Nashef, A Language of One’s Own Chapter 1

2002

As Dickinson notes, brains have a remarkable capacity that differentiates them from other sorts of material substances: the ability to represent things intentionally. Although we often take this capacity for granted, it is no small feat that we are able to entertain the thoughts of a woman who has long since died. Many consider Dickinson to be a gifted poet, yet her ability to exploit the representational capacity afforded by language is shared by all humans. This capacity allows us to communicate with one another across distances of time and space and to affect one another's behavior. Natural language is a species-specific system that enables speakers to evoke cognitive models in listeners via the systematic combination of vocal sounds or visual signs. A schematic characterization of the speech event begins with the speaker's desire to communicate a message and ends with the listener's apprehension of that message. In this simplified model of the communicative act, lang...

When we speak of "universal languages" without at least roughly defining the intended concept, we find ourselves on various slanted planes, sliding from one error into another. The plane, for example, on which music exists as a "universal language," is slanted in relation to the planes where the universal languages "Esperanto" and "symbolic logic" are to be found, where these two planes intersect each other. However, if one tries to avoid this slide into errors by roughly outlining the concept of "universal language" (for example, asking what is meant by the word "language," and for which society a language is "universal"), then one runs the risk of losing grasp of the concrete problem that was originally meant by the word "universal language." This is an unpleasant situation. The situation is uncomfortable because the concrete problem is about to push previously invisible aspects to the foreground, becoming urgent (not to say flammable). Before our eyes, a whole series of codes is about to become universal languages (traffic codes, codes of fashion, gestures, nutrition, etc.), and it is beginning to show that universal languages not only serve to facilitate understanding between different language groups but also contribute to the dissolution of these groups. Therefore, it is more important than ever not to lose grasp of the concrete problem hidden behind the words "language" and "universality," which becomes the problem of massification when these two words are combined. As soon as one steps back from the question of universal languages to see them in the current, concrete context, it becomes apparent that, in this respect (as in so many others), we are in an end time in the apocalyptic sense of the word. The confusion of languages imposed on us in Babel is about to be overcome, and nothing stands in the way of the

Komunikacija i kultura online, 2018

The Philosophical Review, 1972

In this volume Martin Heidegger confronts the philosophical problems of language and begins to unfold the meaning begind his famous and little understood phrase "Language is the House of Being." The "Dialogue on Language," between Heidegger and a Japanese friend, together with the four lectures that follow, present Heidegger's central ideas on the origin, nature, and significance of language. These essays reveal how one of the most profound philosophers of our century relates language to his earlier and continuing preoccupation with the nature of Being and himan being. One the Way to Language enable readers to understand how central language became to Heidegger's analysis of the nature of Being. On the Way to Language demonstrates that an interest in the meaning of language is one of the strongest bonds between analytic philosophy and Heidegger. It is an ideal source for studying his sustained interest in the problems and possibilities of human language and brilliantly underscores the originality and range of his thinking.

Musicals at the Margins, 2021

What does it mean to counter-exemplify a linguistic universal? In the sense that it matters here, a linguistic universal is something stated on properties unique to linguistic form, and if Evans and Levinson are right, it is pointless to look for these, since the set of such properties is empty. They contend that 50 years of generative grammar have produced no evidence of universals pertaining to linguistic structure, that it is long past time to quit, and that cognitive science has been misinformed about the success of the linguistic enterprise, particularly the view that there is any principled form to language that arises from any human ability that is specifically linguistic. I think that they are mistaken on all counts and that their view of how linguists are to proceed in the face of linguistic diversity is a straightjacket which will be an impediment to discovering the true richness of the diversity they celebrate. On the contrary, with a short demonstration I will support the view that the richness of linguistic structure is both evidence of our innate capacity and that a linguistic research paradigm that appeals to abstract, specifically linguistic, entities is the right partner for modern science applied to other cognitive domains.

This paper investigates a range of structural and lexical aspects of the Pitkern-Norf'k language, which characterize it typologically as an 'ecologically embedded' contact language. Lexical items spanning various lexical fields are employed to illustrate key criteria in the relationship between place-knowledge and linguistic knowledge. It is claimed that ecolinguistics needs to supplement philosophical reflection and language critique with a staunchly empirical approach.

Philosophy Today, 2020

In this paper I demonstrate that the analysis supporting Derrida's identification of the desire for a pure, originary idiom in Heidegger's reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III provides a framework with which we can understand the call for a new language in Monolingualism of the Other. While acknowledging how his interpretation of Heidegger provides important insights that guide Derrida's later negotiation with the dual dangers of nationalism and colonialism, I argue that the proximity to Heidegger, manifest in Derrida's articulation of a desire for language in the singular, threatens to close down possibilities latent in the promising definition of deconstruction as plus d'une langue-both more than a language and no more of a language.