Overall an interesting introduction. Some chapters were much more interesting to me than others, which were somewhere between kinda boring and boring. Generally, the book is way too light on the statistical features of the studies cited. When I hear of a purportedly great study, I want to know the sample size and the significance of the results.<\/p>\n
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Why does Pirah\u00e3 lack recursion? Everett\u2019s (2008) answer is that Pirah\u00e3 lacks recursion <\/span><\/p>\n because recursion introduces statements into a language that do not make direct assertions <\/span><\/p>\n about the world. When you say, Give me the nails that Dan bought, that statement presupposes<\/span><\/p>\n that it is true that Dan bought the nails, but it does not say so outright. In Pirah\u00e3, each of the <\/span><\/p>\n individual sentences is a direct statement or assertion about the world. \u201cGive me the nails\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n is a command equivalent to \u201cI want the nails\u201d (an assertion about the speaker\u2019s mental state). <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cDan bought the nails\u201d is a direct assertion of fact, again expressing the speaker\u2019s mental <\/span><\/p>\n state (\u201cI know Dan bought those nails\u201d). \u201cThey are the same\u201d is a further statement of fact. <\/span><\/p>\n Everett describes the Pirah\u00e3 as being a very literal-minded people. They have no creation <\/span><\/p>\n myths. They do not tell fictional stories. They do not believe assertions made by others <\/span><\/p>\n about past events unless the speaker has direct knowledge of the events, or knows someone <\/span><\/p>\n who does. As a result, they are very resistant to conversion to Christianity, or any other faith <\/span><\/p>\n that requires belief in things unseen. Everett argues that these cultural principles determine <\/span><\/p>\n the form of Pirah\u00e3 grammar. Specifically, because the Pirah\u00e3 place great store in first-hand <\/span><\/p>\n knowledge, sentences in the language must be assertions. Nested statements, like relative <\/span><\/p>\n clauses, require presuppositions (rather than assertions) and are therefore ruled out. If <\/span><\/p>\n Everett is right about this, then Pirah\u00e3 grammar is shaped by Pirah\u00e3 culture. The form their <\/span><\/p>\n language takes is shaped by their cultural values and the way they relate to one another <\/span><\/p>\n socially. If this is so, then Everett\u2019s study of Pirah\u00e3 grammar would overturn much of the <\/span><\/p>\n received wisdom on where grammars come from and why they take the form they do. <\/span><\/p>\n Which leads us to \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Interesting hypothesis.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In an attempt to gather further evidence regarding these possibilities, Savage-Rumbaugh <\/span><\/p>\n raised a chimp named Panpanzeeand a bonobo named Panbanisha, starting when they <\/span><\/p>\n were infants, in a language-rich environment. Chimpanzees are the closest species to <\/span><\/p>\n humans. The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived between about <\/span><\/p>\n 5 million and 8 million years ago. Bonobos are physically similar to chimpanzees, although <\/span><\/p>\n bonobos are a bit smaller on average. Bonobos asa group also have social characteristics <\/span><\/p>\n that distinguish them from chimpanzees. Theytend to show less intra-species aggression <\/span><\/p>\n and are less dominated by male members of the species.9Despite the physical similarities, <\/span><\/p>\n the two species are biologically distinct. By testing both a chimpanzee and a bonobo, SavageRumbaugh could hold environmental factors constant while observing change over time <\/span><\/p>\n (ontogeny) and differences across the two species (phylogeny). If the two animals acquired <\/span><\/p>\n the same degree of language skill, this would suggest that cultural or environmental factors <\/span><\/p>\n have the greatest influence on their language development. Differences between them <\/span><\/p>\n would most likely reflect phylogenetic biological differences between the two species. <\/span><\/p>\n Differences in skill over time would most likely reflect ontogenetic or maturational factors.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The author clearly forgets about individual differences in ability. They are also found in monkeys (indeed, any animal which has g<\/em> as a polygenetic trait).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The fossil record shows that human ancestors before Homo sapiensemerged, between <\/span><\/p>\n about 70,000 and 200,000 years ago, had some of the cultural and physical characteristics of <\/span><\/p>\n modern humans, including making tools and cooking food. If we assume that modern <\/span><\/p>\n language emerged sometime during the Homo sapiensera, then it would be nice to know <\/span><\/p>\n why it emerged then, and not before. One possibility is that a general increase in brain size <\/span><\/p>\n relative to body weight in Homo sapiensled to an increase in general intelligence, and this <\/span><\/p>\n increase in general intelligence triggered a language revolution. On this account, big brain <\/span><\/p>\n comes first and language emerges later. This hypothesis leaves a number of questions <\/span><\/p>\n unanswered, however, such as, what was that big brain doing before language emerged? If <\/span><\/p>\n the answer is \u201cnot that much,\u201d then why was large brain size maintained in the species <\/span><\/p>\n (especially when you consider that the brain demands a huge proportion of the body\u2019s <\/span><\/p>\n resources)? And if language is an optional feature of big, sapiensbrains, why is it a universal <\/span><\/p>\n characteristic among all living humans? Also, why do some groups of humans who have <\/span><\/p>\n smaller sized brains nonetheless have fully developed language abilities?