Antw: On Edge

Franz.Dotter at UNI-KLU.AC.AT Franz.Dotter at UNI-KLU.AC.AT
Mon Mar 10 15:55:13 UTC 2014


Dear Frans and colleagues,
 
My first reaction is a pragmatic one: If you want to become famous or if you want to stir up emotions, you should always pose a manipulative dualistic question: "are sheep black or white?" then forces most people to forget that there are also brown sheep (at least) and to give an answer which is wrong anyway.  
At the Edge site I quickly found another example: "Relax, says psychologist Aiison Gopnik. Mostly kids are shaped by their genes and peers. Be concerned about poverty or neglect, not about being the perfect parent. Says Brockman: "Kids will be just fine." " This example is much worse than the question to keep or abandon UG. Who wants to make us all stupid with this practice, even in science?
 
I plead for looking at lingustics as ascience with many threads of knowledge, where whole models or single notions have their historical place and where young linguists should understand that they are part of these threads, willingly or unwilligly. Here no modelor notion needs to be "retired" but gets different evaluations of adequacy and socio-cultural contexts. To take over the natural sciences' "falisfied vs. verified" does not improve cultural scienses/humanities.
 
I take a piece of Benjamin Bergen's srgumentation to analyze it: "core commonalities across languages exist because they are part of our genetic endowment. On this view, humans are born with an innate predisposition to develop languages with very specific properties. Infants expect to learn a language that has nouns and verbs, that has sentences with embedded propositions, and so on."
 
Here we find again a mixture of very different "knowledge" (hypotheses): The first and second sentence would not be contradicted by any linguist if the basis for that would be named cognition and physical properties of the body. The third one turns out to be too specific to hold: Only the model behind UG and LAD etc. is the problem, not the general assumption that humans share "some factors" related to behavior and language. 
 
The universals debate often lacks the discussion of cognition, communicatiion and content/Meaning as the basis of language: we still use "subject" or "adjective" and every other category over all langages despite we know that a unique superficial "definition" (i.e. only based on positively given features of a language) cannot be reached. Why should we then wonder that we cannot formulate too much "universals", when we could not even prove that the basis of these universals, the ill-defined "categories" in the single languages are completely the same?
 
Just for the fun of discussion: Let's propose "Urknall" for retirement.
 
Best Regards
 
Franz


 
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