Date: Wed, 22 Oct 1997 09:38:51 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199710221438.JAA08224@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Robin Turner Sender: Lojban list From: Robin Turner Subject: Re: Linguistics journals X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: <199710220452.HAA13687@firat.bcc.bilkent.edu.tr> X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2764 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Oct 22 09:39:25 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU >> >>Why not? Isn't anyone interested in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? > >Simply speaking, within the academic linguistics community - no. >Anthropologists still consider it an interesting and open question, but >until Chomsky has been displaced, S/W will be on the outs in linguistic >academia. > Hmmm. I was under the impression that Chomsky, if he has not been exactly displaced, is definitely being nudged to one side. The cutting edge of linguistics is semantics rather than syntax these days, and the upsurge of interest in categorisation theory and metaphor has also provoked a resurgence of interest in Whorf (though I see fewer references to Sapir). George Lakoff, for example, has a pretty good re-appraisal of Whorf (in "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things") and the SWH seems to be cropping up all over the place. For an example of how far linguistics has moved since the Generative Grammar days, have a look at the website "The Cognitive Science of Metaphor" - unfortunately I don't have the URL to hand, but you can link to it from my page . Whether this renewed interest in SWH will lead to more linguists becoming interested in Lojban is anybody's guess. IMHO Lojban cannot really test the SWH (I vaguely recall earlier strings on this subject), not least because Sapir and Whorf's work does not really produce a testable hypothesis anyway. Whorf himself rejected the idea of a "correlation" between language and culture, and as for the idea of language restricting thought, as Ellis (in "Language, Thought and Logic") points out, this relies on the rather dubious assumption that they are two distinct entities. On the other hand, Lojban does provide some fairly enticing area for linguistic research (which I may pursue when I get my MA out of the way). Certainly the creation of a speech community from scratch would offer some intriguing possibilities for sociolinguists, and a discourse analysis of Lojban would be another possibility. At the moment this is hampered by the small amount of written Lojban (other than translations) in circulation, and the lack of spoken exchanges, but as a long-term project it would be very interesting to see to what exten Lojbanists follow the discourse patterns of their native discourse communities or create new discourse patterns specific to Lojban. Yet another research area would be language aquisition - is Lojban easier to learn as a second language, and (when we eventually have children learning Lojban) is it possible to aquire it as a first language, or does it have features which make conscious learning necessary? Robin Turner Bilkent Universitesi, IDMYO, Ankara, Turkey.