#linguistics
References tagged "linguistics"
Animal Symbolicum
Cassirer's redefinition of the human: not animal rationale (the rational animal) but animal symbolicum — the symbol-making animal. We don't encounter reality directly; we wrap it in symbols first. Language, myth, art, science: all symbolic forms that constitute rather than describe the world.
Deconstruction
Derrida's method of reading texts against themselves — finding the internal contradictions, the suppressed alternatives, the binary oppositions that structure meaning while pretending to be natural.
Inner Speech
Vygotsky's theory that thought is internalized dialogue — social speech turned inward. Thinking isn't prelinguistic; it's language that learned to be silent.
Language Games
Wittgenstein's late philosophy: meaning is not a private mental image but a social practice. Words mean what they do within the 'language games' of a community. To understand language is to know how to use it — and use is always embedded in a form of life.
Linguistic Relativity
The hypothesis that the language one speaks shapes — or in its strong form, determines — the thoughts one can think. Foundational to understanding how AI trained on English inherits English conceptual structures.
Speech Acts
Austin's theory that language doesn't just describe — it does things. Promising, commanding, christening, apologizing: these utterances don't report on reality, they change it. Words as actions, not labels.
Structural Linguistics
Saussure's foundational theory that language is a system of differences, not a set of labels for pre-existing concepts. The meaning of a word is defined by its relations to other words — which means language partly creates the concepts it expresses.
Universal Grammar
Chomsky's theory that humans are born with an innate language faculty — deep structural principles shared across all human languages — complicating linguistic relativity's claim that language fully determines thought.
Zone of Proximal Development
Vygotsky's theory that cognitive development happens in the space between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with support. Language is not a communication tool but the primary medium through which higher-order thought develops — thinking is internalized dialogue.