Whorfian Linguistic Relativity: A Case Of L2 Acquisition Of English Counterfactual

The relationship between language, mind and culture has always been a perennial issue in the field of linguistics. Benjamin Lee Whorf, with his famous linguistic relativity, questioned the traditional idea of an absolute relationship between language and mind. He assumed people who speak different languages would conceptualize the world differently. The thesis revisited Whorf's linguistic relativity, reviewed several researchers' interpretations of Whorf and probed into the issue of Chinese students' acquisition of English counterfactuals, under the guidance of an open-minded interpretation of Whorfian theory.The thesis reviewed three researchers' different interpretations of Whorfian theory. The thesis argued against Robert Kaplan's ethnocentric interpretation of Whorf and his defective conclusion that Chinese people don't have counterfactual reasoning in their mind because they don't have counterfactual markers in their language. The thesis supported Kristopher Kowal's open-minded interpretation of Whorfian theory and his study results that Chinese use other ways to suggest counterfactual meaning instead of using the same language markers as English. Besides, the thesis also appealed to the state-of-the-art cognitive linguistic theory to support the idea. Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending theory states that counterfactual thinking is a basic element in people's daily performance of conceptual blending.This thesis holds that Chinese have the ability to reason counterfactually, but Chinese students encounter all kinds of problems when acquiring English counterfactuals. The researcher conducted a study in order to find out whether Chinese students are inclined to misuse grammars and avoid use counterfactuals at all. The findings show three problems. First, they were not exposed to enough counterfactual input covering all kinds of topics. Second, they were not fully aware of the difference between Chinese and English. Third, Chinese writing style were described as reader-responsible instead of writer-responsible.Through the analysis and the conclusion of the study, the author is able to make a number of pedagogical suggestions for Chinese teachers. The author believes, we should hold a holistic view toward the relationship between language, mind and culture. They are interacting with each other with no one in a determinist position. Only keeping the three as a whole in the foreign language teaching methodologies can we facilitate L2 learning.