Linguistics
This is the homepage for the Linguistics category, a subcategory of Thought.
Some general resources:
Brent Berlin
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
- with Paul Kay
- discovery of eleven “color foci”
- helped to discredit Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
James Cooke Brown
Developed Loglan to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Noam Chomsky
MIT linguist and anarchest/far-left political critic, controversial within the field and without. He extended the ideas of Zellig Harris. He taught Ray Juckendoff.
Chomsky developed a model differentiating between subconscious control, called competence, and actual use, which he called performance.
Chomsky developed the binding theory in a series of lectures in Pisa based on two concepts: a relation in which pronouns attach to their referents, and a more abstract “commanding” relation between words.
Chomsky replaced the rigid X-Bar theory specified by the specifier, adjunct, and complement rules with Bare Phase Structure using the Merge and Move operations. “Heads” project intermediate constituents in X-bars.
He theorized that a precise set of rules could predict all of the grammatically possible sentences in a language.
Chomsky hierarchy
- a four-class model of grammars/formal systems
- Type-0
- unrestricted/recursively enumerable grammars
- languages with phrase structure which can be computed by Turing machines.
- Type-1
- subest of Type-0
- context-sensitive grammars
- Type-2
- subset of Type-1
- context-free grammars
- Type- 3
- subset of Type-2
- regular grammars
- can be modeled with finite state automata as well as by regular expressions
Chomsky attacked behaviorist theories of language as a learned habit in his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Contra Skinner, he thinks that children have an inherent language acquisition device. He argued that reinforcement-based theories of learning ignored a lack of early childhood inputs in his “poverty of the stimulus” argument.
In one book, Chomsky examines the 17th-century Port Royal Grammer. He still insists that book is a landmark work of intellectual history.
Syntactic Structures
- “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”
- meaningless sentences can still be grammatically correct, supports transformational-generative grammar
- transformations turn abstract “deep structure” into “surface structure” expressions of ideas
- concludes that “grammar is autonomous and independent of meaning” and goes on to describe models based on a conception of language as a Markov process
Cartesian Linguistics
Lectures on Government and Binding
- expanded on the ideas in Syntactic Structures
The Sound Pattern of English
Why Only Us
- 2015
- proposed a thinker proposed a figure named “Prometheus” who brought the ability of “merge” to humanity
American Power and the New Mandarins
- claimed that American intellectuals could be held responsible for the events of the Vietnam War
Interventions
- “9/11: Lessons Unlearned”
- analyzed the roots for Middle Eastern contempt of the U.S. going back to the policies of the Eisenhower administration
- “Dilemmas of Dominance”
- argued that the U.S. invasion of Iraq serves as a warning to Iran and North Korea that they can dissuade U.S. military action by having proper defenses
Daniel Everett
Challenged Chomsky’s ideas
Studied the Piraha language
Kenneth Iverson
Argued that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis applied to computer algorithms
Ray Juckendoff
A Tufts University scholar and student of Noam Chomsky
Juckendoff collaborated with composer Fred Lerdahl on a theory of musical cognition
Eric Lenneberg
with Roger Brown, critiqued the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with the fact taht Sapir and Whorf never proved a causal relationship, and examined the distinction between blue and green
Steven Pinker
A Canadian-American Harvard linguist/cognitive scientist/psychologist. Contra Geoffrey Sampson, he believes that there is a natural language instinct.
He ridiculed an alleged proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis involving chemical workers who smoked in a room containing empty gasoline drums but not one containing filled gasoline drums.
The 1969 Murray Hill riots shifted Pinker’s views away from anarchism.
The Language Instinct
- 1994
- popularized Chomskyan nativism
- likened a spider’s web-weaving and beaver’s dam-building to the human capacity for laguage
- popular science
- compares the innate human capacity for music to a cheesecake
- explains the evolutionary origin of speech
The Better Angels of Our Nature
- 2011
- explored the long-term decline in violence across history
- used Lynn Hunt’s term “Humanitarian Revolution” to name one of the six causes that have opposed humanity’s “inner demons”
Words and Rules
- revisited arguments of 1988 paper
paper
- 1988
- with Alan Prince
- critiqued connectionist models of language acquisition
- argued that regular uses of the past tense must be default because the past tense of nearly all less commonly used verbs follow a regular ending
Learnability and Cognition
- To solve a puzzle that C. L. Baker observed about dative acquisition, Pinker conjectured that children “bootstrap” knowledge of argument structure from their knowledge of semantics
Enlightenment Now!
- 2018
- pro-rationalist
- follow up to The Better Angels of Our Nature
- used C. P. Snow’s dichotomy to argue that a “Second Culture” of humanities types are the main opponents of enlightenment
The Stuff of Thought
Geoffrey Pullum
In an essay about an “Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, Pullum attempted to discredit the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Edward Sapir
A linguist who created the famed and controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with his student Benjamin Whorf (see Benjamin Whorf for more about the hypothesis). He taught Morris Swadesh at Yale, and taught in Yale’s anthropology department at the end of his life.
Sapir collaborated with Alfred Kroeber to document the indigenous languages of California.
Sapir’s work on the Athabaskan languages demonstrated that the comparative method could be applied to non-Indo-European languages.
Sapir expressed the idea that languages are not “tyrannically consistent” with the oft-quoted statement “All grammars leak”
Sapir speculated that people secretly wish they could say “Who did you see?” instead of “Whom did you see?” as part of a discussion of linguistic drift.
A book by Sapir illustrates various grammatical concepts by exhaustively analyzing the sentence “The farmer kills the duckling.”
Benjamin Lee Whorf
A linguist who created the famed and controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with his teacher Edward Sapir
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
- aka linguistic relativity
- languages affect the perception of their speakers
- Whorf claimed that the Hopi perceive time differently from English speakers because their language deals with tense differently
- supported with the example of Inuit words for snow
- described using an analogy of a canoe on a beach
- preceded and influenced by the Weltanschauung ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt
- “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”
Whorf suggested a phonetic element to Mayan glyphs and developed the concept of the allophone.
Whorf wrote ana analysis of supra-segmentals in two Modern Nahuatl dialects.
Whorf, in a work published in American Anthropologist, explained the presence of the voiceless alveolar lateral affricate in only one language within the Uto-Aztecan family.
Whorf was the first to develop the distinction between phenotypes and cryptotypes.