Edward Gibson: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. That’s a very good question, is why do languages have more morphology versus less morphology? And I don’t think we know the answer to this. I think there’s just a lot of good solutions to the problem of communication. I believe as you hinted, that language is an invented system by humans for communicating their ideas. And I think it comes down to we label things we want to talk about. Those are the morphemes and words, those are the things we want to talk about in the world. And we invent those things and then we put them together in ways that are easy for us to convey, to process. But that’s a naive view, and I don’t … I think it’s probably right, it’s naive and probably right. Well, I don’t know if it’s naive. I think it’s simple.…

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