LINB13H3 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Stephen Levinson, Exact Sciences
11 Aug 2015
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Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. E&l think that diversity underlies the world languages. they take a very literal approach to studying languages. According to them if the universal is not present across all languages it is not valid. They also have a psychological take on the subject, referring to the diversity in languages and how children acquire languages is very different than if we think of all languages as universals and having parameters. E&l are also under the impression that any universals found in language are simply an abstraction. They note that universals are not in fact universal and that in order to consider them universals one must ignore the fact that some languages don"t follow them. David pesetsky: "against taking linguistic diversity at "face value"" (page 464-465) Pesetsky argues that completely arguing that universals don"t exist is not only unsubstantiated but also would not give us sigh insight into languages.
