Re: Linguistics journals

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>>
>>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
<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309/linguistics.html>.

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.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>