ABSTRACT
Language is a highly integrated symbolic system; as cultural knowledge and behavior it is part of the automatized, taken-for-granted background of everyday life. The perspective from the language sciences therefore provides a contrast and a foil to the issues central to the culture debates among anthropologists. Language typologists do acknowledge certain phenomena that undermine their language-equals-cultural-group stance: for example, they recognize “language areas” where there is structural influence across unrelated languages in an intercommunicating area. The dominant perspective in cognitive science stresses the continuity between humans and other animals and views language as a biological phenomenon that maps in an unproblematical way onto perception, cognition, emotion, and social interaction. The relative frame of reference uses the speaker’s egocentric viewpoint to calculate spatial relations, as in the familiar left-right and front-back systems of European languages. The distinctive property of language is taken to be syntax, and the abstract core of syntax is a mental module that is universal and biologically innate.
