I keep hearing that “you linguists agree on nothing” as if we were some sort of charlatains pretending to do science. So here are some things we all agree on, independently of the framework, and many people find surprising and counterintuitive. 1/
These generalizations are the result of linguistic research, and cannot be drawn impressionistically through some superficial observation:
1. children who acquire language do it in steps. These steps are roughly the same for every child in every language
2. though all languages put one word after the other, they don’t refer to linear order for computation. In a sentence like “the father of my cousins smokes” the verb agrees with “the father” while skipping over the more closely adjacent “my cousins”
3. sounds, words and morphemes (parts of words) are not distributed randomly in languages; there are very specific rules that govern them in different languages
4. language rules don’t count above 2 (or 3 perhaps). There is no language that has a rule saying: insert negation in 3rd or 4th position
5. there is no language that uses reverse linear order as a rule. For instance: there is no language that uses “school to went John” as a possible rule for negation of “John went to school”
6. language is in the brain. Whichever theory of grammar you have, the computation of your “sentences” happens in the brain. If you stick a thick nail in your brain of the lefthand side you will no longer be able to create sentences or access words as you did before
7. language change is perfectly normal. The only languages that never change are dead languages
8. a language doesn’t need to be written to be a language
9. orthography and writing conventions have nothing to do with grammar
10. all languages and all dialects and all idiolects are equally interesting and complex, independently on whether they are written, used to teach philosophy, or only spoken at home
11. the language you speak at home with your granny also has grammar
12. children exposed to incomplete or mixed input will make sense of it and organize the chaos into some regularity. If this is not possible, they will just ignore the input and move forward
13. grammar pre-exists grammar books; children at school don’t *learn* grammar but just hear about its rules explicitly
14. you need a community for language change to happen. No interaction, no change. In other words, if you just hear something from tv but cannot use it with anyone, change will not happen
15. there is no correlation between the fact that a verbal paradigm expresses the future morphologically (like, overtly) and the understanding of the concept of future by the speakers using that paradigm
16. there are many regularities in languages, and some universal tendencies. These might have different causes, and are mostly not a consequence of the fact that there might exist a universal grammar (i.e. an innate structure-encoding device) in our brain.
17. all humans can use languages, all humans have language (unless some medical condition is present). Humans are *the only* animals that can handle such complex systems as languages.Animals can communicate, but they cannot produce counterfactuals because they don’t have language
18. sign languages are fully fledged languages, as articulated and poweful as spoken languages
19. bilingualism/multilingualism is a normal condition for humans. It is not a sign of inferiority and it does not cause any trouble to a child in the long run (though it can create some delays in the early stages of lg acq). Rather, it offers social and cognitive advantage.
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