A Study Of Benjamin Lee Whorf’s Philosophy Of Language

The idea that different languages foster different world views in their speakers is part of a tradition popularized by Wilhelm von Humboldt in the18th century long before it became associated with Whorf. In this long process, another two American linguists, Boas and Sapir, are also well-known for their great contributions to this notion. This thesis tries to trace the linguistic relativity back to its origin and contextualize its diachronic developments from Europe to America. It is true, however, that it was Benjamin Lee Whorf, the chemical engineer and fire-insurance by profession and the linguist by avocation, who had undertaken extensive research into the language Hopi during1932-1935and Maya in late1930s, and it was he who went further in indicating the relationship between language and thought. As a core part of Whorf’s theory complex, the linguistic relativity was once interpreted in two ways:linguistic determinism which means that language determines the way people think and linguistic relativism which implies that language influences the way people think.This principle has intrigued many anthropologists, psychologists and linguists and there is a fairly extensive literature concerning it. Initially, studies of Whorf mainly focused on lexicon, especially colour terms. In time, the research interest was shifted to grammatical categories including grammatical gender of noun, grammatical marking of form, counterfactual reasoning, and transmission from thought and language to thinking for speaking. Since the1990s, the Neo-whorfianism scholars have began to try experimental methods to explore the relationship between language and cognition under the guidance of cognitive science, thereby gaining success to some extent. During this period of time, linguists mainly studied Whorf s ideas from cognition of time, spatial terms, number marking, language acquisition and so forth through which researchers have found that Whorf, to some extent, has been misinterpreted in some aspects and they provide support for Whorf’s weak version of linguistic relativity principle.The thesis also interprets Whorf s notion by turning to his original writings. Specifically, the thesis makes a detailed analysis of Whorf’s notion from anthropological linguistics, which largely deals with his famous distinction between overt category and covert category and his detailed description of the American Indian language Hopi; contrastive linguistics, which implies Whorf’s research pedagogy by which the major differences between Hopi and English were found; and psycho linguistics which shows that Whorf would like to explore the deeper internalized meaning of language so as to uncover the true nature of language in the process of thinking. Therefore, the writer aims to have access to Whorf by rereading his original works and demonstrates what he has actually done in those disciplines above.Whorf’s status as a chemical engineer and linguist seem to be conflicting. However, it is his seemingly contradicting status that leads him to go on all his studies not only in terms of language itself but by putting it against a wider background, thus creating a new time when language established its own role in the process of thinking, which shows fundamentally Whorf’s philosophy of language.