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WEIRD languages have misled us, too

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2010

Asifa Majid  and
Stephen C. Levinson
Asifa Majid
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500AH, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/[email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen
Stephen C. Levinson
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500AH, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/[email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen
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Abstract

The linguistic and cognitive sciences have severely underestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in the world. Part of the reason for this is that we have projected assumptions based on English and familiar languages onto the rest. We focus on some distortions this has introduced, especially in the study of semantics.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 33 , Issue 2-3 , June 2010 , pp. 103
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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