The cognitive, context-based view of style we have just considered allows translation studies to link universality with the individual choice in style. If we go back for a minute, and retrace our steps in reverse through cognitive to sociological stylistics, to structuralist stylistics and the structuralist linguistics on which it was based, we can find there the origin of another strand of linguistic thought which developed the notion of the particular, as opposed to the universal, but which has followed a different path from the concern with individual stylistic choice. It will be mentioned here because of its relevance to translation, especially the translation of style, and because it is not mentioned much in most current works on translation. This is the strand of linguistics which sees language and thought as closely intertwined, so that "a style of speech is an hypothesis about how the world is" or even, in its extreme form, so that language is seen to actually determine thought. This concern for the close link between language and thought is also seen in the anthropological structuralism of writers such as Levi-Strauss (1966), or the literary structuralism of Barthes (1977) or Culler (1975), and can be seen in part as a development of the philosophy of 19th century writers such as von Humboldt.
When linguists and translation scholars consider the language-thought link, they usually think of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, based on the work of these two linguists. Sapir and Whorf were concerned to classify the details of particular languages; the hypothesis is characterized succinctly by Crystal as consisting of both linguistic determinism (that language determines thought) and linguistic relativity (each language encodes different distinctions). Examples for such linguistic relativity and the potential problems they cause for translation are given in Malmkjœr. But it must be remembered that both the deterministic and relativistic aspects of the hypothesis only cover part of Sapir's and Whorf's views. In common with von Humboldt they maintained that, while each language involved a unique way of seeing the world, some aspects of language were in fact universal; this interplay of universal and culture-specific has, as we have seen, been of particular concern to later writers as diverse as Jakobson, Catford, Fowler or Tabakowska.
The consequences for translation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to Hyde, are that, because it suggests that a text is intrinsically bound to be untranslatable, it emphasizes the source-target relationship and a view of the target text as inferior to the source text. However, says Hyde, such a view fails to take into account the relationship between source language and source text (and between target language and target text) which were so important for Jakobson, especially in literary texts. It is Hyde's view - and here he is presumably drawing on the Russian Formalist notion of "making strange" - that literature is made up of devices which help circumvent the limitations of whatever particular way of seeing a language embodies, a notion similar to Lecercle's (1990) or Venuti's (1998) remainder. Hyde does not, then, deny that different languages embody different ways of thinking, but he sees this as, on the one hand, not a barrier to translation if pragmatic and contextual factors are taken into account and, on the other, not a problem for literature because literature by its very nature resists such limitation.
Throughout the recent decades of generative linguistics, with its emphasis on the universality of grammar, it has become common to dismiss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as leading to too great a relativity. For translation studies, it is easy to see why such a rejection might be welcome.
And yet, as Wierzbicka (1997:7) suggests, it is not clear why generative linguistics has rejected relativity and determinism so completely. Pinker (1994) rejects not only the strong version of Sapir-Whorf but also the weaker view that language and thought may affect one another in ways that distinguish different languages. She herself strongly supports the view that there is "a very close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by it" and goes on to show that the "old insight that the meanings of words from different languages don't match" is supported by empirical data. These differences reflect and pass on" not only ways of living but "ways of thinking" . Wierzbicka is perfectly clear about whether words merely reflect (relativity) or indeed shape (determinism) ways of thinking: that "and pass on" in the quotation above clearly shows that, in her view, they do both (cf. Steiner 1992:91). Arguing against Pinker, she maintains that some areas of language "may be innate, [while] others may indeed be imposed by culture (1997:6). Common elements include the distinction between who and what, and the lexical realization of concepts such as "big" and "small", as I mentioned in section 1.3. But she sees other concepts as peculiar to an individual language (Bruderschaft to German) or simply different in different languages : "the concept of 'anger'is no more universal than the Italian concept of 'rabbia' or the Russian concept of 'grev'" .
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