[Corpora-List] FW: Gender differences in language

[Terry]

"The best argument still seems to be that language competence comes along
with a host of physical, mental and (especially) social skills we learn in
our infancy and childhood, though for which we may well have a biologically
based capacity - eg, we have a larynx and we obsessively find almost every
feature of our world (potentially) meaningful, etc, etc"

Language competence looks like it goes well beyond what you say here. In The
Language Instruct, Stephen Pinker notes how children impose a grammar that
was originally lacking in pidgins in order to turn them into creoles. This
is not something that the children get from "socialization"; this is an
operation, or perhaps a whole series of operations, that their minds provide
them with the capacity to do. A second area that is worth investigating is
the issue of whether different parts of the brain are responsible for
different aspects of language development. The fact that other motor skills
(like the co-ordination of the different fingers) are localized to specific
areas of the brain might lead the researcher to conjecture that different
aspects of language (the unfortunately named gender, plus number, tense and
case) might also be localized. All of these are lacking, for example, in
certain cases of developmental dysphasia. There is also some evidence that
certain kinds of language dysfunctions are actually genetically inherited.
Again, the reference is to Pinker.

Terry


_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora