[Corpora-List] FW: Gender differences in language

[Mike Maxwell]

Albretch Mueller wrote:
> ...I don't think there are specially constructed, pre-built neuron
> paths for, say, gender, adjectives and past tense in our brains
> (Chinese born naturals from some rural area where Swahili has never
> even been heard can learn it if exposed to the proper environment and
> a Swahili baby can certainly learn Navajo ...).

I don't believe anybody who believes in innate grammar (which depending 
on your view, may or may not include innate morpho-syntactic features) 
has suggested that the innate abilities would be racially specific 
(although there was some recent conjecture connecting tone languages 
with certain gene pools).  So the undoubted fact that a Chinese person 
can learn Swahili, or a Swahili child could learn Navajo/ Dene, doesn't 
so far as I can see have any implications for whether gender, 
adjectives, or tenses are in our genes.

BTW, I suspect grammatical gender is not a good candidate for inclusion 
in universal grammar.  There's just too much variability, at least IMO. 
  Person (1/2/3) and number, OTOH, have been proposed as 
universal--based not on the fact that all languages which have person 
agreement distinguish these, but rather on the basis of the structure of 
agreement (e.g. first person plural inclusive vs. exclusive).  There's 
more I could say, but this is probably not the right forum.
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    What good is a universe without somebody around to look at it?
    --Robert Dicke, Princeton physicist

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