ON MUTUAL INFLUENCES BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN THE WORKS OF EDWARD SAPIR

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to distinguish those aspects of the works of the American anthropological linguist Edward Sapir pointing at the qualities of the relations between a language and the culture in which it is used. Sapir primarily structurally and synchronously studied the languages of certain Native American tribes, so he viewed these languages as dynamic systems reflecting their own intrinsic logic, psychology and cultural surroundings. Mainly dedicated to examining the plan of formal expression, Sapir regards a language and its corresponding culture as symbolic configurations conditioned by the context. Unconscious schematization, collective unconsciousness and projection make the basic terms of the early psychoanalytical theory conspicuously visible in Sapir’s approach to investigating linguistic phenomena. Sapir managed to confirm that many communities use the language so as to preserve their common memories, established customs and social stratification, but he failed to determine fundamental correlations between some logical concepts and their formal linguistic lexical-grammatical application. Phonetic alterations in the given language belong to the focus of Sapir’s research since he considers them the most substantial elements of linguistic transformations that become social phenomena when influencing the changes in the community language. Employing the method of analogy in his comparative research of several languages, Sapir succeeded in reconstructing some possible forms of the original linguistic units and in clarifying the development of those forms in discrete dialects depending on diverse variables. Sapir’s classification of languages by the type of linguistic structure is in tune with his readiness to embrace the existence of significant overlapping among categories and the flexibility of his notions regarding numerous linguistic changes based on refuting the irreversible, one-way-only nature of historic and technological development in general. Hence, Sapir was also explicitly firm claiming that there is no point making any judgmental characterizations of languages and neither did he see any viable reason to speak of primitive languages nor primitive cultures in the absolute sense.