Reinterpretation Of Whorf's Notion With A Focus On His Cultural Orientation

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), one of modern linguists, contributes most to the study of the relationship between language and thought. Whorf's fundamentals, however, have caused great difficulties in interpreting and evaluating his notion. Controversy even remains as to what Whorf's notion exactly is (Hudson, 2000). To clarify Whorf's notion and remove the misunderstandings on it, the author turns to Whorf's original writings and seeks Whorf's original meaning within them. In the first part of the thesis, the author reviews some major interpretations of Whorf's notion and some most celebrated experimental researches on it. Representing the common understanding of Whorf's notion, the interpretations reviewed identify Whorf's notion as a hypothesis, i.e. Whorfian Hypothesis, and transform it into two versions— the strong version proposing that thought depends on language, and the weak version proposing that thought is influenced by language. Nevertheless, "common understanding" leaves "language" and "thought", the two key concepts of Whorf's notion unspecified. The experimental researches reviewed are made by Carroll and Cassagrande (1958), Berlin and Kay (1969), Bloom (1981) and Lucy (1992). Based on the identification of "Whorfian Hypothesis", these researchers take an empirical approach to Whorf's notion, and attempt to prove or disprove it through experiments. However, in the author's opinion, these researchers' understanding of "language" and "thought" and Whorf's own understanding bear great discrepancies. In the second part of the thesis, the author examines eight of Whorf's articles and applies "collocational study" to three of them to analyze the meaning of the concepts of "language" and "thought". Built on the functional approaches to semantics proposed by Firth (1957), Halliday (1966), Lyons (1977) and Leech (1981), "collocational study" intends to define the meaning of a particular word by other words co-occurring with it. Through the study, it is found that, Whorf has collocated the two words "language" and "culture" together, i.e. "culture" carries the collocative meaning of "language", and favored combinations such as "habitual thought", "thought world". Hence, in Whorf's notion, "language" and "thought" are both cultural concepts. With further reference to Whorf's specific statements on language, thought, and their relationship, the author identifies cultural orientation as the fundamental orientation of Whorf's notion, and argues that Whorf is cultural orientated in formulating his notion on language, thought, and culture. For him, language and thought are two integrated systems ordained in the cultural background. In this sense, Whorf's notion should be located in the field of humane studies instead of empirical studies. It is inadequate to break Whorf's integrated systems of language and thought into linguistic variables and non-linguistic variables, and test his notion through rigorous experiments as Carroll and Cassagrande (1958), Berlin and Kay (1969), Bloom (1981) and Lucy (1992) do. In this part, the author also tentatively comments on Whorf's notion. On account to the cultural orientation identified, the author attributes the strength of Whorf's notion to the cultural and systematic view Whorf adopts to language and thought, and the original associations of language and thought he makes on the basis of cultural diversity. And the weakness of Whorf's notion is discussed from two respects. One is concerning Whorf's limited understanding of language and culture. The other is concerning the rigid relationship he has proposed between language and thought. In the final part of the thesis, the author makes an attempt to explore the implications of Whorf's notion from new perspectives—"dynamic perspective" and "reversible perspective"; and with reference to new concepts—"discourse" and "co-culture". In light of them, Whorf's notion may imply that, for any group of people, sh...