Linguistic relativity and cognitive linguistics
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C3P95
2025-12-07
62
Linguistic relativity and cognitive linguistics
In this final section, we turn to the issue of linguistic relativity. Although the nature of the relationship between thought and language has intrigued human beings since the time of the ancient philosophers, within modern linguistics this idea is most frequently associated with the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, and is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis consists of two parts: linguistic determinism (the idea that language determines non-linguistic thought) and linguistic relativity (the idea that speakers of different languages will therefore think differently). The strong version of this hypothesis holds that language entirely determines thought: a speaker of language X will understand the world in a fundamentally different way from a speaker of language Y, particularly if those two languages have significantly different grammatical systems. In other words, a speaker will only have access to cognitive categories that correspond to the linguistic categories of his or her language. The weak version of this hypothesis, on the other hand, holds that the structure of a language may influence (rather than determine) how the speaker performs certain cognitive processes, because the structure of different languages influences how information is ‘packaged’.
Since the rise of the generative model in the 1960s, proponents of formal linguistics have tended to reject the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis altogether, given its incompatibility with the hypothesis that there might exist a universal set of pre-linguistic conceptual primitives, and therefore a universal ‘mentalese’ or ‘language of thought’. The following excerpt from Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct illustrates this position:
But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of . . . a conventional absurdity. . . The thirty-five years of research from the psychology laboratory is distinguished by how little it has shown. Most of the experiments have tested banal ‘weak’ versions of the Whorfian hypothesis, namely that words can have some effect on memory or categorization. . . Knowing a language, then, is knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words, and vice versa. (Pinker 1994: 57–82)
While most modern linguists would probably agree that the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is untenable, some interesting findings have emerged in cognitive linguistics and related fields, particularly in linguistic anthropology, cognitive psychology and language acquisition research, which suggest that language can and does influence thought and action. Therefore, a cognitive linguistic approach to the relationship between language, thought and experience, together with the facts of cross-linguistic diversity, is compatible with a weaker form of the linguistic relativity thesis. For this reason, the view we present here might be described as neo-Whorfian.
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