ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at that era, starting with the ideas of Franz Boas, who saw the study of different languages as a means to understanding how they served the specific cognitive-cultural needs of its speakers, and then those of Boas' student at Columbia University, Edward Sapir. The premise of linguistic relativity that guided early research in linguistic anthropology came under criticism a little later, in 1953, by Eric Lenneberg, who held that the different meanings encoded by languages may not be coincident, but they are equivalent. Overall, however, the early research on relativity effects was suggestive, rather than definitive. However, with the rise of Chomskyan linguistics as a mainstream model of language by the mid-1960s, "linguistic relativity was all but given up for dead", as Wolff and Holmes aptly put it. Carroll’s linguistic experiment showed, in sum, that “the morphological traits of the language” and meaning-making are intertwined, as Boas observed.
