K. Malmkjaer

"Linguistics". This encyclopedia does not have an entry for the term, and it is perhaps just as well. Doing linguistics is to use plurals of smoke and singularities of mirrors to lure unordered lists of all lexical formatives (1965 Chomsky, p. 84) into a pit from which bones can be extracted long after the life, and even "the facts" are gone. Brilliant theories have traduced the data and created minefields in the distortion.

For example, in discussing the Lexis in a transformational framework, the entry notes that "the status of the lexicon within transformational-generative linguistics has shifted and grown over the years (e.g. Bresnan, 1978) and seems likely to continue to occupy its more central position within this and other branches of language study (compare Lexical-Functional Grammar)." [304] Even the Creator, Chomsky, has moved on.

The entry on "Mentalist Linguistics" is occupied with the kind of theory advanced by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. It provides historical context for their work "concerned to construct records of the American Indian languages before they disappeared as the Indians became more strongly influenced by white American society". [306] Franz Boaz noted that it is the task of the linguist to discover the grammatical structure of such languages. Hockett described the tense system of Hopi in three parts: timeless truths, known or presumed happenings, events still uncertain. Of Menomini, he found five divisions: certainty (he comes), rumour (he is said to be coming), interrogative (did he come?), positive (he is coming after all), and negative (but he was going to come).

The mentalist claim is "that a person's native language sets up a series of categories which act as a pair of grid spectacles through which s/he views the world; it categorizes experience for the speakers of the language". [306] That is "in a nutshell" what is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or "doctrine of cultural relativism/relativity", aka "ontological relativity".

Sapir was a student of Boas in 1900 when he went to Columbia University. His work stressed the links between culture and language, while insisting that "language is a universal human property", and "a perfect means of expression among every known people, and there are no primitive languages." When Sapir took a position at Yale, Whorf enrolled as one of his students in his first course on native linguistics. Whorf had trained as a chemical engineer at MIT. As an inspector for a fire insurance company, Whorf read reports surrounding the start of fires, and noticed that the physical situations qua physic and meaning became a factor in fires. Behavior around storage of 'gasoline drums' was different if they were described as 'empty' drums--tending to be more careless, in spite of the fact that empty drums are more dangerous because of the volatile vapor. The linguistic meaning dictated the behavior.

In 1936 they developed an article on "An American Indian model of the universe". Whorf exemplified what Sapir called the "relativity of the form of thought" in the metaphysics of Time and Space. He contrasts the three-fold Past, Present, and Future division with the Hopi duality of Manifest and Manifesting/Unmanifested. He commented famously: "No individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality, but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation....All observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated."

The entry explains: "Whorf appears to be saying that unless the languages of two cultures can be translated into each other, we must assume that the world views of the two cultures differ dramatically." [308]

"Sapir omits the possibility of translation altogether...". The worlds in which societies live are distinct, not merely with different labels.

METAPHORS. The entry cites Umberto Eco (1984, p. 87) for the insistence that "metaphor 'defies every encyclopedic entry'. " [308] Metaphor is not merely one among different tropes. Sadock (1979) suggests that metaphor falls outside linguistics proper.

Black (1979) points out that the test of a metaphor would apply equally to other tropes as oxymoron or hyperbole, to best certify the presence of some figurative statement. He grants authentic metaphors need not manifest the invoked controversion. Black is of the opinion that "there is no infallible test for discriminating the metaphorical from the literal; he claims, rather unhelpfully, it may be thought (ibid., pp 35-6), that we recognize a metaphor because, on the one hand, we know what it is to be a metaphor, and on the other hand, we judge that a metaphorical reading is preferable to a literal reading." [309]… (altro)