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Afloat in Semantic Space: Old English sund and the Nature of Beowulf's Exploit with Breca
R. D. Fulk, Indiana University
According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity,
Human beings . .
. are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become
the medium of expression for their society. . . . The "real
world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits
of the group.
Since linguists, historically,
have tended not to lend much credence to the hypothesis, it is somewhat
ironic that, as a structuralist artifact, it remains, in a form even more
extreme than this, a fundamental premise of much poststructuralist literary
thought. Stephen Pinker, the most familiar popularizer of Chomskyan Universal
Grammar, turns a particularly withering eye on the hypothesis, along with
its possibly racist implications. And yet, although he may be at first unwilling
to grant language any power at all to shape thought, and ultimately, when
pressed, to allow it only the most superficial sort of influence, despite
Pinker's empirically based objections it seems necessary to concede some
degree of relativity to language. The sort of euphemism that conceals ugly
political facts and inhuman acts, as observed long ago by George Orwell,
would have no point if language
had no power to mold perception. In a not entirely unrelated way (to employ
one of Orwell's phraseological bugbears), elegant rhetoric often masks cloudy
reasoning.
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