soonja Choi is a linguist originally from South Korea, specializing in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean.
References
- ↑ "jl home". Home.uchicago.edu. 2008-07-01. Retrieved 2013-11-04.
- ↑ "Department of Psychology: Faculty". Psychology.uchicago.edu. Archived from the original on 2013-12-09. Retrieved 2013-11-04.
- ↑ "Harper International Lecture Series: John Lucy on Taking Perspectives: Language and Thought … and Life in the College | the University of Chicago Center in Beijing". Archived from the original on May 22, 2012. Retrieved December 8, 2011.
- ↑ "July 11-17 2011 Xi'an, China". Iclc11.org. Archived from the original on 2013-11-04. Retrieved 2013-11-04.
- ↑ Velasco Maillo, Honorio. 'Linguistic Relativity.' In Hablar y Pensar, Tareas Culturales. Temas de Antropología Lingüística y Cognitiva, Madrid, 2003, pp 259–353
- ↑ Lucy, John. Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, Cambridge, 1996
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