Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow (eds): Language in Mind: Advances in␣the Study of Language and Thought (original) (raw)
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The relation between language and theory of mind remains in need of clarification, both at the level of language evolution, language acquisition and the very content of theory of mind. This raises the question of the very nature of theory of mind. Is it a monolithic, more or less modular mental faculty; or is it a combination of different mechanisms, some of which may be rather low-level? How much theory is there in theory of mind and how much is needed to evolve a language? Very much the same questions apply to language acquisition. This workshop will attempt to analyse the coevolution of these two uniquely human capacities, their co-dependence and interaction. The Workshop is organized by the Institut des Sciences Cognitives CNRS, Lyon. Starting from February 2004, a new paper will be put on line and open to discussion every two weeks. The research presented in this workshop is supported in the framework of the European Science Foundation EUROCORES programme.
Academic Studies Press, Brighton, USA; LRC Publishing House, Moscow, Russia, 2020
This book consists of three chapters. Chapter One introduces the fundamental dichotomy “visual (exogenous) vs. functional (endogenous)” cognitive units; these units are used to give non-verbal definitions of mental representations of various objects, actions, and situations. In particular, definitions of such concepts as GLASS, CHAIR, BANANA, TREE, LAKE, RUN, and some others are given. Chapter Two discusses how children form concepts, hierarchical relationships, and propositions (conceptual ‘utterances’). It is shown that the initial units of the child’s representation of the world are pre-conceptual cognitive units – mental representations of whole situations. In the course of two consecutive cycles in the child’s cognitive development, these units transform into (a) primary notions – object and motor concepts, and (b) binary role relationships. Together these constitute the elementary language of thought that, in the process of thinking, is used to build conceptual structures – propositions. It is further demonstrated that immediately after the formation of thought, the child begins to develop his native language in which object and motor concepts become initial meanings of nouns and verbs, while propositions become the meanings of the child’s expressions. The chapter concludes with a contrastive analysis of the proposed approach, and Aristotle’s and Chomsky’s views on thought and language. Chapter Three analyzes how a community’s culture affects its language. It is demonstrated that the progress of a community, the main constituent of the civilizational component of its culture, enhances the development of the content component of language by extending the range of its lexical and grammatical meanings. In the context of this analysis, Daniel Everett’s (2008) hypothesis that culture affects language structure is discussed. In the subsequent sections, models of the development of human and social activity are offered. These models comprise three components: Activity (main component), Thought, and Language (auxiliary components that ensure the successful realization of activities). The models are illustrated with examples of some concrete societies. "This new book by Alexey Koshelev presents an original theory touching upon the major cognitive, social, and cultural issues concerning language and thought in both phylogenetic and ontogenetic perspectives. Breathtaking in scope, it covers a wide range of controversial topics, from cognitive development to language acquisition, from the evolutionary history of language to the future of mankind, all viewed within a single syncretism-differentiation-integration framework. The author argues with Langacker over the boundary between linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge, joins Chomsky in discussion of the nature of reference, maintains the primacy of basic propositions rather than basic concepts in early childhood, and takes a stance on the emergence and further elaboration of concepts during a person's lifetime. Well-written, consistent, and inspiring, this book will be of interest to academics and lay-persons alike."-Tatiana Skrebtsova, St. Petersburg State University (Russia) "This is a wonderfully unconventional and thought-provoking book. It will be essential reading for beginning linguists who want to hone their critical thinking skills and develop cognitive research projects. Scholars will see it as a chance to 'synchronize watches' with the Koshelev's arguments against Witt-genstein's idea that boundaries of the category game are not fixed or David Marr's and Steven Pinker's thoughts on the problematicity of discriminating objects and their parts. The book is a good chance to have a confab with the author on the eternal issues of language of thought, on concept formation in a human child, on language, thought, and culture relation, or on what Homo per fectus should be to solve the social problems of Homo sapiens sapiens."- Liudmila Liashchova, Minsk State Linguistic University (Belarus) w w w. a c a d e m i c s t u d i e s p r e s s. c o m
Thinking in and beyond Language: On Linguistic Relativity and a Model of Conceptual Thought
This paper is concerned with the relation of thought and language, especially with the inner workings of human conceptual thought. The questions it set out to answer were whether humans think in language and how language might limit human thinking. What the current research has shown, is that both of these questions can be negated, as they do not stand up to scrutiny.
Universals and variation in language and thought: Concepts, communication, and semantic structure
Universals and variation in language and thought: Concepts, communication, and semantic structure Why do languages parcel human experience into categories in the ways they do, and to what extent do these categories in language shape our view of the world? Both language and nonlinguistic cognition vary across cultures, but not arbitrarily, suggesting that there may be universal constraints on how we talk and think. This dissertation explores the sources and consequences of universals and variation in language and thought in four parts.
The Language-Specificity of Conceptual Structure
Words and the Mind, 2010
University at Buffalo * This chapter has grown out of discussions among the members of various research projects at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, going back as far as the short-lived Change of State Project of 1994-1995. I would like to single out Sotaro Kita, who first introduced me and the other members of Change of State to the idea of a language-specific framing of Motion as state change, and Steve Levinson, who created the Motion Verbs stimulus, which elicited the data presented in section 3. I have had many insightful discussions of this topic with both of them over the years, and I am certain that neither of the two will completely agree with the take I develop here. Earlier versions of this chapter have been presented at the University at Buffalo, the University of Rochester, and the 2004 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas in Boston. I thank the participants of these presentations for comments and suggestions, and I am indebted to the editors of this volume, Barbara Malt and Phil Wolff, and to Carolyn O"Meara for insightful comments and general help with the final version of the chapter. The research presented here was fully supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the University at Buffalo.