how language shapes thought, Pinker has also been influential with a nativist, modular, and nativist understanding of human language development. Both theories have their strengths and weaknesses, but ultimately the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis remains far more compelling, more substantiated by empirical evidence, and also more able to explain some of the complexities of language and culture.
Even though children are not born speaking in full sentences, all children have the capacity for language development, the potential to learn verbal and written means of communication as well as non-verbal communication like gestures (Pinker). Yet linguists still grapple with whether semantics exist independently of language (the Pinker point of view)… Continue Reading...
human language contains a system of base rules of a highly restricted sort, a set of grammatical transformations that map the deep structures formed in accordance with base rules onto surface structures, and a set of phonological rules that assign phonetic interpretations, in a universal phonetic alphabet, to surface structures. (Chomsky 150-151)
Modern technology has dispelled much of nativist thinking in relation to certain aspects of language development. However, new research into genetics has reopened the nature side of the argument. Genetics has been used to better understand the criminal… Continue Reading...
tale is as complex as that of the origin of human language. There are three items that have featured in the development of the complex story web, i.e. diffusion, inheritance and invention. Diffusion and inheritance point to invention and do not help to demystify the invention mystery. Diffusion is about borrowing in space while inheritance has to do with time-defined borrowing. These concepts presuppose a mind that is inventive; the central preoccupation of Tolkien.
It is also apparent that the tongue, the incarnate mind and the tale are our coeval world. The mind of the human being is empowered with… Continue Reading...
