Noam Chomsky vs Some Fish

WHO WOULD WIN? Principles and Parameters Noam Chomsky on Behaviorism Nutshell WHY ONLY US LANGUAGE AND EVOLUTION some fish idk Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying 'inexplicable gaps', that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to 'immediate experience', and that this principle has 'severe' consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available evidence and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical 'gaps' supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett [...] are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. We believe [...] that the empirical claims of Current Anthropology (Everett 2005) not only fail to weaken the case for an autonomous, biologically determined mode of language, but they are also irrelevant to it. Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues. “Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment.” Language 85, no. 2 (2009): 355–404. © 2009 Linguistic Society of America

На изображении в формате «кто победит?» слева показан сложный лингвистический материал о теориях Ноама Хомского и грамматике универсального языка, а справа — фотография рыбы с подписью «some fish idk». Шутка строится на абсурдном сравнении огромного интеллектуального и академического аргумента с совершенно случайной рыбой: мем используют как реакцию на чрезмерно сложный спор, где оппонентом выставляют что-то нелепо простое и неизвестное. EN: The image uses the “who would win?” format: on the left is dense linguistic material about Noam Chomsky’s theories and universal grammar, while on the right is a photograph of a fish captioned “some fish idk.” The joke absurdly contrasts an enormous intellectual and academic argument with a completely random fish, so the meme is used as a reaction to an overly complicated debate where the opponent is presented as something ridiculously simple and unknown.

• @pokupkabitka / 12114 2022-07-30