Hizkuntz erlatibitatea espazio-markagailuen argitan: azken hogei urteetako ikerketen zenbait aitzinamendu

Abstract

Since its formulation by Whorf at the beginning of the 1940s and the posthumous publication of a selection of the author's writings in 1956, the «linguistic relativity principle» has known a variety of fortunes. This paper begins with a broad outline of linguistic relativity's ideas and their precursors, and follows by setting out the opposed point of view of universalism largely dominant in the history of ideas, included the last fifty-sixty years with the emergence and rise of cognitive sciences. The clarification of the initial relativist hypothesis and its subsequent reformulation as a revised linguistic relativity in the mid- 1990s is then addressed, together with the large amount of work carried out in this renewed framework, in particular in the field of spatial semantics. The paper ends by presenting an alternative view that tries to reconcile linguistic relativity with universalism and to get a better articulation between language and thought.