Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another

Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by eindiran on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @03:33AM (#24478747)

I feel like the Piraha stuff comes up every so often, and I feel obligated each time to link to the famous Nevins and Pesetsky rebuttal: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/94631/Nevins-...

Beyond the disagreement about what recursion is (as used to define the faculty of language narrow (FLN), from the Chomsky, Hauser, Fitch paper mentioned in the interview), there are significant problems with Everett's argument in general which are covered quite well in the rebuttal.

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Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by derriz on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @04:47AM (#24479149)

Here's Evert's response to the rebuttal: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215992069_Cultural_...

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Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by bloak on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:25AM (#24479352)

It doesn't inspire confidence that the German examples in that response are all wrong.

But I can recommend Everett's book "Don't sleep, there are snakes", which is only partly about language.

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Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by derriz on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @06:06AM (#24479566)

I'm curious (having some basic German) what's wrong with the German examples? Isn't most of the German taken from the article he is responding to?

edit - actually I think I see it - he's not inflecting the articles correctly after "von"?

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Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by Zickzack on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @07:34AM (#24480030)

The claim is that "the English possessive is potentially recursive, while the Saxon genitive [its counterpart in German] is not". I think they are confusing some issues. And by the way, I thought Saxon genitive was a term from English grammar.

Anyhow, in German, you can use the Saxon genitive in preposition, if the word in Genitive can be used like a personal name: "ich sehe Karls Auto". And it is true that you cannot recurse on that: "ich sehe Karls Bruders Auto" is not German, except maybe in German poems two hundred years ago, when the language was raped. Even "ich sehe meines Vaters Auto" will sound outside of the norm.

However, you can recurse in postposition: "ich sehe das Auto meines Vaters", "ich sehe das Auto des Bruders meines Vaters". You do not have to say "ich sehe das Auto vom Bruder von meinem Vater".

Several edits, sorry.

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Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by teraku on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @09:44AM (#24481104)

Would argue that "ich sehe meines Vaters Auto" is valid, but only for lyrics and/or old German.

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Re:Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another by probably_wrong on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @05:39AM (#24479428)

In regards to this discussion, there is this one tweet summarizing the main back and forth:

https://twitter.com/phonologist/status/982023915319906304

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