Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. As a discipline linguistics influences and is influenced by philosophy and logic, speech science and technology, computer science and artificial intelligence, and the study of cognition. It includes the fields of socio-linguistics, historical linguistics, and computational linguistics; and contains the sub-disciplines of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and psycholinguistics (MIT Linguistics Department, web.mit.edu/linguistics/).
Geoffrey Sampson claims that around 1900 a turning point in the modern study of languages and linguistics occurred, shifting study from the nineteenth-century interests in historical linguistics, diachronic linguistics, and philology to the study of synchronic linguistics. Synchronic or descriptivist linguistics seeks to offer a static description of a language with respect to its phonology and morphology and syntax and semantics without prescriptive (value) judgments. While nineteenth-century linguistic research investigated the history of particular languages and attempted to reconstruct lost proto- languages, twentieth-century emphasis is on contemporary manifestation of language and analysis of communicative systems.2
Two members of the descriptivist school of linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, studied the relationship of language and thought. They asked, does language determine thought or does thought exist independent of language. Whorf believed both overt and covert categories exist in language. If the ‘real world is unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group’, then categories such as number, gender, case, and tense are not so much discovered in experience as imposed by the hold that linguistic form exerts upon an individual’s orientation in the world.
2 Sampson argues that nineteenth century philologists borrowed schema or paradigms from mechanistic
physics and biology to construct models of languages that accounted for sounds, language development, and relationships among languages (1980: 13ff). See also O’Grady et al (1996:1-15) and Hirschberg and Hirschberg (1999:613).
This so-called hypothesis never appeared in definitive form in the published works of either scholar but has been inferred from their academic output in two forms. A strong version of the hypothesis is sometimes referred to as ‘linguistic determinism’ and proposes that the forms of language are prior to and determinative of the forms of knowledge and understanding.3 The weak form is referred to as ‘linguistic relativity’ and suggests that no a priori constraints on the meanings that a human language might encode exist, but that these encodings shape unreflective understanding by speakers of a language. The determinism view has been largely discredited but the weaker form of the hypothesis continues to carry influence.
Language categorises reality, orders experience, and helps people make sense of the world. Linguistic codes embody worldviews and ideologies (Adams 2000:28). John Ellis argues for a weak version of Sapir-Whorf that considers language use as a form of thought rather than an influence upon it.4 He contends that the heart of language is categorisation. David Katan agrees that it is generally accepted that humans do organise perceptions in terms of predefined categories (1999:79-83). This means, in one sense, a reduction of the variety of experiences. To categorise an action, an expression or an experience necessarily involves simplification and therefore a reduction of uniqueness and diversity to a finite number of types. Categorisation brings with it the twin dangers of building too many or too few categories (Ellis 1993:60-63).
Linguistic categories, contends Ellis, primarily are the reflection of the collective purposes of the speakers of a language rather than the direct reflections of the structure of the world. Ellis’s view is consonant with Fowler’s thesis that language categorises
3 One criticism of the determinism view objects that translators and interpreters would be prisoners of
their primary languages and incapable of conceptualising and articulating in categories that belong to other languages. Accepting the strong version of the hypothesis, therefore, would mean that we can only think what our language allows (Katan1999:74-89).
4 Roger Fowler also subscribes to a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with an eye on the social
function of language in established categories. ‘Whorf’s claim that language determines the categories of thought can be accepted so long as we qualify the argument somewhat: the semantic categories are not simply properties of the language, but products of the society in which the language is molded’ (Fowler 1986:33).
reality and helps people make sense of the world. Ellis argues that functional differentiation is the basis of the categories and names a host of thinkers who have contributed to this view, such as de Saussure, Charles Peirce, Sapir and Whorf, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Ellis 1993:38-42).5
Thus, a language is a unique, highly complex, ordered contingent system that enables speakers to conceptualise experience and to communicate with other speakers. An understanding of the system of categorising is determined by the purposes of the categorisers; hence, different languages exhibit different categories and ideas. Information is sorted and processed via the act of categorisation. Information and ideas and communication and reference presuppose the existence of a language. Encoding requires a code of signs or a language. But something occurs prior to the coding and the communication. Conceptualisation or categorisation occurs first and is, therefore, the most basic process of language. In this view ‘reference’ does not explain language but pertains to a use of language (Ellis 1993:115-19). Hence, de Saussure comments helpfully about ‘assigning proper place’ (Culler 1986:28-39).
This thesis assumes that language has a double function: it enables speakers to conceptualise ideas and experience, and language is the primary tool human beings use to communicate with each other. Conceptualisation may be logically prior to communication but it need not be assigned paramount status. The two functions are complementary.