The Cognitive Wherewithal for Language

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Modern languages are created by people, but most of the time they are not invented by people. To explain to you what this new word means, i'm going to oftentimes be using words that already exist in my language. Thee's something that people like ar warf and supera might have referred to. His world view the kind of themes that permeate throughout a language get reproduced in some sense because they are liine with our cultural norms and all that.

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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