I'm proud to say that I found a mistake in Steven Pinker's book. When explaining about onomatopoeia he illustrates the idea with a comic in which four dog bark in four different languages. But the Romanian and Portuguese dogs got switched. A Romanian dog would say "ham-ham" for sure. I know. I heard them.
Now I would like to present some of the "Fifty Thousand Innate Concepts" I learned from this book.
Theories of conceptual semantics
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Extreme Nativism
Nativism refers to an emphasis on innate mental organization
Ideas:
* single-morpheme word vs multi-morpheme words
* definition vs semantic representation
* verbs are composed from a smaller number of conceptual particles
* conative alternations (eg. possessor-raising, locative, anti-causative)
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Radical Pragmatics
The mind does not contain fixed representations of the meanings of words.
Oxymoron = a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms.
Polysemy (many meanings) = a word having a number of distinct but related senses
* iregular
* regular
Homonymy (same name) = a single word having several unrelated meanings
Homophony (same sound) = distinct words are pronounced the same way
Euphemism = a substitution for an expression that may offend with a more agreeable one
Dysphemism = deliberately offensive speech
Metonym = a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept
A hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym.
Subtext = implicit content of a text
Wordplay = a literary technique in which the words that are used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement.
Metaphor = the concept of understanding one thing in terms of another.
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Linguistic Determinism
Our native language is the language of thought, and so determines the kinds of thoughts we can think.
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
1) Language affects thought because we get much of our knowledge through reading and conversation.
2) A sentence can frame an event, affecting the way that people construe it, in addition to simply conveying who did what to whom.
3) The stock of words in a language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal with in their lives and hence think about.
4) If someone uses the word language in a loose way to refer to meanings, then language affects thought - language is thought - by definition.
5) When people think about an entity, among the many attributes they can think about is its name.
6) Any computational system must have the means to store the intermediate products of its computations.
phonological loop = the part of working memory that rehearses verbal information
7) Every language forces speakers to pay attention to certain aspects of the world when they are composing or interpreting sentences.
8) The words and grammatical structures of a language have a profound effect on how its speakers reason, even when they aren't actually speaking or listening.
9) The medium of thought consists of actual words and sentences in the language the person speaks.
10) If two cultures speak languages that differ in the concepts they can express, their beliefs are incommensurable, and communication between them is impossible.
Coordinate system types or reference frame:
- geocentric
- object-centered
- egocentric
polyglot lesson
