Surviving Your Thesis is an invaluable resource for those undertaking a higher degree research qualification, as it describes clearly the challenges and complexities of successfully engaging in both the research process and thesis writing.
Except for the correction of a few typographical errors, this version of my thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy on 31 March, 1988 is materially identical to the copies deposited with the Faculty of Arts and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. However, in order to make this web version more readable on a screen, some of the fonts have been changed, as well as other small changes made to the appearance of some tables and figures. These changes have resulted in changes to the pagination of the original thesis.
Unpublished Ph.D. thesis by H.G. Widdowson, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, May 1973
On the occasion of H. G. Widdowson's 70th birthday, this Ph.D. thesis available to download here makes a classic linguistic text accessible to a wider public for the first time and meets a demand frequently expressed by students and scholars alike. It is hoped that this edition will make more widely known just how far advanced H. G. Widdowson's early thinking was on many of the topics developed in his later work.
Linguistic relativism: Logic, grammar, and arithmetic in cultural comparison
Christian Greiffenhagen and Wes Sharrock
Linguistic relativism is the thesis that the grammatical structures of different languages imply different conceptions of reality. In this paper we critically discuss one form of linguistic relativism, which argues that grammatical differences between the English and Yoruba language exhibit differences in how English and Yoruba speakers ‘see’ reality (namely in terms of ‘spatiotemporal particulars’ and ‘sortal particulars’, respectively).
We challenge the idea that linguistic relativism is an empirical thesis, i.e., a thesis that is substantiated through anthropological examples. We show that linguistic relativism is based on two assumptions: firstly, that the purpose of language is to describe the world; secondly, that being able to speak presupposes an ontological theory of the ultimate constituents of the world. We argue that the attempt to extract the outline of that theory from the language inevitably distorts the portrayal of language-using practice itself.
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Linguistic relativism: Logic, grammar, and arithmetic in cultural comparison
