语言相对论的新发展与挑战

Recent Advances and Challenges of Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

本文介绍语言相对论的流变并梳理和分析近期的发展。语言相对论经历早期的思辨阶段、沃尔夫发起的实证研究、心理学的实验室研究，自20世纪60年代以来，由于转换生成语法的壮大，发声渐微。20世纪90年代开始，随着认知科学的兴起，语言相对论再次回到公众的视野，并被冠名为新沃尔夫主义。新沃尔夫主义在研究内容和研究方法等方面都有实质性的突破，但在概念和方法上仍存在问题有待攻破。

This paper gives a brief review of the history of linguistic relativity and examines its recent development. Before the 1960s, linguistic relativity enjoyed prestige as it was debated theoretically, first tested empirically by Whorf and brought to the lab by psychologists. Chomsky＇s transformative grammar put an end to all this. The last decade of the 20^th century has witnessed the reemergence of linguist relativity, also known as neo-whorfism. Breakthroughs have been achieved in terms of the research scope, methods etc., but still some conceptual and methodological problems prevail.