Re: Gender in language

Nathan Sanders wrote:

[snipped]

You still haven't given any evidence that 'some linguistic feature
(or more appropriately, the *potential* for that feature) is "hard-
wired"'. Your words.

(And here, the "linguistic feature" we're discussing is gender, just
in case you try to pull a sly switch on me like you did with the
"feature" into "ability to learn a feature" thing.)

The nativist position is that we are pre-wired, hard-wired, call-it-
what-you-will, to learn the specifics of the human language we're
presented with when children. If you start saying that "most ardent
nativists" are merely claiming that we have innate general-learning
mechanisms, then you've widened the label and gone into some other
realm that I would hesitate to call "linguistic nativism", and you
would still have all that Universal Grammar bollocks to explain as
being general learning rather than language specific.

It seems to me like you're trying to have your cake, eat it, *and* sell
it for $1 a slice.

--
johnF
"Linguistics studies a living language as if it were a dead language,
and native language as if it were an alien tongue[.]"
-- _Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_, Valentin Volosinov
.

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