• DOI:10.1111/J.1467-9922.2008.00462.X
• Corpus ID: 8908681

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought

@article{Casasanto2008WhosAO,
  title={Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought},
  author={Daniel Casasanto},
  journal={Language Learning},
  year={2008},
  volume={58},
  pages={63-79}
}

• D. Casasanto
• Published 1 December 2008
• Linguistics
• Language Learning

The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed. Yet, experimental evidence has reopened debate about the extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time. In this article, I will first analyze an influential argument against the Whorfian hypothesis and show that its anti-Whorfian conclusion is in part an artifact of conflating two distinct questions: Do we think in language? and Does language shape thought? Next, I will discuss crosslinguistic differences in spatial metaphors for time and describe experiments that demonstrate corresponding differences in nonlinguistic mental representations. Finally, I will sketch a simple learning mechanism by which some linguistic relativity effects appear to arise. Although people may not think in language, speakers of different languages develop distinctive conceptual repertoires as a consequence of ordinary and presumably universal neural and cognitive processes.