Imagery for Speaking

The Whorfian hypothesis has alternately attracted and repelled linguists and psycholinguists for generations. The polar reactions tend to come in waves. We currently seem to be entering a phase of attraction, due in no small part to Dan Slobin’s innovative extension of the Whorfian hypothesis to encompass thinking-for-speaking. The classic Whorfian hypothesis is fundamentally static. It presumes the synchronic view of language that has dominated linguistics ever since Saussure’s famous Course (Saussure, 1966, original compiled posthumously by his students from lectures and published around 1915). As usually understood, the Whorfian hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) is the doctrine that holds that language influences ‘habitual thought’—the very term a synchronic reference: thought abstracted from realtime dynamics to form a system of relationships viewed in toto, visible at a single theoretical instant. Lucy’s (1992a, 1992b) elucidation of the Whorfian hypothesis confirms this crystalline structure, in the form of projected analogies between language and thought that by their nature are grasped synchronically. It is to Dan Slobin in his Berkeley Linguistics Society paper, “Thinking for Speaking” (Slobin, 1987), that we turn to get the first sight of a truly dynamic version of the Whorfian hypothesis—thinking generated, as Slobin says, because of the requirements of a linguistic code: “‘Thinking for speaking’ involves picking those characteristics that (a) fit some conceptualization of the event, and (b) are readily encodable in the language” (p. 435). That languages differ in their thinking-for-speaking affordances is a version of the relativity hypothesis, now realized on the realtime dimension of speech and its unfolding.