Is There a Difference Between Agentive and Agentive?

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Linguistic structures in your language determines what you will kind of be less likely to question. There's been interesting work, which i talk about in the book, a some of these studies bylera bardiski and collea s that look at kind of tap into that. So one of those, one of those descriptions, is kind of agentive. And another description is, is not agentive. It turns out that people, depending on how you describe it, even though what they see is the same, they will make different kinds of judgments. Those things kind of bleed into social justifications. I think there are some really interesting other cases at iv talk about in this

We describe the world using language — we can’t help it. And we all know that ordinary language is an imperfect way of communicating rigorous scientific statements, but sometimes it’s the best we can do. Linguist N.J. Enfield argues that the difficulties run more deeply than we might ordinarily suppose. We use language as a descriptive tool, but its origins are found in more social practices — communicating with others to express our feelings and persuade them to agree with us. As such, the very structure of language itself reflects these social purposes, and we have to be careful not to think it provides an unfiltered picture of reality.

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N.J. Enfield received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Melbourne. He is currently a professor of linguistics and Director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. His recent book is Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists.

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