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Starting from the appealing folk idea that “language expresses thought”, this chapter argues that the psychological reality of language should be investigated from a perspective on thought. The idea also leads to the view that conceptual competence partly constitutes linguistic competence, and so is ontologically prior to it. Following Grice, and despite the claims of linguistic relativity, the chapter argues that thought is explanatorily prior to language. These ontological and explanatory priorities have some interesting temporal consequences. Based on these priorities, it is argued that our theoretical interest in thought is prior to that in language.

This chapter examines the roles that metaphor might play in conceptual representation. Lakoff's conceptual metaphor theory argues that abstract concepts, such as “theory”, are understood in terms of concrete concepts such as “buildings” via the metaphor “theories are buildings”. Such metaphors underlie our ability to talk about theories in terms of buildings, e.g., “His theory has a weak foundation” or “The theory has a leaky roof”. Conceptual metaphor as a theory of conceptual representation is critically analyzed and found wanting on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Conceptual metaphor as a theory of metaphor and idiom comprehension is also critically examined. The available evidence is that people ordinarily understand metaphors and idioms without recourse to conceptual metaphoric mappings. However, when novel expressions such as “His bloated ego gobbled up his integrity and used the airwaves as a toilet” are encountered, then people may infer a metaphorical mapping between arrogance and digestion. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis in the context of theories of metaphor comprehension.

Two interrelated perspectives are advanced. One is about the function of language in use, namely in the course of social practices. It is argued that language serves as an attention directing devise in such immediate contexts. The second argument suggests that language use in face-to-face immediate communication as well as across a wide range of social practices (e.g., mass media) have unintended consequences or byproducts. They generate knowledge structures that supersede the immediacy of language use and constitute culturally situated linguistic ecologies that shape human cognition.

This book examines the ways in which the grammatical resources of a particular language enter into the accomplishment of actions that serve a generic human problem: the organization of cooperation. Research on “linguistic relativity” addresses the relationship between an individual language and the culture and mentality of its speakers. This chapter discusses the differences in outlook, aims, and methodology between linguistic relativity and the work presented in this book. While linguistic relativity stresses the relationship of meaning to mental representations, this volume stresses the emergence of meaning in practical action; while work on linguistic relativity focuses on the effect that language has on the individual, this work focuses on language as a resource for dialogic engagement with another; and while linguistic relativity stresses the arbitrariness of linguistic meaning, this work stresses the indexical connections of talk to the social and material context.

This chapter addresses the following question: How do language-specific concepts relate to cognition? The interaction between language and thought has fascinated scholars and laypeople alike for centuries, but during the past few decades this complex topic has gained significance from the discovery that, as shown in Part II, the amount of cross-linguistic diversity in both lexical and grammatical semantics is much greater than previously assumed. The first two sections draw upon psychological and neuroscientific studies to support two seemingly contradictory but actually complementary claims: many forms of cognition do not depend on language-specific concepts; nonetheless, such concepts do sometimes influence a variety of cognitive processes, in keeping with Whorf’s (1956) linguistic relativity hypothesis (or at least with a weak version of it). The last section then addresses some interpretive issues regarding recent neuroscientific evidence that some verbal and nonverbal semantic tasks have partly shared cortical underpinnings.

In this chapter we consider the question of whether the language one speaks affects one’s thinking. We discuss arguments showing that language cannot be taken to be the vehicle of thought. We then review evidence from several domains in which language has been proposed to reorganize conceptual representations, including color, objects and substances, space, motion, number, and spatial orientation. We conclude that linguistic representations have significant online processing effects in these and other cognitive and perceptual domains but do not alter conceptual representation.

Over the past twenty years, a vibrant field of research has emerged around the question of linguistic relativity: the causal relationship between language and the way we think. The chapter offers a major re-interpretation of the empirical results accumulated in the field. To be able to use the technology of language for instruction, we have to learn to experience forit. The overall influence of experiencing-for-instructing on experiencing in general depends on a long list of parameters: every individual stands at the center of a vector spaceof influences, experiential and linguistic, and the actual contribution of language depends on the susceptibility of the individual to these influences, and on the direction, temporal order, and strength of the different vectors. The tensions between the experiential and linguistic influences may also be resolved by changing language, which implies that language and experience are caught in a never-ending cycle of bi-directional influence, always spiraling over the foundational constant of the experiential gap.

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf–Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community. Specifically, certain groups customarily use an externally referenced spatial-coordinate system to refer to nearby directions and positions (“to the north”) whereas English speakers usually employ a viewer-perspective system (“to the left”). Prior findings and interpretations have been to the effect that users of these two types of spatial system solve rotation problems in different ways, reasoning strategies imposed by habitual use of the language particular lexicons themselves. The present studies reproduce these different problem-solving strategies in speakers of a single language (English) by manipulating landmark cues, suggesting that language itself may not be the key causal factor in choice of spatial perspective. Prior evidence on rotation problem solution from infants and from laboratory animals suggests a unified interpretation of the findings: creatures approach spatial problems differently depending on the availability and suitability of local landmark cues. The results are discussed in terms of the current debate on the relation of language to thought, with particular emphasis on the question of why different cultural communities favor different perspectives in talking about space.

