You realize that this is parody, right? And skilful parody. It squeezes in five precisely analogous constructions to intensify metaphors within in the peeve.
really makes my blood boil [but not really] truly a plague [but not truly] really laid-back [but not really] actually drives me insane [but not actually] In fact, it’s quite soul-crushing. [but that’s not a fact]
Another giveaway is the tongue-in-cheek
which is a parody of similar constructions such as
I’m not a racist, but…
I generally support LGBT rights, but…
Yes, if you give words vague meanings then they all sort of mean the same thing. That’s not an argument in favor of doing this.
Learn what the different connotations are between similar words and use the one that is closest to what you mean to say. Don’t just reduce them all to their lowest common denominator.
You seem to make all kinds of claims, like what words mean irrespective of what dictionaries say they mean, without feeling the need to provide any evidence. Maybe he’s the same.
True, no one ever speaks with any sort of verbal tic. Like, never, man, you know? Like, literally.
A few things and perhaps final things to clarify, and I’ll try to be brief this time.
No, that is not my claim. My claim is that there are both beneficent and detrimental factors driving language, and that mistakes and stupidity are usually detrimental.
The above is just a quick reference to the overall post I want to respond to.
You’re quite correct that I didn’t explicitly address your claims about “unconscious learning” which may have made some of my response seem confusing, and this is my fault. But this form of learning is a phenomenon in the category of “obviously true” and the interesting questions in linguistics don’t arise from the fact of its existence, but from trying to understand the underlying mechanisms. Chomsky, for a notable instance, posits three fundamental factors affecting language development in the individual:
[ul]
[li]the genetic endowment [/li][li]experience [/li][li]principles not specific to the faculty of language[/li][/ul]
The “genetic endowment” means those innate skills I spoke of, which have a strong role for instance in the early development of generative grammar skills, which allows even very young children to form and understand arbitrary new sentences that are structurally correct, and to distinguish meaningful sentences from the sorts of nonsense phrases you cited earlier. By “innate” here I mean not just skills we are born with, but skills whose development is directly enhanced by intrinsic genetically endowed language skills, underlying what Chomsky calls the “universal grammar”. This is completely distinct from anything children might learn, “unconsciously” or otherwise, from purely behavioral mechanisms stemming from general cognitive abilities, like imitation of adult speech, rewards, and explicit teaching. The extent to which the two factors predominate is, in a nutshell, at the core of the formalism/functionalism debate.
Notice that “learning” – either implicit or explicitly taught – is not among these factors. That’s because it’s a higher level function that spans all of them. And broadly speaking, language acquisition processes are a continuum that, moving from the first to the third of these factors, take us from genetically enabled mechanisms of implicit learning to the formalized learning of advanced vocabulary and formal grammar.
With that in mind, we can examine this recurring claim of yours that “99%” of our fundamental [language] skills are acquired through unconscious learning. Aside from some dubious statements you made about how this learning actually works, this is simply addressing the present discussion at completely the wrong level. It’s analogous to making such claims about the development of our visual skills, which is computationally a very complex process, yet it produces skills that are very rudimentary from a practical human standpoint. A great deal of “unconscious learning” occurs before we can properly deal with the three dimensional world; even so simple a thing as understanding that the hidden sides of objects exist even though we can’t see them, and conjecturing what they probably look like.
For instance visual skills are a necessary but far from sufficient condition to enable us to be good drivers, which requires competence at a much higher level of abstraction that involves some combination of formal learning and experience. Language is no different, because it involves a similar combination of genetic endowment, implicit and explicit learning, and artificial formalisms. We disagree on the importance of the latter. So be it.
It obviously meant that she had been quoting him verbatim. Wait! Maybe Hillary was using “literally” merely as an intensifier, as in “you bloody well know that you did say those things (more or less)”! IOW, perhaps she was using “literally” figuratively.
Perhaps we should ask the descriptivists in the thread to tell us exactly what she meant, since they seem to be preternatural analysts of the language and are never confused about anything.
She meant “literally” as in “not metaphorically.” That you couldn’t figure that out on your own explains a great deal about your difficulties with this word.
