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
8
votes
Accepted
Do all languages have the same set of grammatical relations?
I assume, based on the your posts elsewhere, that by 'sentence parts', you are referring to grammatical relations (GRs) like subject, object, etc. In the future, it would be clearer for you to call ...
- 3,431
8
votes
Does majority of linguists accept universal grammar?
While this is an oldish question with some existing good answers, I think there's something fundamental missing from all of them: "Universal grammar" is both ambiguous and vague, and people who "don't ...
- 2,625
8
votes
Accepted
Is there a universal (general) definition of gerund, infinitive and participle?
Not really.
"Participle" can be defined pretty reliably as "an inflected form of a verb that acts as an adjective". But the line between a participle and any other adjective ...
- 63.8k
7
votes
How did Chomsky conceive orthography and spelling?
The first relevant work that I know of are comments for Project Literacy Meeting, Chicago, August 6, 1964, which was later published in Readings in applied transformational grammar, ed. by M. Lester (...
- 81.9k
6
votes
How far is Natural semantic metalanguage really natural?
The "Natural" in Natural Semantic Metalanguage is intended to contrast with other semantic metalanguages which use non-linguistic symbols and syntax.
Here's an example, which apparently is describing ...
- 6,126
6
votes
What are the practical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories in the field of linguistics?
I would highlight Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblances, which served as a basis for a very productive field in semantics (specificaly prototype theory). This basically postulates that words and ...
- 2,363
6
votes
Human natural language metalanguage
In 1984, I created an Expert System, named XTRAN (TM), whose domain of expertise is computer languages, data, and text. XTRAN parses language content to XTRAN Internal Representation, known as XIR (...
5
votes
Is Wikipedia's argument for Universal Grammar completely fallacious?
Beginning with your very last parenthesized question, does "this" refer to the argument you quote from Wikipedia or the argument you yourself make that begins with "however"? And why does that ...
- 12.4k
5
votes
What's the deal with universal grammar?
Since your question is phrased so broadly and there are tons of research on Universal Grammar (UG), I have to write a likewise broad answer, which is nevertheless technically correct:
Universal ...
- 8,684
5
votes
How does Greenberg’s approach to language universals differ from Chomsky’s?
Greenberg's approach is completely different from Chomsky's. The two differ in what objects are being investigated: data-patterns analyzed in terms of a set of "language types" (G) versus ...
- 81.9k
4
votes
Accepted
What would be the obstacles to creating a language composed of all the words of all the human languages existing today?
Languages are more than just collections of words, and you're going to run into many problems at many levels.
Let's pick one really obvious problem: What counts as a word? The single Yupik word "...
- 2,625
4
votes
Accepted
Isn't a language where a rule is applied everywhere always overly redundant?
I think the answer has to be no, not from the perspective of observed facts of language, but from problems with the idea of "carrying information". Here's an example from (American) English. There is ...
- 81.9k
3
votes
Accepted
Universal Grammar or Other Area of Study
There is a theory of language which has the concept of Universal Grammar, but that refers simply to "Whatever is necessarily available to all human languages". It does not include such things as "...
- 81.9k
3
votes
Do recursively generated tenses exist?
McCawley argues that recursively generated past tenses do exist in English. See discussion beginning about page 221 in Syntactic Phenomena of English. Past is a predicate of a sentence which may ...
- 12.4k
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
What should we do to disagreements on sentence judgments
"Universal Grammar" means "universal to all humans". If the grammars of two individuals differ, the difference is in the grammars of the languages, and not in the human faculty of ...
- 81.9k
3
votes
Wouldn't the premise of Chomsky's universal grammar theory be trivially true?
Well, the obvious counter-position to Chomsky is something like: Give a species a large enough brain, and it will start to develop language just as an emergent phenomenon of having enough intelligence....
- 29.8k
2
votes
Could anyone explain this grammar question for me?
You use plural adjectives (masculine or feminine) with plural nouns designating people, but feminine singular adjectives with nouns designating things.
- 23.7k
2
votes
What are the arguments against Chomsky's Universal Grammar?
The UG proposed by Chomsky has to be one that is consistent with transformational grammar, because Chomsky proposed TG. Chomsky does not like to be wrong.
But TG is wrong -- there are no ...
- 12.4k
2
votes
How far is Natural semantic metalanguage really natural?
The "natural" part of NSM comes from the fact that all of the items in the vocabulary are claimed to be found in all lexicalised in all languages and thus "universal". This is supposed to establish ...
- 10.6k
2
votes
Isn't a language where a rule is applied everywhere always overly redundant?
What about the word final stress in modern French? It carries no information except for marking word boundaries.
- 29.8k
2
votes
Accepted
What are the structural similarities that exist common to all languages?
For any specific property you suggest, there's probably a counter-example somewhere. However, the big one that's most often considered universal is recursion.
Every known human language (*) has ...
- 63.8k
2
votes
Interesting, easy-to-replicate linguistic studies
If you know how and can get say 5 speakers each, you could compare F1 and F2 of Japanese and Spanish, to see if the vowels are "the same". This does relate to UG in that it raises the question whether ...
- 81.9k
2
votes
Does Piraha syntax lack any recursion or just embedding?
I take the word "appear" literally, that is, it's a question about the evidence. Almost all of the publicly available evidence comes from Everett. You can consult the other works on listed Glottolog (...
- 81.9k
2
votes
Do recursively generated tenses exist?
This is not exactly recursive because the recursion stops after one level, but it comes close to recursion: There is a formation termed Doppeltes Perfekt in German. Similar formations are also known ...
- 29.8k
2
votes
Can framing lang acquisition as nature vs nurture be harmful?
The so-called "nature vs nurture" debate in linguistics is not as dichotomous as it may seem from the first sight.
Everybody agrees that humans have innate abilities that enable them to learn ...
- 1,773
2
votes
Languages w/out dependent clauses
It seems Pirahã may qualify (my stress):
Since we do not find unambiguous relative clauses in the corpus, we
cannot use them to conclude that Pirahã has recursive embedding.
As Pirahã isn't a ...
- 494
2
votes
Human natural language metalanguage
we would “discover” a new syntactic feature of language that had never
occurred to us before.
I think this is the core interesting question, which should be approached from a metatheoretical ...
- 81.9k
1
vote
Principles and Parameters vs. Government and Binding
This is a difficult history and sociology of the field question, fraught with personal opinions and revisionism. GB theory commenced with the (originally samizdat) publication of "The Pisa ...
- 81.9k
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