I recently did a video on the relationship between linguistics and language learning. I am trying to explain that in many ways linguistics contributes to an over complication of language learning and language instruction. I referred to the work of Amorey Geithin. Here is his article called ” The Mirage of Linguistics”.
To give you a taste, here is the table of contents of Geithin’s article. Enjoy!
Contents
The importance of understanding the nature of language and thought
Language supposed to be the key to human thought and personality
Chomsky’s argument for the existence of ‘universal grammar’
Chomsky’s and Pinker’s mistakes regarding the forming of questions
Intonation is more basic to question meanings than structure
Diversity, not universality, characterize question forms
Identical sequences of words can be both statements and questions
Questions that are completely structure-free
Pinker’s and Chomsky’s double error regarding question formation
Many languages do form questions by mirror-reversal
Reversed pairs can be attached to longer sentences to form questions
Grammatical abstractions cannot exist independently of meaning
The non-existence of grammatical ‘dummies’
How do you determine whether a language is a VO language or an OV language?
Pinker has not told us the whole truth about VO and OV word orders
Meaning must come before categorization into parts of speech
Further demonstration of Chomsky’s illogicality regarding meaning and grammar
Pinker’s muddled view of the connection between concepts and parts of speech
The square pegs of reality forced into the round holes of language
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1 comments on “The Mirage of Linguistics”
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Steve, I am indebted to you for this link to such a brilliant thinker on language learning, not unlike yourself. I feel his article on “the Fraud of the English-teaching Industry” raises a lot of question that have yet to be answered for.
Also, to let you know I’m still an avid user of LingQ as I’m learning Japanese from Tokyo. I’m finding it very transparent thanks to my fluency in Korean, and the number of excellent resources available for study (including LingQ of course, but also the flashcard application Anki). I feel that going from Korean to Japanese must be somehow easier than the other way around. I wonder, are you still continuing your journey towards acquisition of Korean?
P.S I’m doing an MA TESOL at the moment and have plans to publish some research that uses LingQ in the future. I’ll get in touch with you about the details if I ever get anything accepted.