Timeline for Are universal grammar and Sapir-Whorf really competing theories?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 19, 2012 at 20:43 | vote | accept | Nick Anderegg | ||
| Aug 11, 2012 at 4:37 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackLinguist/status/234146535946977280 | ||
| Aug 6, 2012 at 16:09 | answer | added | user483 | timeline score: 8 | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 14:19 | comment | added | Nick Anderegg | Then there is the whole deal with truth-conditions, which fall under the UG umbrella, while Whorf rejects those because Whorf has more to do with cognitive linguistics and cognition, rather than formulaic retrieval of thoughts. | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 14:17 | comment | added | Nick Anderegg | That's the point of the question; it seems like they'd be two parts of the same theory, but I've often seen them posed as opposites. Once again, I'll refer to Pirahã: Thr UG perspective is that those people do have recursion and other UG concepts, they just don't use them, while the Whorf view is that they haven't learned these concepts and so they are not present in their brains. | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 13:41 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | And yes, that's what I meant by 'theory' too. I wouldn't consider UG or the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' to be theories (in the scientific sense). | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 13:38 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | I'm curious to know what are the things you've read that pit the two against each other? The 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis' is not about 'learning grammar'; it's the claim that the grammatical categories in a language determine (or at least strongly influence) how the speaker perceives and categorises the world. The strong form of UG (ie Chomsky's) says there is a language module common to all human brains that has no function apart from language and underpins all human language. The contrast you describe sounds more like UG versus behaviourism. | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 12:10 | answer | added | Peter C. Rollins | timeline score: 1 | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 11:41 | comment | added | Nick Anderegg | Also, I'm using theory not as in "it might be true," but rather the scientific term of "the theory of gravity." Since I can't fly, we know gravity is there, we just aren't sure why. | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 11:40 | comment | added | Nick Anderegg | A lot of material that I have read seems to pit the two against each other. As in, in one, languages have grammar in common because thats how the brain works, whereas in the other, the grammar we we is purely learned. This is especially the case with anything talking about Piraha. | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 5:21 | comment | added | Gaston Ümlaut | I agree that these two ideas (I wouldn't call them theories) don't necessarily conflict. Why do you think they may be in competition? | |
| Aug 6, 2012 at 1:36 | history | asked | Nick Anderegg | CC BY-SA 3.0 |