Evidence for Linguistic Relativity

Most of the ten contributions to this volume were originally presented at the 26th International LAUD Symposium entitled ‘Humboldt and Whorf revisited’ (1–5 April, 1998, Gerhard Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany). Proceedings of the meeting have appeared in two volumes; the fifteen contributors to this volume (including the two editors) come from ten countries on four continents.

The volume is divided into two parts: Part 1 contains papers dealing with evidence from language structure; Part 2 has papers that draw on data from cognition, discourse, and culture. In his introduction (ix–xxi), John A. Lucy characterizes linguistic relativity and discusses its empirical evaluations. Before commenting on the papers of the volume, he mentions three types of empirical studies of linguistic relativity—approaches that are structure-oriented, domain-oriented, and behavior-oriented.

To sample the contents of Part 1: In one of the papers Jan Schroten studies semantic structure and its relation to the conceptual structure of body-part nouns in English, Spanish, and Dutch. According to him, it is necessary to understand how the semantic structure is organized before one attempts to study the relationship between language and thought. Gábor Györi views the cognitive function of language as also serving ‘to provide the speakers with relatively stable, ready-made categories that reflect the environment the language users live in’ (76). Then by studying semantic change, we learn not only ‘how cognition influences what categories will be created in language, . . . [but also] how the linguistically established categories influence our view of the world’ (77).

In Part 2, Dan I. Slobin in ‘Verbalized events: A dynamic approach to linguistic relativity and determinism’ (107–38) gives an example of how languages shape their speakers’ way of thinking. He examines the event of human motion and explores differences in ‘thinking for speaking’ between ‘verb-framed’ languages like French and ‘satellite-framed’ languages like English (this typology originated with Leonard Talmy in 1985). Balthasar Bickel offers evidence from his fieldwork among a Tibeto-Burman people, the Belhare, that cultural forms of social practices (e.g. locating things or persons) show affinity to linguistic patterns. And in ‘ “S’engager” vs. “to show restraint”: Linguistic and cultural relativity in discourse management’ (193–222), Bert Peeters contrasts communicative norms of French and English speakers. The French ideal is one of engagement in order to defend individual expression; the Anglo-Saxon ideal is to avoid the risk of venturing an erroneous opinion and getting drawn into other people’s business. Ultimately, Peeters’s thesis is that ‘selected aspects of language... because of linguistic relativity, generate cultural relativity, which itself generates linguistic diversity’ (217).

Papers in this volume will prove to be of interest because they suggest new ways of approaching the issue of linguistic relativity.