The Pirahã Controversy — Part 3

Mar 29, 2012 by

The Pirahã Controversy — Part 3

In the previous post, I outlined the arguments in the Pirahã controversy. Here, let’s consider more closely one of the most crucial issue of this controversy: whether Pirahã allows recursion. (An interested reader is referred...

read more

Making my case

Dec 26, 2011 by

Making my case

In the last couple of posts, I’ve discussed the issue of grammatical complexity and have shown that even if an objective measure of such complexity is absent, languages clearly differ as to which grammatical distinctions they...

read more

It’s not all black and white

Nov 30, 2011 by

It’s not all black and white

As was discussed in earlier postings, the cross-linguistic range of color terms is quite complex and languages differ as to how the treat the color spectrum (e.g., see how Hanunoo does it). But interestingly, not all uses of color...

read more

You save what you speak?

Oct 25, 2011 by

As noted in a number of previous postings (see here and here), recently more and more non-linguists come out with research involving language. And very often, whether it’s biologists, physicists or economists that make claims...

read more

The evolution of word order and “free word order” language...

Oct 20, 2011 by

In the previous posting, I outlined the recently proposed theory by Gell-Mann and Ruhlen on the origin and evolution of word order. According to their proposal, the most recent common ancestor of all currently living human languages,...

read more