Winter Storm Lunch talk: Omer Preminger (LING)

 

This talk is about domain-specificity: the question of whether the explanation for a given linguistic phenomenon lies with general cognitive mechanisms (domain-general), or must appeal to mechanisms that are specific to language (domain-specific). We will look at linguistic phenomena found in the Kichean languages (Mayan; Guatemala) and in Zulu (Bantu; South Africa, i.a.).

It is the case that, across different languages and constructions, one finds phenomena whose analysis has been stated in terms of a “scale” or “hierarchy”: a set of linguistic categories set in particular order. For example: human >> animate >> inanimate (one of the two scales considered to regulate Differential Object Marking; see Aissen 2003, and references therein). Against this 

backdrop, we can pose the following question:

 

 

We will first see data from Kichean that have been claimed to adhere to a scale based in “cognitive salience.” We will then juxtapose these with data from Zulu, where one finds the same combinatorics seen in Kichean, but operating over an entirely different set of operands. Crucially, “cognitive salience” does not seem to have any purchase on the operands involved in the Zulu case. Thus, insofar as we find the parallels between the Kichean and Zulu cases compelling, we have an argument against an explanation of the Kichean facts based in general cognitive mechanisms.

The larger point concerns how “scales” of this sort may be leveraged to investigate the domain-specificity of our linguistic capacities. Since such scales are often excellent candidates for a domain-general etiology (e.g. “cognitive salience”), they stack the deck against a domain-specific explanation. If even here we can show that a domain-specific explanation is indispensable, we arrive at a particularly strong argument for the domain-specificity of linguistic knowledge.