The central topic of
this proseminar will
be to challenge a fairly widespread conviction that languages differ beyond
limits and in unpredictable ways. Under this view, logically, there is no such
a thing as an ‘impossible language’. Evans and Levinson (2009) define this point
fairly conspicuously: “languages differ so fundamentally from one another at
every level of description (sound, grammar, lexicon, meaning) that it is very
hard to find any single structural property they share”. During the proseminar
this claim will be confronted with arguments by different authors and examples
from distinct languages. The issue of
language diversity will be addressed from a variety of viewpoints, and some of
the questions to raise will be: Why is there language diversity at all? How is it manifested? Are there language
universals and the universal grammar?
- Teacher: Przemysław Tajsner