John A. Lucy

Dry as dust! But it still does important work for people who want to engage with linguistic relativity experimentally (as opposed to English-department dilettantes like me). Lucy dismisses previous debates (relativism v. determinism, a Whorfian "hypothesis" v. a relativistic "principle") that are long settled but that people seemed compelled to give lip service to, and schematizes the question in terms of three realms: the cognitive effects of different linguistic structures, the different linguistic ways of carving up the same cignitive domains, and the effects of habitual linguistic behaviours or habits (individual or cultural). Each of these can then be subdivided in about a billion more ways. As he says, it's daunting. Annual Review of Anthropology 26.… (mere)