Nor a language organ. Nor, probably, a universal grammar anchoring all human languages. Chomsky’s conjectures were brilliant but wrong. Children learn language, as they do many other things, by trial and error. “Children have far more sophisticated learning capacities than Chomsky foresaw”. At the age of nine months, most children are already hard at work decoding what the adults around them are trying to say (4,200 words).Excellent read. Highly recommended... unless of course you prefer the full thesis in Evans' latest book.
08 December 2014
There Is No Language Instinct
Vyvyan Evans -- Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, UK and author of The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct (2014) -- summarised his main thesis for Aeon magazine in an article entitled Real talk (with the lead-in: For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong.) This, in turn, was further summarised by The Browser under the heading There Is No Language Instinct as follows:
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OSASCOMP = Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Colour, Origin, Material, Purpose QOSASCOMP = Quantity, Opinion, Size, Age, Shape, Colour, Origin, ... -
Tommy Butler of Atrinex has posted a corporate bullshit generator . He uses a Dilbert strip as an attention grabber: Tommy writes... -
While beyond my blog's usual scope, this item may prove useful to translators and interpreters working from or into English in any field...
