Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Steven Pinker
In this review of a book by Steven Pinker Christine Kenneally tells you a lot about the complexities of language. By implication in this review, and to some extent in her podcast discussion she indicates that Noam Chomsky's effect on language study stifled other useful approaches.
In particular, Pinker views language as an evolutionary phenomenon, not solely an artifact of mechanistic biological “deep structure”. One fascinating idea of Pinker's is that words exist in conceptual families.
“…verbs fall into natural groupings based on broad categories of meaning. Linguists recently discovered…that many verbs hang out in invisible cliques, again based on concepts like space, or force, or motion. Of at least 85 such verb sets in English, one involves what happens when a collection of objects is distributed over a surface (blot, bombard, dapple, riddle, speckle). In another group, the verbs all describe what happens when little bits of stuff are sent in every direction (bestrew, scatter, seed, sow, strew). Yet another lot describes something that is being expelled from inside something else (emit, excrete, expectorate, secrete, spew, spit, etc.).”
I think Emerson said something like “Each word is at first a stroke of genius”, that is, an insight about reality which is then named and given an objective status. The study of language is the study of the inner life of the species, containing our history and manners and deepest secrets — the many frameworks we use to describe what we experience.