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Jill de Villiers , Ph.D.

What is the Use of Language?

What does language do for us, intellectually? There is a basic tension between two widely held views. First, it is believed that language is an indispensable tool of thinking, without which vast stretches of human cultural activity would not exist: history, literature, theories in science; Second, it is argued that language maps onto existing thoughts to enable us to communicate them, but does not add to or alter thoughts. In this talk I summarize evidence to question this latter conception, while steering carefully around the chasm of Whorfian linguistic relativity. I discuss first words, first phrases, embedded clauses and recursion to provide illustrations of the value added by language to our conceptual repertoires. In the final section I discuss some late developing linguistic phenomena that reveal the complex interplay of language use and inference.