This Friday’s colloquium will be given by Justin Fisher from the Department of Philosophy, UBC. The title of his talk is “How Smart Languages Learn to Teach Themselves to Stupid Children” (abstract below).
The talk will be in the Buchanan Penthouse, starting at 3:30 pm (coffee and cookies at 3:15), on Friday, Jan 26th.
ABSTRACT
“This paper has two aims. One is to undercut the arguments that many people have taken to favor a popular nativist position in linguistics. The other is to present a strong alternative to Linguistic Nativism. I call this alternative Symbiotic Developmentalism, for, as I argue, I think we can profit by thinking of ‘language acquisition’ as involving the simultaneous development of two symbiotic ‘organisms’ – a language and a homo sapiens child. (A similar view is advocated by Terrance Deacon 1997.)
I begin by stating clearly what is held by Linguistic Nativists. I then carefully consider the various sorts of evidence that have been mustered in favor of Linguistic Nativism. I argue that none of this evidence favors Linguistic Nativism over Symbiotic Developmentalism, while some of it does favor Symbiotic Developmentalism. In the concluding section, I argue that Symbiotic Developmentalism may open promising new avenues for linguistic research, avenues which are not readily available within a nativist framework.”
