John A. Lucy is an American linguist and psychologist who has studied the relationship between language and cognition, and especially the linguistic relativity hypothesis, since 1979. He is Professor William Benton at the Department of Comparative Human Development and the Department of Psychology at University of Chicago. He has worked extensively with the Yucatec Maya language, which specializes in noun classification systems.
Video John A. Lucy
Research
John Lucy is a modern proponent of the linguistic hypothesis of relativity; he argues for a weak version of this hypothesis as a result of a comparative study between English grammar and Maya Yucatec. One of his experiments runs as follows: he shows a series of objects to native speakers of each language, showing them an object in the first place and two different objects afterwards; participants must choose which of the last two they find are the most similar to the first. Lucy notices that native English speakers will usually select objects according to their shape, whereas the Yucatec speaker will consider what material the object is made of; so, if for example they are shown a cardboard box, English speakers usually choose the box-like object as the most similar, while the Yucatec speaker prefers to choose any object made of cardboard, whatever the shape. Lucy attributes this result to the presence of a nominal classifier in Mayan Yucatec: every time a noun is preceded by a number, this nominal classifier is placed between numbers and nouns, and its function is to determine what the noun is like. Therefore, the noun, when not accompanied by a classifier, is seen by the Yucatec loudspeaker as an amorphous entity, as opposed to an English speaker, who understands the object as something already shaped. Thus, different languages ​​will require different ways to conceptualize reality, thus defining different ontologies.
Maps John A. Lucy
Books
- 1992. Language of Diversity and Thought (Cambridge)
- 1992. Grammatical and Cognition Category (Cambridge)
- 1993. Reflexive Language: Reported and Metapragmatic Speech (Cambridge)
Main article
- 1979. Whorf and its critics: linguistic and non-sexual influences on color memory . (With Richard Shweder.) American anthropologist 81 (3): 581-615. Reprinted in R. W. Casson (ed.), Language, Culture, and Cognition, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1981, pp.Ã, 133-63
- 1988. Effects of incidental conversations on memory for focal colors . (With Richard Shweder.) American Anthropologist 90 (4): 923-31.
- 1994. The role of semantic values ​​in lexical comparisons: Motion and root position in Yucatec Maya '. Linguistics 32 (4/5): 623-656. (Special Edition "Space in the Mayan Language" edited by J. Haviland and S. Levinson.)
- 1996. The scope of linguistic relativity: An analysis and review of empirical research. J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 37-69.
- 1997. Linguistic Relativity . Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 291-312.
- 1992, Diversity of Language and Thought: A Reformulation of the Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 1992, Grammatical Categories and Cognitions: A Case Study of a Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- 1993, Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Editor.)
- 2001, grammatical categories and development of classification preferences: Comparative approach. (Along with Suzanne Gaskins.) In S. Levinson and M. Bowerman (eds.), Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge University Press, p. 257-283.
- 2003, Interaction of language types and reference types in the development of nonverbal classification preferences. (With Suzanne Gaskins.) In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds.), Language in Mind: Progress in Language Studies and Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.Ã, 465-492.
- 2004, Language, culture, and mind in a comparative perspective. In M. Achard and S. Kemmer (ed.), Language, Culture, and Mind. Stanford, CA: Center for Language Studies and Information Publications [distributed by University of Chicago Press], pp., 1-21.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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