Languages and universal grammar
Universal grammar
Linguists doubt exception to universal grammar by Robin H. Ray MIT-Controversies in the field of linguistics seldom make headlines, which is why the current imbroglio over an alleged counterexample to Universal Grammar (UG), made famous in the 1960s by Noam Chomsky, MIT professor of linguistics, is so unusual.
On one side is Daniel L. Everett, a linguist at Illinois State University, who has spent several decades studying Pirahã, a language spoken by roughly 350 indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon rainforest. On the other are a number of linguists, including MIT linguistics professor David Pesetsky, who have thrown doubt upon many of Everett’s claims, both cultural and linguistic, about the Pirahã
Read more from on this MIT linguists debate Languages and univeral grammar
The question here is do languages all have a common structure, and what does this tell us about out brain.
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