Another difference bites the dust
People have been trying to prove for a long time that humans are fundamentally different from animals instead of simply being higher on a continuum. First it was tool use, then self-awareness, culture, and language, but animals have been shown to have all the same faculties, albeit less developed of course. Each time those claiming a divide are
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I didn't post a story. Too painful to think about still. Soon, I expect.
He seems invested in proving that humans are special, that we have an innate ability that no animal does
Yup, that. And much much more. It's his syntax that I was studying.
I agree with you re animals and humans differing in development. I've always thought that. And I think that the sign language studies with primates go a long way to show that.
I thought your thesis was about recording a dying Native American language. In what way was it Chomskyan (and why)?!
No, my thesis was about the nature of subjects and objects of Nakota sentences. It was a very theoretical thesis. I went about showing that the prefixes on the verbs that denote the subject and the object are agreement morphemes, not the actual subjects and objects of the verb, even though they are often the only marker of the subject or object. I'll gladly give you a copy if you're interested, but I gotta admit, it's a difficult (and boring!) read.
Now, why was it Chomskyan? Short answer: because my advisor was. Longer answer: Because that's the theory I know better than any other, and learning another theory well enough to do it justice was more work than I could take. Plus, I'd have had to have found one that was compatible with someone on my committee, which meant likely doing one called Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), which while it is a really cool theory, it would have been really a challenge, and I already had a pretty big challenge dealing with an almost extinct language.
* Shouldn't the word for a person who specializes in linguistics be linguistician to distinguish it from linguist, which is usually taken to mean someone who speaks several languages?
Ya know, that usage bugs the hell out of me. A polyglot is someone who speaks many languages. But you know, your word linguistician would totally work for me. :)
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