MacNeilage’s recent book ‘The origin of speech’ argues in favor of a ‘frame/content’ theory of syllable structure. (He has argued for this for years.) The terms are from Levelt. The idea is simply that the syllable is first a frame, a space within which content may be fleshed out more language-specifically. It’s more or less [...]
In the days of behaviorism (now coming back it seems), Bloomfield (1933, Chapter 2) writes about the function of language. He sets up with an example: “Suppose that Jack and Jill are walking down a lane. Jill is hungry. She sees an apple in a tree. She makes a noise with her larynx, tongue, and [...]
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 [...]
