RT list: answering Dr. Guijarro

“Current perspectives on the relation between universal human nature and
cultural factors often seem to me to be inverted: for example, language is
held to be essentially universal, whereas language use is thought to be more
open to cultural influences. But the reverse may in fact be far more
plausible: there is obvious cultural codification of many aspects of
language from phoneme to syntactic construction, whereas the uncodified,
unnoticed, low-level background of usage principles or strategies may be
fundamentally culture-independent <…> (The) underlying presumptions,
heuristics, and principles of usage may be more immune to cultural influence
simply because they are the prerequisites for the system to work at all,
preconditions even for learning language <…> (Incidentally, the idea that
usage principles may be much more uniform and simpler than the conventions of
language is interestingly at variance with Chomsky's (1975: 25) oftrepeated
pessimism about "our very limited progress in developing a scientific theory
of any depth to account for the normal use of language," perhaps because
"human science-forming capacities simply do not extend to this domain.")”
Levinson (2000: xiv-xv)
Received on Thu Oct 7 16:44:57 2010