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Interesting that he doesn’t cite a reference for this claim, or the brain size general intelligence claim from earlier. I’m more wondering, tho, is there really no difference in language sofistication between groups with different brain sizes (and g<\/em>)? I’m thinking of spoken language. Perhaps it’s time to revise that claim. We know that g<\/em> has huge effects on people’s vocabulary size (vocabulary size is one of the most g<\/em>-loaded subtests) which has to do with both spoken and written language. However, the grammers and morfologies of many languages found in low-g<\/em> countries are indeed very sofisticated.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As a result of concerns like those raised by Pullum, as well as studies showing that <\/span><\/p>\n speakers of different languages perceive the world similarly, many language scientists have <\/span><\/p>\n viewed linguistic determinism as being dead on arrival (see, e.g., Pinker, 1994). Many of <\/span><\/p>\n them would argue that language serves thought, rather than dictating to it. If we ask the <\/span><\/p>\n question, what is language good for? one of the most obvious answers is that language <\/span><\/p>\n allows us to communicate our thoughts to other people. That being the case, we would <\/span><\/p>\n expect language to adapt to the needs of thought, rather than the other way around. If an <\/span><\/p>\n individual or a culture discovers something new to say, the language will expand to fit the <\/span><\/p>\n new idea (as opposed to preventing the new idea from being hatched, as the Whorfian <\/span><\/p>\n hypothesis suggests). This anti-Whorfian position does enjoy a certain degree of support <\/span><\/p>\n from the vocabularies of different languages, and different subcultures within individual <\/span><\/p>\n languages. For example, the class of words that refer to objects and events (open class) <\/span><\/p>\n changes rapidly in cultures where there is rapid technological or social changes (such as <\/span><\/p>\n most Western cultures). The word internetdid not exist when I was in college, mumble <\/span><\/p>\n mumble years ago. The word Googledid not exist 10 years ago. When it first came into the <\/span><\/p>\n language, it was a noun referring to a particular web-browser. Soon after, it became a verb <\/span><\/p>\n that meant \u201cto search the internet for information.\u201d In this case, technological, cultural, and <\/span><\/p>\n social developments caused the language to change. Thought drove language. But did <\/span><\/p>\n language also drive thought? Certainly. If you hear people saying \u201cGoogle,\u201d you are going to <\/span><\/p>\n want to know what they mean. You are likely to engage with other speakers of your language <\/span><\/p>\n until this new concept becomes clear to you. Members of subcultures, such as birdwatchers <\/span><\/p>\n or dog breeders, have many specialist terms that make their communication more efficient, <\/span><\/p>\n but there is no reason to believe that you need to know the names for different types of birds <\/span><\/p>\n before you can perceive the differences between them\u2014a bufflehead looks different than a <\/span><\/p>\n pintail no matter what they\u2019re called.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The author apparently gets his etymology wrong. Google was never a verb for a browser, that’s something computer-illiterate people think, cf. https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n No… Google’s Chrome is a browser. Google is a search engine. And \u201cto google\u201d something means to search for it using Google, the search engine. Altho now it has changed somewhat to mean \u201csearch the internet for\u201d. Similarly to the Kleenex meaning change.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Different languages express numbers in different ways, so language could influence the <\/span><\/p>\n way children in a given culture acquire number concepts (Hunt & Agnoli, 1991; Miller & <\/span><\/p>\n Stigler, 1987). Chinese number words differ from English and some other languages (e.g., <\/span><\/p>\n Russian) because the number words for 11\u201319 are more transparent in Chinese than in <\/span><\/p>\n English. In particular, Chinese number words for the teens are the equivalent of \u201cten-one,\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cten-two,\u201d \u201cten-three\u201d and so forth. This makes the relationship between the teens and the <\/span><\/p>\n single digits more obvious than equivalent English terms, such as twelve. As a result, children <\/span><\/p>\n who speak Chinese learn to count through the teens faster than children who speak English. <\/span><\/p>\n This greater accuracy at producing number words leads to greater accuracy when children <\/span><\/p>\n are given sets of objects and are asked to say how many objects are in the set. Chinesespeaking children performed this task more accurately than their English-speaking peers, <\/span><\/p>\n largely because they made very few errors in producing number words while counting up <\/span><\/p>\n the objects. One way to interpret these results is to propose that the Chinese language makes <\/span><\/p>\n certain relationships more obvious (that numbers come in groups of ten; that there\u2019s a <\/span><\/p>\n relationship between different numbers that end in the word \u201cone\u201d), and making those <\/span><\/p>\n relationships more obvious makes the counting system easier to learn.22<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This hypothesis is certainly plausible, but the average g difference between chinese children and american children is a confound that needs to be dealt with.