A quibble on interjections: I’ve just read Jim Hurford’s outstanding book ‘The Origins of Meaning’. In it, he discusses interjections, as the earliest precursors of linguistic utterances. (The book withholds all discussion of complex grammar; this will come in a sequel to the book.) The problem is that he says interjections ‘have no descriptive content’ [...]
A language learner encounters a word, and taking it to be cognate with a known word in their own language, presumes the new word to mean the same as the old. Sometimes this sense of security is false—when, for instance, an American in Paris asks in his broken French whether there are any préservatifs in [...]
Wittgenstein 1953, section 199: ‘To understand a sentence means to understand a language.’
There are no meaningful structures that do not require proper contextualization. So, to know the part is to be in control of the whole.
The puzzle of human sociality basically comes down to the apparent conflict between a drive to compete and a drive to cooperate. We do both. What drives us to do both? How do we pull off this balancing act?
Many of the puzzles are set out in Roots of Human Sociality, my 2006 book co-edited with [...]
Where do linguistic systems get their structure? Individual ‘pieces’ of language have lives as items of their own. Each one can be invented, borrowed, changed, or forgotten more or less independently of the others. So what is it that keeps all these items lodged together in the larger systems we call [...]
