Fotografía de autor

Stephen C. Levinson

Autor de Pragmatics

12 Obras 370 Miembros 2 Reseñas

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Incluye el nombre: S.C. Levinson

Obras de Stephen C. Levinson

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Conocimiento común

Género
male

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Uffff there is some event horizon beyond which the systematizing impulse collapses in on itself and pulls you in black hole style. This is a comprehensive and erudite field survey with tons of interesting observations by a brilliant borbetomagus of the language field, but language isn't math and beyond a certain point I--personally--can't help but be appalled by the scholastic rationalism of the many fine distinctions and inferences and cloud scaffolding all throughout here. I knew how I felt about that in the case of generative syntax, say, or constraint-based phonology, but I do certainly appreciate Levinson and his wordhoard for helping me clarify that it applies even for a field in which I feel such a deep investment and interest as pragmatics. Humanistic, impressionistic, hermeneutic, stochastic methods are the methods you should use when you don't have scientific evidence, as long as we're talking about the real world (and not math, and I guess also theoretical physics has a really good track record of not needing real-world evidence, but it's somehow closer to math than the rest of the sciences, I guess?). And certainly we have much wider crosslinguistic-descriptive and more extensive psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic work on all this stuff at present. From the perspective that this was a field in its empirical toddlerhood, this is an amazing work. But some of it is superseded and other of it is just not my philosophical bag, though I'm not saying it can't be yourn.… (más)
 
Denunciada
MeditationesMartini | Jul 21, 2017 |
Gratifying, now that I've come to have "opinions" and a kind of "allegiance" in the relativism–universalism and innatism–emergentism debates, to find a book that gathers many great and powerful minds together to moot them and rise in a ferment. This is where you'd start if you were pretty sorted on the basics of linguistics and wanted to make some personal decisions about linguistic relativity based on the best information available at the present time. A few ideas I'd like to remember:

Linguistic relativity as a form of deixis (Gumperz and Levinson)

Not "thought" and "language," but "thinking for speaking (Lucy)

The idea that there is no linguistic relativity because framing distinctions are also present within languages (e.g., using "strictly speaking" vs. "technically") and this shows that the idea of the "mindset" of a language is nonsense (you can say the same about dialectal variation, etc.) (Paul Kay)--I write this down not because I agree but only because it is a widespread argument but only makes sense if you have no sense of gradient difference and think only categorically separate deterministic boxes constitute linguistic relativity--I can choose to speak one way and you can choose another in English, and neither of those are Swahili, just the same way as there is an infinite number of numbers between one and ten and none of them are eleven, end of story.

Prelinguistic thought--what a blacksmith does when he makes a knife, described--the role of words and how they get used (for example between a smith and apprentice or client) to evoke image schemata in ways that constitute special shared clusters of ideas. Pretty cool reading for those of us used to thinking in words, aside from its relativistic implications.

There were others! I should have been more conscientious in writing them down!
… (más)
 
Denunciada
MeditationesMartini | Sep 25, 2013 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
12
Miembros
370
Popularidad
#65,128
Valoración
½ 3.7
Reseñas
2
ISBNs
47
Idiomas
7

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