The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction by Penny Lee (review)

634LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction. By Penny Lee. (Studies in the history of the language sciences, 81.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. xix, 373. Reviewed by John E. Joseph, University of Edinburgh When the balance sheet is drawn on American linguistics of the twentieth century, there may be some dispute about who was its greatest figure but not about its most intriguing. That distinction belongs to Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), who is also in the running for most controversial —and most influential, particularly when one looks beyond linguistics to the impact on other fields of study and on general culture.1 Yet our knowledge of him has been limited, for several reasons. Those closest to him, fearing that his brilliance might be overshadowed by his unconventionality, have been selective about which aspects of his thought would be put on public display. Whorf's diaries and many other papers were withheld from the materials donated to the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the Yale University Library, and only now, following the death of Whorf's widow in July 1997, is there some possibility of them becoming available to scholars. Even the bulk of the material heretofore open to public view has gone unpublished—surprisingly, seeing how well the 1956 collection of papers has sold and continues to sell. As a result his influence has tended to proceed from severe reductions of his thought, on the lines of the definition of 'Whorfian hypothesis' given in the New shorter Oxford English dictionary (1993): 'the theory that one's perception of the world is determined by the structure of one's native language'. His centenary has coincided with a spate of renewed interest in his work, and at long last the first serious attempt has been made to move beyond the handful of his well-known papers to reconstruct his system ofideas in its totality. Penny Lee's book, however, is more than an exercise in archaeology. Her critical reconstruction of the Whorf theory complex is accompanied at every step by a réévaluation of work done explicitly or implicitly in a neo-Whorfian vein through the 1990's. Besides contributing a much fuller sense of what Whorf was about, the book establishes the existence of a vivid Whorfian research paradigm of decades' standing, with more strands and more coherence than even those involved in it might suspect. L begins with an introductory chapter outlining Whorf's life and work from 1924 until his premature death from cancer, tracing how his work would subsequently be 'misread, unread, and superficially treated' (14) and giving an overview ofthe theory complex which it is impossible to summarize further without repeating past reductionism. I shall therefore limit myself to one important point. L emphasizes that Whorf's theorizing is 'only by extension about language in general . . . and thought in general'; rather, it is aimed at the intersection of the two, 'linguistic thinking' (30). Whorf considered that socially generated and sustained patterns of language use become physically entrenched in cognition and in doing so condition physiological (including neurological) structures, processes, or associated energy fields and bring about adjustments to the overall patterning of mental behavior. He did not claim that all conceptual activity is linguistic in origin or character nor did he claim that the sole function of language is to facilitate conceptual activity. He did, however, claim that it is the species specific ability to talk that characterizes what is distinctive about human cognition. (30-31) The idea that patterns of language use condition neurological structures foreshadows connectionism by half a century, as L discusses at length, just as human cognition being distinguished by species-specific language ability foreshadows the opposite cognitivist trend. While the lines connecting Whorf to contemporary work like that of Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1989-92), Lucy (1992, on which see Lee 1994) and the contributors to Gumperz and Levinson (1996) are obvious enough, nothing in the book is more surprising than the links drawn to Chomsky, especially with regard to Whorf's notions of 'cryptotypes' (a link already noted by Ogle 1973, as L points 1 See for example Joseph (1995: 380n.) on the...