[lg policy] Humans hardwired to use the passive voice

[Harold Schiffman]

Slavomir:

You mean this is an April Fools day message?

HS


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Slavomír Čéplö <bulbulthegreat at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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-- 
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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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