[lg policy] Humans hardwired to use the passive voice

[Slavomír Čéplö]

You may want to check today's date... :)

On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 5:01 PM, Suresh Kolichala
<suresh.kolichala at gmail.com> wrote:
> I find the conclusion to be totally surprising, if not, bogus. The passive
> constructions are only found in 44% of all world languages. They may be most
> common among the languages of Eurasia, but there are several regions of the
> world where they are not found at all. They are absent in Caucasus and many
> non-Indo-European families of South Asia (the literary languages of
> Dravidian family attest a recent borrowing of this feature from Indo-Aryan).
> The World Atlas of language structures shows that they are attested only in
> a couple of languages in Australia. In New Guinea they seem not to occur at
> all. See the map here:
>
> http://wals.info/feature/107A
>
> What am I missing here?
>
> Regards,
> Suresh.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 11:35 PM, Baron, Dennis E <debaron at illinois.edu>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> There's a new post on the Web of Language:
>>
>> Humans hardwired to use the passive voice
>>
>> The human brain is hardwired to prefer the passive voice. A definite
>> predilection for passive constructions has been found by a team of
>> neuroscientists led by Elaine Bao Weiss and W. Strang-Ng, postdoctoral
>> researchers at Cornell University’s Neurosyntax Imaging Laboratory.
>>
>> “This was totally unexpected,” Bao Weiss said of the findings.
>> “Generations of writers have been advised to prefer the active to the
>> passive, but that’s not how the brain works.”
>>
>> . . .
>>
>> Read the full post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/1gJlLxA
>>
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>
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