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It would be interesting to see a scandinavian comparison because danish<\/a> has a horrible numeral system, while swedish has a better one. They both have awkward teen numbers, but the e2 numbers are much more meaningful in swedish<\/a>: e.g. fem-tio, five-ten vs. halv-tres, half-tres, a remnant from a system based on 20’s, it’s half-three*20 = 2.5*20=50.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So how are word meanings (senses, that is) represented in the mental lexicon? And what <\/span><\/p>\n research tools are appropriate to investigating word representations? One approach to <\/span><\/p>\n investigating word meaning relies on introspection\u2014thinking about word meanings and <\/span><\/p>\n drawing conclusions from subjective experience. It seems plausible, based on introspection, <\/span><\/p>\n that entries in the mental lexicon are close analogs to dictionary entries. If so, the lexical <\/span><\/p>\n representation of a given word would incorporate information about its grammatical <\/span><\/p>\n function (what category does it belong to, verb, noun, adjective, etc.), which determines how <\/span><\/p>\n it can combine with other words (adverbs go with verbs, adjectives with nouns). Using <\/span><\/p>\n words in this sense involves the assumption that individual words refer to types\u2014that the <\/span><\/p>\n core meaning of a word is a pointer to a completely interchangeable set of objects in the <\/span><\/p>\n world (Gabora, Rosch, & Aerts, 2008). Each individual example of a category is a token. So, <\/span><\/p>\n teamis a type, and Yankees, Twins, and Mudhensare tokens of that type.2<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He has misunderstood the type-token terminology. I will quite SEP:<\/p>\n http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/types-tokens\/#DisBetTypTok<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The distinction between a <\/span>type<\/span><\/em> and its <\/span>tokens<\/span><\/em> is an ontological one between a general sort of thing and its particular concrete instances (to put it in an intuitive and preliminary way). So for example consider the number of words in the Gertrude Stein line from her poem <\/span>Sacred Emily<\/span><\/em> on the page in front of the reader’s eyes:<\/span><\/p>\n Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n In one sense of \u2018word\u2019 we may count three different words; in another sense we may count ten different words. C. S. Peirce (1931-58, sec. 4.537) called words in the first sense \u201ctypes\u201d and words in the second sense \u201ctokens\u201d. Types are generally said to be abstract and unique; tokens are concrete particulars, composed of ink, pixels of light (or the suitably circumscribed lack thereof) on a computer screen, electronic strings of dots and dashes, smoke signals, hand signals, sound waves, etc. A study of the ratio of written types to spoken types found that there are twice as many word types in written Swedish as in spoken Swedish (Allwood, 1998). If a pediatrician asks how many words the toddler has uttered and is told \u201cthree hundred\u201d, she might well enquire \u201cword types or word tokens?\u201d because the former answer indicates a prodigy. A headline that reads \u201cFrom the Andes to Epcot, the Adventures of an 8,000 year old Bean\u201d might elicit \u201cIs that a bean type or a bean token?\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He seems to be talking about members of sets.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Or maybe not, perhaps his usage is just idiosyncratic, for in the note \u201c2\u201d to the above, he writes:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Teamitself can be a token of a more general category, like organization(team, company, army). Typeand token<\/span><\/p>\n are used differently in the speech production literature. There, tokenis often used to refer to a single instance <\/span><\/p>\n of a spoken word; typeis used to refer to the abstract representation of the word that presumably comes into <\/span><\/p>\n play every time an individual produces that word<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n –<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We could lo ok at a cor pus and count up ever y t ime t he word dogsappears in exactly that <\/span><\/p>\n form. We could count up the number of times that catsappears in precisely that form. In <\/span><\/p>\n that case we would be measuring surface frequency\u2014how often the exact word occurs. But <\/span><\/p>\n the words dogsand catsare both related to other words that share the same root morpheme. <\/span><\/p>\n We could decide t o ignore minor differences in s ur face for m and ins t ead concent r at e on <\/span><\/p>\n how often the family of related words appears. If so, we would treat dog, dogs, dog-tired, and <\/span><\/p>\n<\/a>1.1 What the Distinction Is<\/span><\/h3>\n