fodor on pinker [1 of 2] (was Re: [lbo-talk] Altruism & Evolution?)

[joanna bujes]

" There is also, as the linguists have
been claiming for years, a lot of indirect evidence that points to much
the same conclusion: all human languages appear to e structurally
similar in profound and surprising ways."

I don't know what structures they have in mind. Last time I looked into linguistics the consensus was that the invariants were things like deictic markers (here/there, this/that, I/you/he, we/they), elements that derive from the situation of discourse itself taken as a point of origin. Nothing surprising about that, and nothing that suggests genetic influence. 

Joanna