XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

In this paper, the biography of Benjamin Lee Whorf is considered.

Benjamin Lee Whorf is an American linguist, a specialist in American Indian languages ​​and the author of the so-called “linguistic relativity hypothesis,” also known as the Sepir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which a person’s picture of the world is largely determined by the language system that he speaks. According to Whorf, the grammatical and semantic categories of a language are not only tools for conveying the speaker’s thoughts, they also shape his ideas and control his thinking. Thus, people speaking different languages ​​will have different ideas about the world, and in the case of significant structural discrepancies between their languages ​​when discussing some topics, they may have difficulty understanding. Whorf was born on April 24, 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, received the specialty of a chemical technologist. In 1919, he joined the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, where he eventually received the position of Deputy Director. And although Whorf worked in the company all his life, devoting only free time to scientific studies, he published many works on the problems of linguistics. Many of them are included in the collection Language, Thinking, and Reality.

Whorf died in Weathers (Connecticut) on July 26, 1941. Whorf's interest in the languages ​​of the American Indians was formed in 1931 under the influence of a listening course of Amerindian linguistics, which Edward Sepir taught at Yale University - one of the most significant linguists of his time. Later, Whorf studied the Hopi language (the Uto-Aztec branch of the Tano-Aztec languages), and it was on his material that he formulated the foundations of his theory of linguistic relativity, which is also often called the Sepir-Whorf hypothesis, paying tribute to the enormous influence that Sepir had on his student and friend. In its strong form, the theory of linguistic relativity claims that individuals divide the world into fragments, predetermined by the structure of their native language. For example, if to designate a number of related objects in one language there are several different words, and another language designates these objects in one word, then the native speaker of the first language must isolate in his mind the characteristics that distinguish these objects, while the native speaker of another language does not have to do this. Thus, according to Whorf, the speakers of different languages ​​have different mental images of the same object. In English there is only one word for snow, there are several in Eskimo, so it is required from the Eskimo native speaker to distinguish between what kind of snow it is: falling or lying on the ground. Similarly, Whorf argues that grammatical categories, such as time or number, also force speakers to perceive the world in a certain way. In English, any verb in a personal form must contain a time indicator: for example, I sang 'I sang (past tense)', I sing 'I sing (present tense)', I will sing 'I will sing (future tense)'. Native English speakers are forced to indicate temporary differences in each sentence; speakers of other languages ​​may not need to note these differences, but they will have to indicate, say, the objects mentioned in the conversation are visible or invisible. The theory of linguistic relativity has been controversial since its inception. Most linguists and psychologists have argued that speakers of languages ​​in which one or another distinction is not made are nevertheless able to make them if the need arises, although perhaps not so easily and quickly. Whorf's theory stimulated serious discussions and experiments regarding the relationship between language and thinking, and his pioneering work paved the way for further research in this direction.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE

Whorf B.L. The ratio of norms of behavior and thinking to the language. – In Saint-Petersburg: New in Linguistics, vol. 1, M., 1960

Brutyan G.A. The Sepir – Whorf Hypothesis. Yerevan, 1968