The cognitive roots of gender--论文代写范文精选

它不可避免地调用，必须回答一个问题之前,任何富有成效的讨论，关于认知和认知能力的本质，心理表征是什么?当代哲学理论表示理解为某些心理结构包括故意类别，构成的内容语言结构。下面的essay代写范文进行详述。

Introduction 
It will not be an exaggeration to say that modern linguistic science is in a profound theoretical and conceptual tangle. This is especially obvious in semantics as the “theory of meaning”, where the chaos is striking (Devitt & Sterelny 1999). It is because so far linguistics as a science has not succeeded in bringing together in an uncontradictory fashion the two concepts of language: language as a sign system for representing knowledge and language as a communicative activity. This is largely due to methodological shortcomings of the traditional philosophy of mind based on Cartesian logic with its ontological distinction between mind and body (Priest 1991; Schlechtman 1997; Kim 1998). 

The mainstream cognitive science approach to intelligence is largely computational: intelligent performance is viewed as certain symbolic processes involving representations (Fodor 1975, 1998; Newell 1990; Pylyshyn 1999; Fuchs & Robert 1999 inter alia). These processes account for such cognitive capacities as perception, language acquisition and processing, planning, problem solving, reasoning, learning, and the acquisition, representation, and use of knowledge (Lepore & Pylyshyn 1999). However, the concept of mental representation as used in contemporary literature is so fuzzy and elusive that its more or less consistent use unavoidably invokes one question that has to be answered prior to any productive discussion of the nature of cognition and cognitive capacities: What is a mental representation? In the contemporary philosophical theory of knowledge, representations are understood as certain mental structures including intentional categories (believe that p, wish that q) which constitute the content of linguistic (semantic) structures at the deeplevel. In psychology, representations are typically described as conceptual structures individuated by their contents (Margolis & Laurence 1999) and defined in accordance with traditional methods of analytical philosophy, that is, by positing sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that have to be met.

However, there is enough empirical evidence that refutes the very existence of rigid categories in a classical sense (Rosch 1973, 1977; Taylor 1989; Margolis 1994). Moreover, concepts, or knowledge structures rooted in intentional categorization, are much more complicated than what the traditional philosophical/semantic analysis claims them to be. Experimental data highlight the role experience plays in perception, categorization, and conceptualization. It has been shown that background knowledge affects categorial decisions (Palmeri & Blalock 2000; Gelman & Bloom 2000) and acquisition of new concepts (Nelson et al. 2000; Matan & Carey 2001), that meaning is specifically related to perception (Allwood & Gaerdenfors, 1999) which itself is influenced by categorization processes (Schyns 1997; Albertazzi 2000), and that object recognition and categorization is largely an on-going process, affected by experience of our environment (Wallis & Bülthoff 1999). In what follows I will attempt to offer a cognitive account of gender classification of nouns in Russian, departing from traditional semantic accounts and taking as a starting premise the experiential nature of knowledge represented in grammatical categories.

The problem with traditional semantic classification 
In Russian, the category of gender is a grammatical feature of pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the past tense. Adjectives are marked for gender to agree with nouns, and verbs in the past tense agree with nouns and pronouns. Therefore, of primary interest to those studying gender as a grammatical category, are pronouns and nouns. If we compare the ways gender is expressed in nouns and pronouns, we will see that they are basically inconsistent, but inconsistent in a different manner. Pronouns are marked for gender in the 3rd person singular and are unmarked in the 1 st and 2 nd person singular, this being a universal feature across languages (with the exception of Semitic languages).

This feature stems from the epistemic mode in which the world is categorized by means of the tripartite classification of entities into the subject of speech, the object of speech, and the matter of speech (Кравченко1992). The primary epistemic contrast “I - you” reflects the first and most important step in cognitive categorization which is the phenomenological core of language as a system of representation. The phenomenological nature of this epistemic contrast renders explicit gender identification irrelevant since such identification is not an issue in a canonical situation of utterance. Third person pronouns, on the contrary, reflect the twofold differentiation of real world objects on a primary feature “animate/inanimate”, and a secondary feature of gender. This classification is, obviously, pragmatic in that it is predetermined by the two existential imperatives for humans: survival (an animate object is a high-ranking source of danger) and procreation.

According to standard academic grammars, most nouns in Russian are marked for gender, with the exception of pluralia tantum nouns and the so-called “common gender nouns” such as сирота ‘orphan’, умница ‘smart one’, работяга ‘laborer’, etc. (Шведова, Лопатин 1989). To quote an authoritative source, “the category of nominal gender is a non-formative syntagmatically revealed morphological category manifest in the ability of singular nouns to relate preferentially to the gender forms of those word forms that agree (or are coordinated, in case of predicates) with the noun” (Русская грамматика 1980, 1: 465). However, definitions of this kind fail to give any rationale behind the gender classification of nouns, although common sense tells us that such a classification could hardly be irrational (cf. Lakoff 1987).（essay代写)

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