SOURCE: “The Emergence of Edward Sapir's Mature Thought,” in New Perspectives in Language, Culture, and Personality, William Cowan, Michael K. Foster, Konrad Koerner, eds., John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986, pp. 553-88.

In the following essay, Darnell discusses Sapir's wide range of theoretical interests.

Introduction

Edward Sapir was interested, in a more than passing way, in Germanic philology, American Indian linguistics, ethnology and folklore, poetry, literary criticism, music, mathematics, psychology and psychiatry, and theoretical linguistics. The question remains, however, which, if any, is the “real” Edward Sapir. Scholars in a range of present-day disciplines and subdisciplines acknowledge him as a founding father; most are only minimally aware of his contributions in areas which, for them, are unrelated. I would like to suggest that the whole of Edward Sapir best emerges from a biographical perspective. That is, the concrete events and influences of Sapir's life show the integration of his thought...