I knew you were a mind reader! But what does this mean? A lot of what she said consisted of paraphrases of his words and inferences from them. Does that mean he “literally” said those things? Or that he only implied those things? Or what?
Here’s a great example of where this kind of usage takes us:
Then came the part of Clinton’s harangue where she literally said Trump needed psychiatric help:
“Literally”? Really? Nowhere was such a statement made. But hey, a statement was made the evoked some mental imagery that associated the man with psychiatric assessments, metaphorically speaking, of course.
The new definition of “literally”: (1) in a literal sense, (2) metaphorically and not literally at all, (3) not really literally, but something close to it, (4) oh, what the hell, whatever the fuck you want it to mean!
Of course all language has the potential for ambiguities. But the precision of language, and many other criteria like the effectiveness of its creative elements, are all objective measures of its communicative power, although the relative importance of different criteria depends on context.
This is a great thread, with some of my commentary here, that illustrates real and instructive examples of the human language instinct in action. It truly does, and it’s remarkable how appallingly bad most of these linguistic affectations are. To be clear, this is not an argument for a static language, or an argument against metaphors, or any other stupid inference that anyone might try to make, and no language ever will or should be static. The mocking in the other thread is just what it is: evidence of my argument about the counterproductive nature of the ignorant misuse of language.
That’s not what language instinct means. You’ve been name-dropping Chomsky and Pinker and throwing in a mish-mash of technical terms and you don’t understand this?
What do you think you’re demonstrating by linking to a thread mocking corporate jargon? Are you now misrepresenting descriptivist linguists as people who are unable or unwilling to hold stylistic views on what constitutes clear and elegant use of language?
Oh, please. Calm down. The world doesn’t revolve around Steven Pinker and it wasn’t a reference to the book – it was a humorous jab but at the same time a semi-serious reference to our natural proclivities to play with language. It’s so common today in corporate cultures, among teenagers, and really in any group trying to use language to elevate or distinguish its discourse. The funny and whimsical point is just how bad* most of these efforts are. For the record, my last serious response was #208, if there was something substantive you actually wanted to say.
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A value judgment, to be sure. But one widely shared.
Now, THIS is a good example of the wrong use of “literally”. Because the context clearly implies the literal use of the word. The previous example was not, because there was from very little to no ambiguity.
So, in a thread where we had both recently been discussing Pinker’s book entitled The Language Instinct, you’re saying that you decided to use the same term language instinct to mean something completely different from Pinker’s thesis? You’re claiming it’s an expression that you just coined, independent of Pinker, with a different meaning, that has no relationship to his book?
If you think this is ambiguous, you have argued yourself out of your ability to speak English.
You think that the fact that Clinton did not literally say what Breitbart claimed is proof that Breitbart’s assertion was ambiguous? This is U.S. politics! The meaning of Breitbart’s assertion is abundantly clear, and it is a LIE.
Why would the author write something that is a lie and then immediately follow it by a quote that reveals it to be a lie? Clearly the writer at Brietbart had something else in mind. It’s a lot more plausible that he was confused about what the word “literally” means and/or believed that his readers would be. I just think it’s symptomatic of how the meaning of the word has been undermined by poor usage. There was another article that referenced the same quote and described it as “She more or less literally tells Trump to seek psychiatric help”, which at first blush might seem less egregious but it actually supports the claim of poor usage, because it’s really a lot like saying “more or less exactly”.
Quite frankly I think we’ve each invested a fair amount of effort into arguing our respective sides of this debate, to your credit and I think to mine, so I’ll take a second to seriously respond to this absolute utter nonsense rather than just ignoring it. This particular digression you’ve gone off on is exceptionally stupid and seems to be another ratcheting up of the increasingly strident position that anyone who disagrees with you must be badly misinformed on basic science.
I made a reference to a humorous thread with a semi-serious point about how bad some of these language affectations are. The playful implication I had in the back of my mind was that maybe in some distant way our innate instinctive sense of language might have some relationship to these cases of business executives constantly meddling with the language and inventing bizarre euphemisms, similar to the language affectations of young people and in-groups of all kinds. But the idea that I was claiming that the sort of hilarious language affectations often found in business is literally what Pinker’s book is about is delusional, and if you believe that you’re taking all this far, far too seriously.
