Linguistic determinism and the part of speech.

IN RECENT years the anthropologists Whorf (12), Lee (9), and Hoijer (6) have put forward the view that language is a determinant of perception and thought. The nature of the determining influence exerted by the vocabulary of a language is quite clear (1), but it is less easy to see how the grammatical features of a language can affect cognition. Yet it is just the grammatical differences between languages that are most striking and it is their determining force that the anthropologist has stressed. This paper undertakes to show how one kind of grammatical practice, the allocation of words to one or another part of speech, does affect cognition. The words of a language can be collected into classes of formal equivalents which are called the parts of speech. Fries (5) has shown that English nouns, for example, are words acceptable in sentence frames of the type "(The) is (are) good." Native speakers of English will find it possible to insert "concert" or "cow" or "truth" in that frame but will find "very" or "of" grammatically impossible. Fries has used other sentence frames to separate out verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. In French, nouns can be further subdivided into formal gender classes. In Navaho there are more than 20 formal classes for words naming different kinds of objects. All of these word classes are defined by linguistic science in terms of the combinational possibilities of forms in a language without reference to the meanings of forms. So long as these classes are defined in purely formal terms they do not suggest important cognitive differences. That suggestion comes in when we add the semantic correlates of the classes. The native speaker of English is likely to think of the parts of speech in semantic terms. Nouns name substances; verbs name processes; and adjectives name qualities. The genders of certain European languages are usually called masculine, feminine, and neuter,