@lesserjoke, on linguistic diversity and other stuff
lesserjoke:
astationaryjew:
Here is a long, rambling description of the talk on linguistic diversity and evolution that I mentioned in my ask but didn’t really explain.
So the presentation I heard about evolution and language diversity was at Nerd Nite, which is kinda scholarly but not very (some day soon I will be able to link a video of the talk instead of just a paragraph description, but it is not available yet). It was by this guy, who, as you can tell from his site being sapir.psych.wisc.edu, is big into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. So right from the get-go I was suspicious of his talk, because Edward Sapir might have been an okay dude but Benjamin Whorf was an asshole. Also, linguistic determinism is absurd. I think that was my main point there. Anyway.
Nerd Nite talks are for a general audience, and there were not a lot of linguists in the crowds. (There would have been a lot more booing and hissing and hard-hitting questions if that were the case. As it was, I booed and hissed by myself and all the chemists at my table asked me what was wrong.) So he did not always go into a lot of detail about his claims, and he was perhaps making generalizations that he wouldn’t have made in front of an audience of other psychologists.
He made several claims in his talk, and the one that struck me as the best supported by his research was something like “as languages accomodate more non-native speakers, they become more morphologically isolating.” So English was a prime example, and the counterparts were some minor languages that I unfortunately cannot remember the names of that don’t have a lot of foreign learners and are extremely morphologically complex. There was a West African one and a Papua New Guinean one, and then of course, he cited Inuktitut (not about words for snow, though). I do not have a huge problem with that claim, although I guess it’s interesting to consider some sort of alternate history where the world is colonized by people with a much more morphologically complex language and wonder what the outcome would be in that case. But moving on…
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“Anyway, I’m down with the idea that geography could affect linguistic variation because it separates groups of people, but I can’t see how certain sounds would be better adapted to certain environments.” That is exactly how I feel about these claims. =)
summary of Grice’s Maxims
quantity - Say exactly what needs to be said - no more, no less.
quality - Truth is better than lies! If we are engaged in a conversation we want to be productive and (assuming) representative of whatever reality we choose to discuss (the current one or one we imagine for the sake of the topic at hand), we must be willing to give precise information that also represents this reality.
relation - The relevance of what I am saying to what other people are saying. This is productive because it allows for progression of a topic rather than saying one sentence each about a thousand different topics; the way we switch to a new topic, however, is variable depending on the specific situation.
manner - Be clear, be brief, be organized.
- “The maxim of quantity, where one tries to be as informative as one possibly can, and gives as much information as is needed, and no more.
- The maxim of quality, where one tries to be truthful, and does not give information that is false or that is not supported by evidence.
- The maxim of relation, where one tries to be relevant, and says things that are pertinent to the discussion.
- The maxim of manner, when one tries to be as clear, as brief, and as orderly as one can in what one says, and where one avoids obscurity and ambiguity.
As the maxims stand, there may be an overlap, as regards the length of what one says, between the maxims of quantity and manner; this overlap can be explained (partially if not entirely) by thinking of the maxim of quantity (artificial though this approach may be) in terms of units of information. In other words, if the listener needs, let us say, five units of information from the speaker, but gets less, or more than the expected number, then the speaker is breaking the maxim of quantity. However, if the speaker gives the five required units of information, but is either too curt or long-winded in conveying them to the listener, then the maxim of manner is broken. The dividing line however, may be rather thin or unclear, and there are times when we may say that both the maxims of quantity and quality are broken by the same factors.”
“OCW course discusses propositional attitudes (i.e. beliefs, desires and knowledge, among others) and speech acts in language, such as saying and asking. This class explores syntax and semantics of the English language. Lecture notes are provided as .pfd files, and course material includes links to some required readings.”
“Coherence is the result of the efforts of participants to integrate saying, doing, meaning, and knowing.”
