Gumperz John J., Levinson Stephen C. (Editors). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity

Cambridge University Press, 1999. — viii, 488 pages. — (Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language). — ISBN: 0-521-44433-0.Every student of language or society should be familiar with the essential idea of linguistic relativity, the idea that culture, through language, affects the way we think, especially perhaps our classification of the experienced world. Much of our experience seems to support some such idea, for example the phenomenology of struggling with a second language, where we find that the summit of competence is forever over the next horizon, the obvious absence of definitive or even accurate translation (let alone the ludicrous failure of phrasebooks), even the wreck of diplomatic
efforts on linguistic and rhetorical rocks.On the other hand, there is a strand of robust common sense that insists that a stone is a stone whatever you call it, that the world is a recalcitrant reality that imposes its structure on our thinking and our speaking and that the veil of linguistic difference can be ripped aside with relative ease. Plenty of subjective experiences and objective facts can be marshalled to support this view: the delight of foreign friendships, our ability to “read” the military or economic strategies of alien rivals, the very existence of comparative sciences of language, psychology, and society.Linguistic determinism: the interface between language and thought
The scope of linguistic relativity: an analysis and review of empirical research
From “thought and language’* to “thinking for speaking”
Intra-speaker relativity
Imaging in iron, or thought is not inner speech
Universal and variation in language and culture
The origins of children’s spatial semantic categories cognitive versus linguistic determinants
Relativity in spatial conception and description
Cognitive limits to conceptual relativity: the limiting-case of religious ontologies
Interpretation in cultural context
Language form and communicative practices
Projections, transpositions, and relativity
Communities, commonalities, and communication
The social matrix: culture, praxis, and discourse
The linguistic and cultural relativity of inference
Linguistic resources for socializing humanity
When animals become “rounded” and “feminine” : conceptual categories and linguistic classification in a multilingual setting