{"id":2025,"date":"2024-07-28T22:07:39","date_gmt":"2024-07-29T02:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=2025"},"modified":"2024-07-29T09:20:21","modified_gmt":"2024-07-29T13:20:21","slug":"linguistic-relativity-i-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/linguistic-relativity-i-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguistic relativity and i-language"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elif Batuman’s autofiction novel The Idiot\u00a0<\/em>follows Selin, a Harvard freshman in the mid 1990s. Selin initially declares her major in linguistics and describes two classes in more detail. One is with a soft-spoken professor who is said to be passionate about Turkic phonetics (no clue who this might be: anybody?) and the other is described as a Italian semanticist who wears beautiful suits (maybe this is Gennaro Chierchia; not sure). Selin is taken aback by the stridency with which her professor (presumably the Turkic phonetician) rails against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis\u2014she regrets how the professor repeatedly mentions Whorf’s day job as a fire prevention specialist\u2014and finds linguistic relativity so intuitive she changes her major at the end of the book.<\/p>\r\n

Batuman is not the only person to draw a connection between rejection of the stronger forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and generativism. Here’s the thing though: there is no real connection between these two ideas! Generativism has no particular stance on any of this. The only connection I see between these two ideas is that, when you adopt the i-language view, you simply have more interesting things to study. If you truly understand, say, poverty of the stimulus arguments, you just won’t feel the need to entertain intuitive-popular views of language because you’ll recognize that the human condition vis-\u00e0-vis\u00a0<\/em>language is much richer and much stranger than Whorf ever imagined.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elif Batuman’s autofiction novel The Idiot\u00a0follows Selin, a Harvard freshman in the mid 1990s. Selin initially declares her major in linguistics and describes two classes in more detail. One is with a soft-spoken professor who is said to be passionate about Turkic phonetics (no clue who this might be: anybody?) and the other is described … Continue reading “Linguistic relativity and i-language”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-presentation-of-self"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2025"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2037,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2025\/revisions\/2037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}