Elif Batuman’s autofiction novel The Idiot follows Selin, a Harvard freshman in the mid 1990s. Selin initially declares her major in linguistics and describes two classes in more detail. One is with a soft-spoken professor who is said to be passionate about Turkic phonetics (no clue who this might be: anybody?) and the other is described as a Italian semanticist who wears beautiful suits (maybe this is Gennaro Chierchia; not sure). Selin is taken aback by the stridency with which her professor (presumably the Turkic phonetician) rails against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—she regrets how the professor repeatedly mentions Whorf’s day job as a fire prevention specialist—and finds linguistic relativity so intuitive she changes her major at the end of the book.
Batuman is not the only person to draw a connection between rejection of the stronger forms of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and generativism. Here’s the thing though: there is no real connection between these two ideas! Generativism has no particular stance on any of this. The only connection I see between these two ideas is that, when you adopt the i-language view, you simply have more interesting things to study. If you truly understand, say, poverty of the stimulus arguments, you just won’t feel the need to entertain intuitive-popular views of language because you’ll recognize that the human condition vis-à-vis language is much richer and much stranger than Whorf ever imagined.
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