Explorations in Linguistic Relativity (review)

This is a companion volume to Evidence for linguistic relativity (ed. by Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000). The nineteen contributors of the fifteen papers of this volume come from three continents.

The first five papers take a historical view of linguistic relativity. In ‘Towards a “full pedigree” of the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”: From Locke to Lucy’ (1–23), E. F. K. Koerner discusses the Humboldtian tradition of linguistic worldview but also mentions some of the earlier thinkers who contributed essential elements to what later came to be referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (Locke figures in the title but is not mentioned in the text.) The following paper (25–44) by Jürgen Trabant examines Humboldt’s views in the context of his time and points out some of the similarities and differences between Humboldt’s thinking and the approaches of those who explored more recently the issue of the relationship between particular languages and thinking. Moving forward in time, Penny Lee reviews Whorf’s formulation of the linguistic relativity principle in order to clarify to what extent this principle corresponds in particular studies to what Whorf himself meant by it (45–68). In ‘Linguistic relativity and translation’ (69–88), Juliane House first gives a brief overview of Humboldtian, neo-Humboldtian, and Whorfian views, which cast serious doubt on translatability, and then proposes that the process of translating become a process of cultural recontextualization. The last of this set of papers is Peter Mühlhäusler’s ‘Humboldt, Whorf and the roots of ecolinguistics’ (89–99). According to M, ‘ecolinguistics is probably best defined by its refusal to privilege a single perspective...on language and communication’ (89). Mühlhäuser supports Penny Lee’s argument and concludes that while Whorf did refer to the intrinsic value of cultural diversity, nowhere did he mention any connection between diverse conceptual systems and the diversity of natural kinds.

The other ten papers deal with particular theoretical and methodological issues. Two of them investigate in some detail specific Whorfian constructs: Linda L. Thornburg and Klaus-Uwe Panther conclude that ‘claims about how language shapes thought should not be based solely on superficial structural differences among languages . . . but on in-depth analyses of linguistic systems’ (339); Minglang Zhou, drawing on data from China, challenges both Whorf’s hierarchy of susceptibility of linguistic categories to awareness and Michael Silverstein’s hypothesized universal constraining factors regarding the role of metalinguistic awareness in linguistic relativity.

A few brief comments about some of the remaining papers: Bruce W. Hawkins concludes that ‘meanings are not immutable structure . . . [and] can change significantly when there is a change in the experiential base and . . . in the grounding context’ (316). Wallace Chafe contributes a well-thought-out article with supporting data as widely divergent as Tlingit and Mohawk consonants, Seneca syntax, and an English translation of a paragraph from Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika. Finally, Nick J. Enfield addresses some methodological and theoretical issues that have emerged from two current conflicting positions on linguistic relativity.