Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Walking through walls
- 1 An issue about language
- 2 Linguistic relativities
- 3 Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Boasian foundations of contemporary ethnolinguistics
- 4 Cognitive anthropology
- 5 Methodological issues in cross-language color naming
- 6 Pidgins and creoles genesis: an anthropological offering
- 7 Bilingualism
- 8 The impact of language socialization on grammatical development
- 9 Intimate grammars: anthropological and psychoanalytic accounts of language, gender, and desire
- 10 Maximizing ethnopoetics: fine-tuning anthropological experience
- 11 Interpreting language variation and change
- References
- Index
- STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS OF LANGUAGE
3 - Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Boasian foundations of contemporary ethnolinguistics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Walking through walls
- 1 An issue about language
- 2 Linguistic relativities
- 3 Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Boasian foundations of contemporary ethnolinguistics
- 4 Cognitive anthropology
- 5 Methodological issues in cross-language color naming
- 6 Pidgins and creoles genesis: an anthropological offering
- 7 Bilingualism
- 8 The impact of language socialization on grammatical development
- 9 Intimate grammars: anthropological and psychoanalytic accounts of language, gender, and desire
- 10 Maximizing ethnopoetics: fine-tuning anthropological experience
- 11 Interpreting language variation and change
- References
- Index
- STUDIES IN THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS OF LANGUAGE
Summary
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds.
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956: 213)The phenomena of language are background phenomena, of which the talkers are unaware or, at most, dimly aware… These automatic, involuntary patterns of language are not the same for all men but are specific for each language and constitute the formalized side of the language, or its “grammar.”
From this fact proceeds what I have called the “linguistic relativity principle,” which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers, but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.
Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956: 221)The role of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) in contemporary ethnolinguistics is an unusually complex one from the standpoint of the histories of anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, not to speak of philosophy. It is arguable that Whorf has been misread more thoroughly than any other social scientist of his generation.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language, Culture, and SocietyKey Topics in Linguistic Anthropology, pp. 82 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
- 4
- Cited by