Linguistic relativities : language diversity and modern thought / John Leavitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leavitt, John Harold, 1952- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages--Origin.

Language and languages.

Linguistic change.

Anthropological linguistics.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 245 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

There are more than six thousand human languages, each one unique. For the last five hundred years, people have argued about how important language differences are. This book traces that history and shows how language differences have generally been treated either as of no importance or as all-important, depending on broader approaches taken to human life and knowledge. It was only in the twentieth century, in the work of Franz Boas and his students, that an attempt was made to engage seriously with the reality of language specificities. Since the 1950s, this work has been largely presented as yet another claim that language differences are all-important by cognitive scientists and philosophers who believe that such differences are of no importance. This book seeks to correct this misrepresentation and point to the new directions taken by the Boasians, directions now being recovered in the most recent work in psychology and linguistics.

Contents:

A passage to modernity

One reason, one world, many monads

The world at war with reason: Britain and France in the eighteenth century

Multiplicity and the Romantic explosion

Essences and universals through the nineteenth century

Boas and the linguistic multiverse

Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf

The other side of the mirror: a twentieth-century essentialism

The rise of cognition and the repression of languages

The return of the repressed

Conclusion.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-107-21774-1

0-511-99391-9

1-282-96705-3

9786612967054

0-511-99170-3

0-511-99072-3

0-511-99268-8

0-511-98893-1

0-511-97505-8

0-511-98712-9

OCLC:

700706249