[Corpora-List] Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics withR'--re Louw's endorsement

[Mike Maxwell]

Wolfgang Teubert wrote:
 > So far, though, no language mechanism has ever been discovered, even
 > though uncountable models have been invented. There also seems to be,
 > particularly when it comes to meaning, a certain scarcity of 'brute
 > facts'.

My favorite brute fact (associated at least with syntax and morphology-- 
I'll make no claims about semantics) is that every child, even those 
with mild retardation, learns a language without being taught.  Contrast 
this with the learning of math or science or history, where even with 
years of intensive teaching, not everyone learns it.  (And contrast it 
also with the analysis of languages by smart linguists; languages are 
not simple.)  Language is clearly different, and the only reasonable 
explanation I've ever heard is that we have a built-in mechanism for 
learning it, a mechanism which is different from whatever we use for 
learning math, science or history.

Do we know what that mechanism is?  No.  But that's true of lots of 
things in science.  It took decades between the discovery of the general 
principles of heredity and the discovery of the mechanism (DNA etc.). 
But no one in the intervening years suggested that there wasn't any 
mechanism.  (Well, maybe Lysenko...)
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "We signify something too narrow when we say:
    Man is a grammatical animal. For although there
    is no animal except man with a knowledge of grammar,
    yet not every man has a knowledge of grammar."
    --Martianus Capella, "The Seven Liberal Arts"

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