Links are easy (just google for “Tomasello language” or something like that). Magic takes a bit longer. I’ve glanced through some of the links, and the single best thing I’ve come up with is this only moderately turgid paper: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/18245487.pdf - But I haven’t read very far in this literature, so there are likely other things that are better.
One of the characteristic of Scientific American is that proponents of cutting-edge theories have free reign in their articles. This is a problem if the theories turn out to be merely eccentric dead-ends, and the magazine doesn’t seem concerned to present orthodox theories as any kind of balance.
I’m glad you like my posts, but I have some mundane grammatical questions. For example - this is an English, not a Welsh question - when you say “I want to watch the football,” does that mean “the football game?” I’m on the other side of the water, and here “the football” can only refer to the physical ball.
Not Aran, but my pennyworth - Over here, “football” refers to the game as much as words like “rugby”, “cricket”, “ice hockey”, “netball”, “American football”.
You will hear something like "I want to watch (x) " /“I like watching (X)” (speaking of it generally) or " I want to watch the (x) " (normally speaking of a particular game) of any of them, in my experience.
Football, of course, also refers to the ball. (As, indeed, does the term “American football”!)
That counts as genuine magic for me - it’s the first paper I’ve read that seems to be broadly in line with what I think makes the SSi Method work. Which is pretty exciting…
[If only because it will in due course provide me with an answer to post-docs who tell me that what we’re doing won’t work because it was discredited in the 70s…;-)]
My suspicion that SSi is a giant experiment to confirm Aran’s theories was not undermined by the observation in the article that more studies are required about multiligualism (paragraph 5.2).
