Evolving pragmatics Speaking Our Minds: Why Human Communication is Different, and how Language Evolved to Make it Special, Thomas C. Scott-Phillips (Palgrave-Macmillan, New York; 2015)
نویسنده
چکیده
Perhaps the most famous sentence in linguistics is Noam Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” illustrating that an English utterance might be perfectly wellformed syntactically but semantically meaningless (or at least deeply problematic). This sentence helped inaugurate a renewed focus on syntax as a core factor in language [1] — a focus at variance with linguistic practice at the time in the 1950s. Today, the importance of syntax is well accepted both in linguistics and in related fi elds, including psychology and biology. Also famous, if less so, are variants of the following exchange: Susan: “I’m leaving you.” John: “Who is he?” To any English-speaking adult, this exchange makes sense, because we can follow John’s thought process: if Susan is leaving she must have found another lover (the ‘he’ in question inferred by John). The process by which we infer such ‘missing pieces’ of information, using a vast store of real-world knowledge to fi ll in gaps in actual utterances, is termed ‘pragmatics’, and is the topic of an excellent and important new book on language evolution by Thom ScottPhillips. A hypothetical alien with perfect command of English syntax and semantics, but no grasp of pragmatics or human relationships, might argue that John’s response is a non sequitur and completely irrelevant to Susan’s initial utterance. Similarly, a young child who understands the words might still fail to understand the meaning behind them. Thus, the exchange above illustrates the centrality of pragmatics Book review
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Current Biology
دوره 25 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2015