Ad hoc concepts and linguistic relativity: towards an experiential and situated view of language–cognition interactions

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue on ad hoc concepts and linguistic relativity. We argue that empirical research on linguistic relativity can be re-interpreted through the lens of ad hoc cognition, a framework originating in Barsalou’s (Memory & Cognition, 11, 211–227, 1983) account of goal-derived categories and expanded by Casasanto and Lupyan’s (The conceptual mind: New directions in the study of concepts. MIT Press, 2015) proposal that all conceptual representations are context-sensitive constructions. We begin by placing the argument in historical context, outlining how prototype theory and ad hoc categorisation challenge accounts of fixed, feature-based conceptual structure, motivating instead a view of concepts as dynamically assembled in response to situational demands. We then introduce the studies comprising this special issue, which collectively investigate language–thought interactions across diverse perceptual, conceptual and linguistic domains using a wide array of linguistic typologies and experimental methodologies. Across these contributions, a coherent pattern emerges: linguistic effects on cognition are graded rather than categorical, shaped by task demands, memory load, the availability of verbal resources and the experiential histories of speakers. We argue that this perspective reframes the Whorfian question, shifting from a binary ‘does language affect thought?’ to a systematic investigation of when, how, and to what degree language dynamically modulates conceptual processing.