Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language

by John A. Lucy

Language Diversity and Thought examines the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis: the proposal that the grammar of the particular language that we speak affects the way we think about reality. Adopting a historical approach, the book reviews the various lines of empirical inquiry that arose in America in response to the ideas of anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin L. Whorf. John Lucy asks why there has been so little fruitful empirical research on this problem and what lessons can be learned from past work. He then proposes a new, more adequate approach to future empirical research. A companion volume, Grammatical Categories and Cognition, illustrates the proposed approach with an original case study. The study compares the grammar of American English with that of Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language spoken in southeastern Mexico, and then identifies distinctive patterns of thinking related to the differences between the two languages.

Genres: Linguistics, Language

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[mileva]

this is the theoretical tradition that got me interested in and eventually led me to study linguistics btw

[Elise]

Oh boy, I'm the first person to review this book! Uh, I'd recommend this for people who are interested in the history of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the modern social-scientific perspective on it. If you are not interested in either of those things, you should not read this book. You would find it somewhat dry.