Evidence for Linguistic Relativity

Download or read book Evidence for Linguistic Relativity written by Susanne Niemeier and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-04-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume has arisen from the 26th International LAUD Symposium on “Humboldt and Whorf Revisited. Universal and Culture-Specific Conceptualizations in Grammar and Lexis”. While contrasting two or more languages, the papers in this volume either provide empirical evidence confirming hypotheses related to linguistic relativity, or deal with methodological issues of empirical research.These new approaches to Whorf’s hypotheses do not focus on mere theorizing but provide more and more empirical evidence gathered over the last years. They prove in a very sophisticated way that Whorf’s ideas were very lucid ones, even if Whorf’s insights were framed in a terminology which lacked the flexibility of linguistic categories developed over the last quarter of this century, especially in cognitive linguistics. To date, there is sufficient proof to claim that linguistic relativity is indeed a vital issue, and the current volume confirms a more general trend for rehabilitating Whorf’s theory complex and also offers evidence for it. It contains articles written by scholars from various fields of linguistics including phonology, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, historical linguistics, anthropological linguistics and (cross-)cultural semantics, which all contribute to a re-evaluation and partial reformulation of Whorf’s thinking.