Seriously! My headline isn’t hyperbole — that’s what linguists are arguing about. This isn’t like the age of the universe, with experts debating whether it’s 13.7 or 13.8 billion years old. Same thing, for most of us. This is a serious, tenfold difference of opinion. If you’re in the “continuity” camp, you believe that language […]
Noam Chomsky
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Nature or Nurture?
Last week I discussed linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar, the idea that we’re all born with some sort of “language module” that we adapt, at a very early age, to the language in which we’re being raised. Here, I’m going to go into some detail to discuss a particular and tricky bit of […]