The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
19. Does our Language Affect the Way We Think?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Third Edition - Caroline Myrick
Geoffrey K. Pullum [+]
University of Edinburgh
Geoffrey K. Pullum was a professional rock musician for five years before doing a B.A. degree in Language at the University of York and earning the Ph.D. in General Linguistics at the University of London. For many years he worked as a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. After moving to the University of Edinburgh in 2007, he became Head of Linguistics and English Language, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2009. He has published about 280 articles and books on many topics in linguistics, including a major reference grammar of English, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002, co-authored with Rodney Huddleston), which was awarded the LSA’s Leonard Bloomfield Book Award in January 2004. His latest book is Linguistics: Why It Matters (Polity, 2018).
Description
Language and thought are closely related. Language helps us to represent thought explicitly in our minds. It helps us reason, plan, remember, and communicate. However, the idea that our language shapes or determines how we think is pure speculation, and it’s hard to imagine what could possibly support that speculation even in principle.