ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces background on the linguistic relativity theory, and reviews the major experimental studies on this issue based on various grammatical categories. Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is the claim, associated especially with the names of Humboldt, Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, that the particular language one speaks affects the way in which one thinks, especially one's classification of the experienced world. Following the intellectual tradition established by Humboldt, anthropologists Boas, Sapir, and later Whorf attempted to present evidence against the patronizing attitude held by Western scholars toward the non-European languages. Since the 1950s, empirical studies of linguistic relativity by linguists, especially by psycholinguists, have been arguing for or against one of the three interpretations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Lucy categorized those studies into two groups: early studies on lexical items and later studies on grammatical categorizations. All languages need to refer to spatial orientation using a limited number of expressions.
