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Category: General Language
What do linguists think of the movie Arrival?
You have waited a long time, Hansolophontes, for me to answer this A2A. I did not read any spoilers. I did not read any of the other answers (which may make this look silly this late). I finally watched Arrival last night. Very well made movie: great sense of atmosphere, and fear, and awe. I […]
Do letters exist?
Phonemes exist. That’s one of the key findings of 20th century linguistics. Where do they exist? In the Noosphere I guess; but they are mental constructs which underlie not only our articulation of language, but also our mental organisation and understanding of language. So unlike a lot that is in the noosphere, they do have […]
How do you define cliché in your own words?
The definitions offering are actually missing something here: A clichéd expression is an expression that was figurative or otherwise had rhetorical potency—but which has become deprecated by stylists in a language community, because they value novelty and freshness over familiarity and conventionality in discourse. This is a cultural judgement, and one that English-language culture in […]
What is your opinion of Noam Chomsky?
Feh. Screw that guy. I wrote why on my website, something like 20 years ago (ignore the update date): Anti-Chomsky: English. I was somewhat aghast around 2000, when David Horowitz got in touch with me, asking for permission to quote me. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about him. (Chomsky, I mean. But […]
Did anything practically useful ever come out from the field of pragmatics so far?
Practically useful? How… gauche. I mean, I love the fact that Implicature explains so much about language change and information transmission; Speech Acts are a great framework for making sense of how language is used to influence people; and Gricean maxims undergird so much of how humour works. But practical? The closest I can think […]
Does language play any significant role in shaping national identity?
Language plays a huge role in shaping national identity, as any European knows. But from OP’s details, their question is really more, how does national identity get shaped in the absence of a distinct language? If it’s a sufficient but not a necessary condition, how do such countries get their own identity? Let’s go shopping. […]
Why are OSV order languages so rare?
Brian Collins says: Those are the type of questions only a few people like Bob Dixon are willing to touch with a 17ft pole. Only Dixon, may his soul be blackened (or indeed blacklisted)? Surely not. Surely we haven’t run out of functionalists in Australia! Here’s a functionalist take, though it will have some holes […]
Why are most poems written with rhymes?
As Jakobson once said, though artlessly,poetry claims th’ axis of combination. The repertoire of sounds, in crafty array,are how the Muse stakes her signification.Without form woven in sonority,poetry loses its essential claim:ends up as prose with gilded metaphor,but does not merit the enchanter’s name. The Homeoteleuton as a devicewas known to Greeks as such a […]
Is pronunciation speed a meaningful feature when discussing languages?
I don’t know that this has really attracted the interest of typologists, though I’m happy to be corrected. The phonologist I used to work for as a research assistant was considering writing an article, comparing the speed of newcasts, but I don’t think he went ahead with it. I think the impression we have that […]
Is it possible for a person to acquire a written language as their native language?
Hello all the good people, Clarissa and Audrey and Brian. I was going to join in to your discussion under Brian’s answer, but it didn’t head in the direction I was hoping. Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller, who are the deaf–blind people Brian alludes to, communicated through finger spelling, read Braille, and wrote. Must have […]