The Conlang FAQ

Language intuition

adapted from a 27 Nov 96 post by Mark Line

Chris Palmer wrote:

My own feeling is that a lot (majority?) of the learning we do is "passive," i.e., TV rams it down our throats or we wait for the teacher to just tell us the right answer -- the result of all this being that we don't actively learn.
That could certainly be a major factor -- people's intuitions about language as a phenomenon do not progress beyond those of a six-year-old because (from that age on) they are systematically trained to sit still, shut up, and listen carefully for the answers to questions that are going to be on the test. I see people in their 40's and 50's doing exactly the same thing in engineering meetings. I'm usually just waiting for somebody to ask, "Is this going to be on the test?"

Mark, do you know of any literature discussing this point about "baseline naivete" on Fourth World cultures? Sounds cool.
Not off-hand, but I remember the anthropological literature on oral folklore being chock full of descriptions of the amazing sophistication with which all but the village idiot approach their language and its effective use, in some cultures. In modern linguistic terms, most of this sophistication is in the area of pragmatics (every imaginable kind of verse; rhetorical figures; metaphor; prose style typology). That sophistication cannot subsist on pragmatics alone, though, and speakers show broad expertise in what you might want to call amateur lexicography and compositional semantics ("what's the difference between 'upambuba' and 'bubampapa'?"). IIRC, many of these cultures are the same ones in which oratory, debate and on-the-fly versification constitute(d) an extension of one's manhood. Samoa comes to mind.

In America, the extension of one's manhood comes from being like The Fonz.


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