John Joseph Gumperz (1922–2013)

Gratifying, now that I've come to have "opinions" and a kind of "allegiance" in the relativism–universalism and innatism–emergentism debates, to find a book that gathers many great and powerful minds together to moot them and rise in a ferment. This is where you'd start if you were pretty sorted on the basics of linguistics and wanted to make some personal decisions about linguistic relativity based on the best information available at the present time. A few ideas I'd like to remember:

Linguistic relativity as a form of deixis (Gumperz and Levinson)

Not "thought" and "language," but "thinking for speaking (Lucy)

The idea that there is no linguistic relativity because framing distinctions are also present within languages (e.g., using "strictly speaking" vs. "technically") and this shows that the idea of the "mindset" of a language is nonsense (you can say the same about dialectal variation, etc.) (Paul Kay)--I write this down not because I agree but only because it is a widespread argument but only makes sense if you have no sense of gradient difference and think only categorically separate deterministic boxes constitute linguistic relativity--I can choose to speak one way and you can choose another in English, and neither of those are Swahili, just the same way as there is an infinite number of numbers between one and ten and none of them are eleven, end of story.

Prelinguistic thought--what a blacksmith does when he makes a knife, described--the role of words and how they get used (for example between a smith and apprentice or client) to evoke image schemata in ways that constitute special shared clusters of ideas. Pretty cool reading for those of us used to thinking in words, aside from its relativistic implications.

There were others! I should have been more conscientious in writing them down!… (mehr)