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Chargement... The Kingdom of Speechpar Tom Wolfe
   Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  pod_twit | Mar 30, 2020 |    ) Hillbillythomist | Dec 9, 2019 |  )1  charlie68 | Sep 23, 2019 | ) adaorhell | Aug 24, 2018 | Let us begin with the writing style. The most glaringly annoying and supremely unnecessary part of Wolfe's style is the excessive... use... of... ellipses... It is so distracting! There is simply no good reason to interrupt the flow of prose with ellipses when full stops, commas or semi-colons do the job perfectly well. The ellipsis has a certain limited function in writing, but it is limited for a reason. It can produce an interesting and deliberate effect once in a while, as in pages 4-5, where it is supposed to illustrate a jumbled train of thought as Wolfe considers an article by Chomsky et al. and draws the conclusion that since Darwin, "linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and people from every other discipline [have] discovered... nothing...about language". (p.5) But even when the use of ellipsis is deliberate (putting aside the patent untruthfulness of the above-quoted statement), it comes off as annoying and disruptive. What is, however, simply inexcusable, is the use of 1-2 ellipses on almost every single page, often for no (apparent) stylistic reason. Otherwise, the style is flashy and overly rambling. Wolfe often restates his point far too many times, like for example the different mnemonic examples (p.161-162) and digresses into strange and unrelated aspects of the narrative, for example recounting personal anecdotes and not linguistic arguments from Everett's book. The attempt to create a parallel between Darwin/Wallace and Chomsky/Everett also seemed a little bit strained and introduced some unnecessary bias. The case that Wolfe is trying to make (and that Everett has supposedly vindicated) is this: "language is an artifact, shaped by culture". How this conclusion is reached is incredibly unclear. Okay, Piraha proved recursion theory and some other aspects of the innate-language orthodoxy wrong. That I understood, and an important point was made about dogmatic attitudes and the danger of ego in science. It is fascinating how a single discovery can overturn so much scientific consensus. But Piraha and artifact-language theory only raise more questions than Wolfe ever attempts to answer. Even if language is an artifact, the question of how that artifact was constructed (rather than evolved) still remains. Pooh-pooh or bow-wow theories are still relevant, since it is unclear exactly how humans constructed languages even as simple (and complex) as Piraha. Language is shaped by culture, okay, but isn't culture also shaped by language? How do they interact? This is a chicken-and-egg question very relevant to the debate, but Wolfe nowhere even acknowledges it. Furthermore, Wolfe dismisses all Chomskyan thought as pie-in-the-sky theorizing, without every engaging with actual arguments AND research that might support innate language paradigms. It is true that Chomsky et al. often rely on theory rather than empiricism, but that doesn't change the fact that there are observations and research that seem to support innate language. The one counter-argument that Wolfe does note - that Piraha speakers easily learn a very different language, Portuguese, raises some interesting questions. Obviously Piraha speakers have full mental capabilities, but their cultural structure doesn't require language innovation, or perhaps their language inhibits cultural innovation... who knows? Wolfe is a good PR-spokesman for Everett, whose books do seem quite interesting and probably do tackle these questions in a serious manner. Also, even if language is an artifact that has enabled all of human civilization, how did humans gain the capacity for such creativity? And we are back to evolutionary questions. Tom Wolfe is more interested in linguistics as a story, rather than as a field of study. He wants to deflate Chomsky and Darwin and vindicate the underdogs more than he actually wants to understand anything about language. This book is good for some historical background behind The Origin of Species and certain developments in linguistics (although he does overestimate Chomsky's influence), but ultimately it is not greatly informative. It tries to reach conclusions but only raises questions and muddies the waters - not necessarily a bad thing, but Wolfe is overly ambitious and overly certain of his premise compared to the actual evidence he provides. The book suffers from an author who is obviously a stranger to the field of both linguistics and evolutionary biology, often making factually inaccurate statements and misunderstanding concepts. I would probably not recommend The Kingdom of Speech , but I might look into Dan Everett's book for a more satisfying approach to this new language-as-artifact paradigm. (  ) bulgarianrose | Mar 13, 2018 |
