UniTrento Psicologia e Scienze Cognitive
University of Trento – Center for Mind/Brain Sciences – CIMEC
Doctoral school Cognitive and Brain Sciences
The CIMEC Colloquia series
Neither nature nor nurture: the semiotic basis of language universals
Friday, October 28, 2016 @ 12:00 p.m.
Aula Magna, Palazzo Istruzione, Corso Bettini 84, Rovereto
http://webmagazine.unitn.it/en/evento/cimec/11454/the-cimec-colloquia-series
http://www.polorovereto.unitn.it/services/media/2016/1028/home.html
Welcome Francesco Pavani
Speaker
Terrence W. Deacon
Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley
Neither nature nor nurture: the semiotic basis of language universals
Abstract
The concept of a “universal grammar” has been hotly contested over the past half century. What is the source of the many highly convergent language structures in the world’s many diverse languages? The usual lines of debate divide along nature/nurture lines: e.g. commonalities due to innate evolved cognitive predispositions or due to common discourse demands that become cultural conventions. But nature and nurture do not exhaust the possibilities. Many language universals are analogues to mathematical universals. These universal grammatical constraints are effectively “discovered” in the history of linguistic evolution, language change, and during process of language acquisition due to pragmatic feedback about failed or ambiguous reference. And many of the most critical semiotic constraints are discovered in prelinguistic and extralinguistic iconic and indexical communication. This makes both innate grammatical knowledge and the so-called poverty of the stimulus problem irrelevant. .(tagsToTranslate)University of Trento(t)Cognitive(t)Rovereto (City/Town/Village)(t)Trentino (Italian Province)(t)Italy (Country)(t)cimec(t)mente(t)cervello(t)graduate program(t)cognitive science(t)phd(t)nature(t)nurture(t)semiotic(t)language
Amazing stuff.
Deacon continues to produce big leaps forward in human understanding.
have to admit that as a first pass into Deacon's thinking, this is a difficult lecture to trudge through
Did he end up doing the part two of the lecture anywhere? I'm really interested to hear part 2 as well.
so for first question in q and A it seems that an answer is that the feral child lacked feedback in tranfering constraints between icons to constraints between symbols right…in a sense discovery of language is an experimental process, without sufficient feedback…no chance to evolve…..
Amazing new stuff by Terry, once again
He is not formally trained in linguistics and all of his lectures omit critical linguistic data that is known to exist (such as the maturational constraints). It is difficult to comprehend that anyone would actually take this guy seriously and one thing is for sure: He has absolutely no idea how the first language was formed. Listening to his lectures is like listening to someone read the Wizard of Oz. All fiction with no supporting evidence. In case you were curious…. this is exactly what researcher bias looks like.