back to the future

[Bill Palmer]

Utterly ludicrous, yes. But not in principle different to some of the claims made in relation to linguistic relativity. Basically the claim can be rephrased as follows: grammatical encoding of a distinction between future and present forces speakers to attend to that distinction, and influences the way the child constructs conceptual representations of time and their own relationship to time as they acquire the language. As cross-modal correlations for many such conceptual representations are well established, the null hypothesis is that the grammatical categories of the langauge are influencing conceptual categories that surface in a range of other behaviours.

Obviously in this case the details contain errors and omissions - as others have noted English is not a "strong FTR" language, and the 'typology' this guy proposes does not take into account a presumably comparable effect of a distinction between realis and irrealis in tenseless languages. However, they're details, and I can't help feeling that if this hypothesis had been proposed by a linguist and couched in sober scientific neo-Whorfian language we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Bill



Dr Bill Palmer
Deputy Head of School - Research
School of Humanities and Social Science
Convenor, Endangered Languages Documentation,
    Theory and Application Research Group
Linguistics Research Higher Degree/Honours coordinator
HSS
University of Newcastle
Callaghan NSW 2308
Australia
email bill.palmer at newcastle.edu.au
>>> Nigel Vincent <nigel.vincent at MANCHESTER.AC.UK> 27/02/13 3:14 AM >>>
At Frans' prompting I post this piece of nonsense for typological (or indeed other!) comment:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574

Nigel


Professor Nigel Vincent, FBA
Professor Emeritus of General & Romance Linguistics
The University of Manchester

Vice-President for Research & HE Policy, The British Academy

Linguistics & English Language
School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
The University of Manchester
Manchester M13 9PL
UK



http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/lel/staff/nigel-vincent/