<P> But to restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English (...) is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained . It is the' plainest' English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature . (...) We handle even our plain English with much greater effect if we direct it from the vantage point of a multilingual awareness . </P> <P> Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought, Fishman's' Whorfianism of the third kind' proposes that language is a key to culture . </P> <P> In the late 1980s and early 1990s, advances in cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir--Whorf hypothesis . One of those who adopted a more Whorfian approach was George Lakoff . He argued that language is often used metaphorically and that languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think . For example, English employs conceptual metaphors likening time with money, so that time can be saved and spent and invested, whereas other languages do not talk about time in that way . Other such metaphors are common to many languages because they are based on general human experience, for example, metaphors likening up with good and bad with down . Lakoff also argued that metaphor plays an important part in political debates such as the "right to life" or the "right to choose"; or "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers". </P> <P> In his book Women, Fire and Dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind, Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's views about how linguistic categorization reflects and / or influences mental categories . He concluded that the debate had been confused . He described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity: </P>

Who proposed the idea that language development could be explained with the principles of learning