Conceptual Transfer in English Reading: The Economist and Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic relativity, also known as the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis', studies the relationship between language, culture, and thought, believing that different language environments can affect people's formation of different thinking patterns. In the process of researching linguistic relativity, in addition to oral language, text is also an important reference material that reflects 'language habits' or 'pattern rules'. The Economist, published in 1843, has become one of the reading materials for many English learners, covering economics, culture, technology, and global hot topics from many countries. Although English beginners can read English texts in their second foreign language, the meaning they obtain is still different from that of native language readers. This difference is due to the phenomenon of mother tongue transfer that occurs when receiving, browsing, analyzing and decoding text. For transfer phenomenon, linguists Humboldt and Whorf believe that this transfer may occur not only at the language level, but also at the conceptual level, so conceptual transfer can also be regarded as a manifestation of linguistic relativity. Since linguistic relativity was proposed, it has been applied to language research in multiple fields. This article takes linguistic relativity as a guiding theory, and the foreign publication The Economist as the research object, from the perspective of conceptual transfer to analyze the impact of thinking mode transformation on English text reading to obtain more flexible thinking patterns.