RT list: Response to A Sytnyk

 
I am not sure I understand what you mean, and what I think I do does not make a lot of sense to me. Are you saying that we are inherently unable to make a wholly explicit description of human language by one means or another? Or are you suggesting that the human language is not a biological evolved trait of our species but rather a result of our social interchanges? I WOULD STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH ANY OF THE TWO ABOVE INTERPRETATIONS, I am sorry to admit.

The problem with non-Spanish speaking people in this case, I find, is that almost nobody is able to make a conceptual distinction between what I call LENGUAJE, LENGUA and IDIOMA.

Lenguaje. for me is the mental device that permits us to formalize aspects of the world, store them in our mind, manipulate and retrieve them when necessary. Let me call it L1 from now on.

Lengua, for me, (or L2, from now on) is the initial state of the linguistic organ. That which allows us to acquire an

Idioma which, for me, would point to the final state of that linguistic organ (from now on, L3).

To attain at least the observational adequacy level in this small debate, I would like to know what is the object you point to when using the general terminological pointer you have in English, namely language. Are you pointing to L1, L2 or L3? It would clarify the discussion a lot if we were sure what interlocutors are referring to in their arguments, don't you think?

Furthermore, I do think that some cognitive aspects of the human communicative process are universal for the human species, and that's why I so strongly attached myself to RT in the first place. I am in no way denying that social factors are important in the processes of interpreting messages. All I am saying is that, for me, the important issue in science, any type of science, is to be able to achieve a descriptive adequate (i.e., explicit) level, in order to arrive at a working explanation of the workings of a given biological trait.

No more and no less!

El dia 07 oct 2010 17:44, Andre Sytnyk <andre.sytnyk@gmail.com> escribió:
> ?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)
>

José Luis Guijarro
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
Universidad de Cádiz
11002 Cádiz, España (Spain)
tlf: (34) 956-011.613
fax: (34) 956-015.505
Received on Thu Oct 7 19:50:14 2010