 Evolution, he argues, isn’t a “scientific hypothesis” because nobody’s seen it happen, there’s no observation that could falsify it, it yields no predictions and it doesn’t “illuminate hitherto unknown or baffling areas of science.” Wrong — four times over. We’ve seen evolution via real-time observations and ordered series of fossils; evolution could be falsified by finding fossils out of place, such as that of a rabbit in 400 million-year-old sediments; and evolution certainly makes predictions (Darwin predicted, correctly, that human ancestors evolved in Africa). As for evolution’s supposed failure to solve biological puzzles, Wolfe might revisit Darwin’s description of how evolution not only unlocks enigmas about embryology and vestigial organs, but clarifies some perplexing geographic ranges of animals and plants. Or he could rouse himself to read recent biology journals, which describe multitudes of evolutionary riddles being solved. ... But every part of this story is wrong. Chomsky’s views were influential but hardly, as Wolfe maintains, a universal paradigm — perhaps not even the majority view. And Everett didn’t slay universal grammar: Later linguists found that the Pirahã language indeed had recursion (e.g., “I want the same hammock you just showed me”). Finally, the technical notion of “recursion” was never the totality of Chomsky’s theory anyway. He highlighted the idea in a brief paper in 2003, but his theory always consisted of operations for merging words into bigger and bigger phrases, something no one disputes. ... All this grammatical structure, genetic data and uniquely human behavior implies something Wolfe cannot abide: that our language is — horrors! — the result of . . . evolution! But why would evolution do that? If the good Mr. Wolfe thought about it for a minute, maybe he’d see some advantage in our group-living, problem-solving ancestors producing and comprehending language — and realize that any mutually intelligible language needs, well, rules and conventions! And those who most effortlessly understand and follow such conventions — might they not have a reproductive advantage? And wouldn’t that produce genetic change? But of course he can’t bear to think about that . . . for it leads him back to bearded old Darwin. ... Somewhere on his mission to tear down the famous, elevate the neglected outsider and hit the exclamation-point key as often as possible, Wolfe has forgotten how to think. In an increasingly batty finale, Wolfe explains that Darwin and Chomsky screwed up by trying to apply evolutionary theory to language, which, as a man-made artefact, exists outside biological constraints. And it is language alone, Wolfe concludes, that accounts for humankind’s progress and fundamental difference from the rest of the animal kingdom. Well, where to start? Take Wolfe’s great revelation about the uniqueness and importance of language: that has long been a basic given. And the new post-Chomsky consensus follows the proposals of Terrence Deacon nearly 20 years ago that human language did indeed evolve, over several million years, beginning with the proto-languages of our ancestor hominids. Deacon also proposes that languages themselves are subject to intense evolutionary pressure; either they are learned by children or not, and if they aren’t, they die. So languages have evolved to be learnable by toddlers. Language isn’t Darwin’s nemesis as Wolfe thinks — it provides triumphant vindication of evolutionary theory’s almost-universal application. If Wolfe’s argument is all over the shop, his style also comes unstuck. All attempts to enliven what is basically a history of ideas with wordplay, daft ellipses and repetition of key words in this context seem rather lazy and silly and embarrassing, like a vicar getting down with the kids at the youth club by dancing the twist.
"Au commencement était le verbe. " Mais l'était-il vraiment ? Tom Wolfe, le maestro des raconteurs d'histoires, enquête sur les origines de son principal outil de travail : la langue. Pour lui, pas de doute, c'est bien au langage – et non à l'évolution – qu'on doit le développement des sociétés. D'Alfred Wallace, qui fut le premier, avant Charles Darwin, à défendre la théorie de la sélection naturelle, jusqu'aux néodarwinistes contemporains menés par le linguiste Noam Chomsky, Wolfe examine comment la science a essayé, en vain, de fournir une explication à ce don de la parole. Un petit bijou d'érudition, drôlement passionnant et d'une incroyable férocité envers l' establishment.[Source : 4e de couv.] Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)417.7Language Linguistics Dialectology and historical linguistics Historical linguistics (Diachronic linguistics)Classification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.38)
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2
He obviously tries to fit history into interesting narratives, so go into this looking for a light, fun treatment of the material. It's well-researched but doesn't shy away from bestowing real people with exaggerated personas (the most common one being the David-Goliath dynamic) in service of a dramatic narrative.
The only real complaint I have from this otherwise highly enjoyable book is that, towards the end, it feels rushed. The Darwin-Wallace is given the deepest treatment when its only job is to set background for the actual theme of the language debate. When we get to the language question, we're fed a binary David-Goliath narrative that isn't fleshed out as well as the chapters on Darwin. And the last ten pages, which had the potential to be the most interesting because that's when Speech-with-a-capital-S is introduced (alongwith the provocative statement "Language is Mnemonics"), are just disappointingly unsupported by any of the credible footnotes that held up the previous pages. It foreshadows something cool is coming, like maybe, language is neither universal nor an artifact. But that insight is never delivered, and we're stuck with a ten-page sermon on the importance of speech. It seemed like Tom worked his butt off on Darwin, read up on Chomsky, Universal Grammar, Everett, but prematurely abandoned the project when he reached the meat of the book, namely speech.
Still, enjoyable light-reading. (