This chapter considers the relationships among culture, language, and perceptual category organization. Some continuous perceptual experiences, such as color, come to be perceived as discontinuous, discrete categories—for example, the “stripes” in the rainbow. That phenomenon, known as categorical perception, might reflect a fixed organization of the experienced world, determined by some properties of human color vision. Yet, despite the commonalities of human color vision, different languages carve up the range of visible colors in very different ways. This has led researchers to investigate the relationship between linguistic categorization and perception. Does the language we speak determine our worldview? Would a language with only two color terms see only two stripes in the rainbow? Some researchers suggest that universal categorical organization of color occurs at an early perceptual level, free from any influence of language or culture (the universalist hypothesis). Others argue that learned categories warp perceptual organization (linguistic or cultural relativity). A third possibility is that undifferentiated perceptual processing and categorization may occur in parallel and may serve different purposes. The phenomenon known as categorical perception has been taken, at different times, as evidence for all three theoretical positions. Convergent recent evidence from a variety of perceptual domains, including color, suggests that categorical perception does not reflect perceptual inequalities, either innate or warped by experience. Rather, it reflects a graded category structure that is culturally variable, learned through language, and context sensitive. This appears to be the case for natural continua, such as color, and for artificially created continua, such as images of facial identities or facial expressions made by morphing between novel end-point stimuli.

This chapter critically appraises flimsy and impressionistic accounts of linguistic relativity. It gives examples from French and English of authors who celebrate linguistic diversity, but who often prove to have no first-hand knowledge of the languages of which they speak. This serves to explain why affirmations that languages open up worlds to us are often not taken seriously.

The chapter shows the fundamental importance of ideas from computer science to the concerns of linguistic anthropology (and to the concerns of culture-rich and context-sensitive approaches to communication more generally). It reviews some of the key concepts and claims of computer science (language, recognition, automaton, Universal Turing Machine, and so forth). It argues that the sieve, as both a physical device and an analytic concept, is of fundamental importance not just to anthropology, but also to linguistics, biology, philosophy, and critical theory. And it argues that computers, as both engineered and imagined, are essentially text-generated and text-generating sieves. In relating computer science to linguistic anthropology, this chapter also attempts to build bridges between long-standing rivals: face to face interaction and mathematical abstraction, linguistic relativity and universal grammar, mediators and intermediaries.

This chapter includes a view from bilingualism put forward by psycholinguist Aneta Pavlenko; a view from life writing, presented by Eva Hoffman, the author of the groundbreaking cross-linguistic autobiography Lost in Translation: A life in a new language; and a view from translation, given by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Pavlenko’s special focus is on thinking and speaking in two (or more) different languages, as evidenced by bilingual speakers’ view and perceptions on how they think and feel. The chapter discusses Eva Hoffman’s classic memoir, which shows compellingly how language-bound a person’s life normally is, while highlighting the possibility of translingual thought. The last section presents J. M. Coetzee’s reflections on the possibility of thought outside particular languages. All these views are deeply consonant with NSM research and with the central theme of Imprisoned in English.

This chapter is a story about cultural categories of birds and science in China that addresses issues of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis—which suggests that the cultural content of one's language can influence one's habitual thought and practice. It emphasizes that to learn Chinese categories one had to “unlearn” similar, yet different, concepts of Western culture—resulting in a culture shock that has less to do with an encounter with difference and more a forced reevaluation of familiar categories. These cultural categories can be summed up neatly in the concept of “linguistic relativity”—the idea that language influences the way people see the world and even think.

Language is known to play an important role in communicating our thoughts, memories, and emotions. This chapter proposes that the role of language extends much more deeply to further shape and constitutively create these mental phenomena. Research on emotion has shown that language can powerfully influence experiences and perceptions that are affective or emotional. Research on memory, too, has also shown that language can be used to shape autobiographical experiences. The authors organize this work by the many forms and aspects that language may take such as rich narratives, specific emotion words, words that focus on the situation versus words that focus on the body, and even words that convey psychological distance from grammatical tense and pronoun usage. They describe a constructionist theoretical model to understand how language shapes emotion and memory in terms of psychological and neural mechanisms. Their model integrates with recent predictive coding models of neural processing. Finally, the chapter relates this work to clinical and translational models of therapeutic change.

Christofaki’s chapter provides an analysis of terms used for first-person reference in Japanese, addressing the question of how de se thought is expressed in a language with a multitude of expressions for self-reference, and in particular what aspects of the self such expressions map to. The analysis shows that in addition to the direct reference account, predicated of first-person pronouns in languages such as English, these terms also convey rich conceptual and expressive content and as such defy the standard Kaplanian (1989) classification. The chapter next moves to a critical assessment of the plausibility of a linguistic relativity account of the self which has been based on these data, and supports a universalist view instead, on which, on the one hand, different aspects (or facets) of the self are distinguished, but on the other they sum up to a cross-culturally comparable self.

The introduction presents the cutting-edge linguistic and philosophical problems with self-reference. It justifies the need for an unprecedented interdisciplinary perspective that allows the method of theoretical and contrastive linguistics on the one hand, and philosophy of mind and language on the other, to enrich their respective fields of enquiry. It concludes with a summary of the contributing chapters.