Why Whorf has been misconstrued in stylistics and critical linguistics

Abstract

For many years, a common assumption in linguistics has been that the anthology of Whorf's papers (1956) espouses a distinct 'hypothesis' - the language system determines the manner in which its speakers understand reality. This goes under the names of 'linguistic determinism' or the 'Whorfian hypothesis'. As confirmation of this espousal, many stylisticians and critical linguists cite a famous paragraph in the paper 'Science and Linguistics' (SL). The `hypothesis', however, is actually a misconstrual of Whorf's writings. An exploration of his papers, as Ellis (1993) points out, shows that there is no mention of a 'hypothesis' or any overall suggestion of such a strong deterministic relationship between linguistic systems and thought. I offer an explanation as to why many stylisticians and critical linguists confirm the misleading 'hypothesis' as Whorf's position, and because I am particularly interested in misreading of Whorf by such linguists my main focus is SL rather than any of his other papers. The reasons I provide are connected with the pervasiveness of objectivist background assumptions of the nature of language and thought and with how in stylistics and critical linguistics it has been overlooked that SL is intended for an educated lay-audience. I then examine the famous paragraph without the distraction of the 'hypothesis'. I show that, for Whorf, when we talk we affirm common conceptualizations extant in the culture rather than conceptualization being determined by the language system itself. Finally, I indicate some implications of this reading of Whorf for stylistics and critical linguistics.