For no good reason today I look at an ambitious work with the name Josef Stalin on the title page, “Marxism and the problems of linguistics” (1950). There was a theory among Soviet linguists at the time that all languages can be traced to a single primordial language, and that their job was to suss out what THAT proto-language must have sounded like. This was called the Japhetic theory or “linguistic paleontology.” The advocates of this theory thought they were well within Marxist traditions — developing a dialectical view of the history of language. They also adapted their theories to the terminology of classical Marxist theory. Marx had written of the ownership and control of the means of society as the "substructure" of history and of culture as a "superstructure," suggesting something epiphenomenal. The Japhetic theorists, accommodating their views to this, discussed language too as part of the "superstructure," that is, because the multiplicity of...
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"According to [Angelika] Kratzer, the verb 'can' in a sentence such as 'A can do B' always comes with an additional, often implicit qualification of the form 'in view of X.' This qualification, if not specified explicitly, is determined by the context in which the sentence is uttered. For example, when we talk about what is humanly possible, we might say, 'We can walk, run, and jump, but not fly,' thereby referring to what we can do by way of the constraints of human physiology. When we talk about how we get from London to Paris, we might say, 'We can fly, take the Eurostar travel train, or travel by overnight bus,' thereby referring to what we can do in klight of the available means of transport. W might add, however, 'We cannot fly or take the Eurostar, because those options are too expensive.' this time referring to what we can do in view of our financial constraints." pp. 103-04 The point in the context of free will, L...
I will continue here the trend of thought of my recent posts about Fiona Cowie's 1999 book, What's Within. It criticizes both Fodor and Chomsky in some detail and I've already paraphrased/summarized her take on Fodor. But in a sense the continuation is a pause. Instead of going further, into the part of the book that discusses Chomsky's linguistics views, I'll look a bit further at the differences between Fodor and Cowie as they have played themselves out SINCE the publication of this book. Fodor himself replied at length to Cowie, in an essay called Doing Without What's Within. It is a lengthy essay and difficult to summarize. Here is a link to the whole thing, for this who want to pursue this jousting. Fodor Strikes Back . Quite early on in this essay, Fodor suggests that the relationship between empiricism and rationalism, or innatism, as classically understood, was symmetrical -- and that Cowie wrongly re-imagined it as asymmetrical so that she ...
It was J.R.R. Tolkien who first wrote, in a reminiscence of his childhood and of an early effort at fantasy writing, that one cannot refer in English to a "green great dragon." Size must come before color. It must be a great green dragon. He also expressed his continuing puzzlement, as boy and man, about this philological fact. Recently, someone among my FB friends posted a photo of a book, author unspecified and unknown to me, which addresses the point more comprehensively. According to this unsourced book, the proper list is: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose Noun. So one could encounter a terrifying great ancient smooth-lined green demon-sired flesh-and-blood gold-guarding dragon. Then presumably edit down the adjectives to just two, keeping the order. Is this a Chomskyan thing or a Skinnerian thing? If different languages have different preferred adjective orders then we might describe this as a Skinnerian discovery. The 'proper...
The arguments about racial differences in intelligence, and in social behaviors, that I've engaged through Wade's book in these last three weeks remind me of the argument about language as a human trait, that I've discussed at other times in this blog and on others. I'll just give over this entry to thinking about the reason I am so reminded. B.F. Skinner famously described language as a form of "verbal behavior," fashioned by a lifetime of positive and negative reinforcements, in a way not in principle different from the way a rat manages the navigation of mazes when properly reinforced by grain. Noam Chomsky, even more famously, critiqued Skinner in a way that involved the question of innateness. Our brains, Chomsky maintained, are hard-wired for language. The wiring involves a "finite set of rules operating on a finite vocabulary to generate an infinite number of acceptable grammatical sentences and no un-acceptable ones." Now, views of so...
Linguists sometimes use the term "indexical" for a type of word or sign. If I understand the point, a word is "indexical" if it presupposes some aspect of the situation in which it is employed. "Here" is indexical. So, for that matter, is "there." Each presupposes that the speaker is located at a particular place, and that the listener has some idea what that place is. You ask a friend over the phone, "Do you know where my folder is?" Your friend replies, "Yes, you left it over here." In that case, the speech situation includes the fact that both he and I know that I was at his place the previous night, and I presume (he knows that I will presume) that he is speaking to me now from that home. So, because I understand the indexical use of the term, I know where my folder is. Likewise "now" is indexical. If I record the phrase "I am having trouble breathing now" and someone plays back that recording th...
Back in 1912 a Polish book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, purchased an odd manuscript from Jesuits in Rome. The Jesuits of the Villa Mondragone were in need of cash and so were selling off some of their holdings, including this old 15th century book. Voynich kept it until his death in 1930. It is now in the possession of the Yale Library. Based on the illustrations, (see above), Voynich inferred that this was supposed to be a medical or pharmacological text from that period. but he didn't recognize the language. Neither has anyone else since. The "Voynich manuscript" has become a standing challenge to cryptoanalysis. indeed, it is so difficult to decipher that one hypothesis is that there was no purchase from the Jesuits at all, that the whole thing was Voynich's hoax, and that the text-like symbols are nonsense. But carbon dating supported his account and the 15th-century origin. There is another theory, that it is an older hoax, perhaps some Renaissance-era pra...