24
votes
Accepted
Are there languages with no first person?
In languages that have no category of person, like Manju or Malay, there are dozens of politeness-specific words meaning "I" and "you", most of them being actually nouns. In such languages the same ...
- 17.7k
15
votes
Are there languages with no first person?
I is one of the Semantic Primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Though NSM researchers have not considered every language in existence, they have studied languages from every large family (and ...
- 6,136
10
votes
Sapir-Whorf vs. Chomsky
Let's start at the end. It is impossible to talk about original theories in this context. There was actually no cohesive formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That is a label assigned later to a ...
- 10.6k
7
votes
Accepted
Selective fluency - is it a thing?
One of my MA instructors, Alex Ho-Cheung Leung, has researched this question with regard to phonology. He says that speakers of 'heritage languages' (e.g. spoken within the family but in the wider ...
- 242
7
votes
When you think one word, but write another, similar sounding word?
A term I know from psycholinguistics is "phonologically based lexical selection error".
That means, when looking up the words you need in your mental lexicon, you already have the almost ...
- 6,478
7
votes
Word meaning as function of the composition of its phonemes
This is probably not the kind of answer you are looking for, but I guess the following two points would have to be considered as strong indications that meaning is not computed from phonology.
...
- 447
6
votes
How would a trained linguist describe this hypothesis of Symbolic Leverage
"Be brief" is the 3rd Gricean manner maxim of conversation. See Gricean maxims.
- 12.4k
6
votes
Are there languages with no first person?
I've found the question interesting and re-read a couple of books today searching for the answer.
The books are full of similar examples - languages with only 2 tenses, languages "with no grammar", ...
- 340
6
votes
How can we use the same word in multiple different ways and distinguish the senses so easily?
The simplest answer is that context is stronger and contains more clues than you think.
Have you seen IBM's Watson play Jeopardy? Check out, for example, this video around 45 seconds in. The prompt ...
- 2,392
6
votes
Why is there pressure to change seemingly neutral words that some consider 'offensive' to their more 'neutral' synonyms?
The reason is not about etymology, it is about individual reactions to words. Plainly put, a word is offensive if, when used, a person finds it offensive. If a particular demographic selection of a ...
- 82.2k
6
votes
Does grammar condition our conclusions and opinions?
Unsatisfying answer: it depends what you mean by "affect". Different versions of this theory have been known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or just the Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic ...
- 64.1k
5
votes
Accepted
Experiment of creating an artificial language by cycles of memorizing errors
This sounds like one of the series of papers by Kirby and/or Smith; e.g., Smith, Kirby, Brighton 2003. They just call it 'iterated learning'.
- 2,502
5
votes
How and when do French children learn to select between masculine and feminine forms of words when referring to themselves?
Learning the correct gender (and number) for referring to oneself is a very minute and relatively easy part of learning genders or noun classes (and number) generally.
As such, it follows the same ...
- 7,531
5
votes
Accepted
What's the difference between 'concept' and 'meaning'?
It depends on how you define "concept" and "meaning". Which is to say, neither term is uncontroversially and unambiguously defined, even limiting the discussion to technical linguistic usage. (Or, "...
- 82.2k
5
votes
Accepted
What factors determine the numeral coming to numbers such as -1, 0, 0.5, 100% in a language which has and only has contrast in singular and plural?
As pointed out by Michaelyus in a comment, this is covered for two languages (English and French) in the 2003 paper On the Semantic Range of the Plural by Wayne P. Lawrence.
Briefly, English and ...
- 2,625
5
votes
Word meaning as function of the composition of its phonemes
Interestingly, it is so self-evident that the arbitrariness claim is true that nobody has experimentally verified the claim. But it would not be hard to do, if you have access to a captive subject ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Linguistic theory of "signs"
(First, an apology: I don't speak Spanish, and ran your question through Google Translate to understand it. So I may be misinterpreting things.)
If I understand right, what you're asking is: "is ...
- 64.1k
4
votes
Does capitalizing nouns improve readability?
I haven't read any empirical studies myself, but Wikipedia refers to three resources that seem to support this claim, so you might want to consult those studies if you are interested in the details.
...
- 6,478
4
votes
Are there languages with no first person?
Vietnamese comes pretty close. Pronouns in conversation are almost all words for family members. The pronoun used depends on relative age. Speaking to a slightly older woman, for example, I would call ...
- 242
4
votes
Accepted
What do the terms "External" and "Internal" language refer to?
You are probably referring to the I-language vs. E-language distinction, terminology promulgated by Chomsky in 1986 Knowledge of language. I-language refers to the internal psychological state of an ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
How did Proto-Indo-Europeans view the world?
[This is only a bit of an answer, so I just mentioned it in a comment] but Draconis suggested I post it as an answer]
From David W Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, beginning of Chapter 8:
...
- 7,424
4
votes
Why is research on grammatical gender important?
There are a few million answers (32, if I'm not mistaken), here is one. Bantu languages have a complex system of grammatical gender where nouns have some gender, and things that agree with nouns agree ...
- 82.2k
4
votes
Is there a Grammar blindness?
There are language disorders of different kind (inherited or acquired, e.g., by a stroke or a brain injury) and there are several types of Aphasia. These language disorders come most close to the ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
What language has the longest word for 'no' and 'yes'?
I just wanted to point out that "no" in Swahili is hapana, not hakuna. Both are structurally identical, differing only in the class of the subject prefix. Class 16, with pa- generally refers ...
- 125
3
votes
Sapir-Whorf vs. Chomsky
I think you've got it the other way round.
"Chomskyan" theory of UG is much more of a claim about "the brain", which (in humans) has specific machinery for language. The idea is that the language is ...
- 1,066
3
votes
Accepted
How can we use the same word in multiple different ways and distinguish the senses so easily?
The number of words humans produce are 'just enough' to allow you (and hopefully another party) to disambiguate the content. We don't stop speaking, or writing until we believe we've disambiguated the ...
- 664
3
votes
A distance on words
What you remember is quite vague, but I think this is related to word vectors. Word vectors are internal representations of words learned by a neural network, and they live in a high dimensional ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
What is the difference between neurolinguistics and similar fields of study?
Alex has explained well each concept, but to be easier to understand, when we talk about neurolinguistics in contrast to pyscholinguistics, we are talking about studying language processing in the ...
3
votes
Are there different "kinds" of meaningless sentences?
Yes, there are indeed different kind of semantically meaningless or anomalous sentences, and those different types can be distinguished in psycholinguistical experiments, e.g., by using the EEG ...
- 29.8k
3
votes
Does grammar condition our conclusions and opinions?
Nothing at all absolutely and automatically forces a person to be biased, but interpreting your "make" to mean "influence", grammar can easily influence an individual, especially ...
- 82.2k
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