ABSTRACT
In this essay I shall try to describe the impact of linguistics on early writing in the field of culture and personality: to discuss why language was used as a model for theories of culture, what assumptions about culture were made by extension from this model, and what difficulties arose from these assumptions. Although I shall largely restrict my attention to Ruth Benedict and Edward Sapir, many of the comments I make have a far wider applicability, not only to other theorists in the field of culture and personality, but to many current approaches to cultural theory in general.
