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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Independently of forms of grammar statement. Chomsky (1986)basically dismissed both corpus-based work and mathematicallinguistics simply on the grounds that they employ an extensionalconception of language that is, a conception that removes the objectof study from having an essential connection with the mental.External. Second, a distinct meaning based on‘external’ was folded into the neologism‘E-language’ to suggest criticism of any view thatconceives of a natural language as a public, intersubjectivelyaccessible system used by a community of people (often millions ofthem spread across different countries). Here, the objection is thatlanguages as thus conceived have no clear criteria of individuation interms of necessary and sufficient conditions. On this conception, thesubject matter of interest is a historico-geographical entity thatchanges as it is transmitted over generations, or over mountainranges. Famously, for example, there is a gradual valley-to-valleychange in the language spoken between southeastern France andnorthwestern Italy such that each valley’s speakers canunderstand the next. But the far northwesterners clearly speak Frenchand the far southeasterners clearly speak Italian. It is thepolitically defined geographical border, not the intrinsic propertiesof the dialects, that would encourage viewing this continuum as twodifferent languages.Perhaps the most famous quotation by any linguist is standardlyattributed to Max Weinreich (1945): ‘A shprakh iz a dialekt mitan armey un flot’ (‘A language is a dialect with an armyand navy’; he actually credits the remark to an unnamedstudent). The implication is that E-languages are defined in terms ofnon-linguistic, non-essential properties. Essentialists object that ascientific linguistics cannot tolerate individuating French andItalian in a way that is subject to historical contingencies of warsand treaties (after all, the borders could have coincided with adifferent hill or valley had some battle had a different outcome).Considerations of intelligibility fare no better. Mutualintelligibility between languages is not a transitive relation, andsometimes the intelligibility relation is not even symmetric (smaller,more isolated, or less prestigious
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