Adjectives

Question 1

Regal [riːɡəl]

Answer 1

Majestuoso, regio

1. The Wolof are the darkest, tallest and most regal-looking people in Africa

Question 2

Pigeonholed

Answer 2

Encasillado

1. Freud was pigeonholed by his contemporaries as a therapist.

Question 3

Orthogonal

Answer 3

Of two or more problems or subjects, independent of or irrelevant to each other

1. A lot of issues that at first appear to be orthogonal to our concerns turn out, on closer consideration, not to be.

Question 4

Attendant

Answer 4

Occuring with or as a result of

1. The book not only endorses the Katz-Postal principle which enacts the forementioned concern, and the principle’s attendant innovations, like semantic interpretation rules and trigger morphemes, it strengthens it, by adding base-recursion to the model.

Question 5

Apocryphal [əˈpɒkrɪfəl]

Answer 5

Apócrifo; of dubious veracity, of questionable accuracy or truthfulness; fictitious

1. Harvey Newquist reports an apocryphal story about an early English-Russian system that translated the biblical quotation “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” into Russian as “The vodka is strong, but the meat is spoiled.”
2. Suppose, for example, that one actually found the apocryphal grandmother cell. Would that really tell us anything much at all?

Question 6

Apodictic

Answer 6

Clearly established or beyond dispute, apodíctico

1. However, it is not unreasonable to think (hope?) that cognitive distance is not an unreasonable (note the hedging here) proxy for genetic distance and that an FL that is chock full of sui generis information presents more evolutionary work to build than one that is less cognitively distinctive. I will adopt this reasonable, though by no means apodictic, assumption going forward.

Question 7

Ineluctable

Answer 7

Ineluctable, ineludible, que no se puede evadir

1. Granted the premises, the conclusion is ineluctable.

Question 8

Burgundy [ˈbɜrgəndi]

Answer 8

Burdeos, color rojo púrpura oscuro

1. Her name was Shirley and we were both in a piano class. She wore burgundy overalls, which I for some reason found immensely charming.

Question 9

Enmeshed

Answer 9

Said of a thing entangled in sth

1. Individuals are enmeshed in society from birth.

Question 10

Ensconced [ɪnˈskɒnst]

Answer 10

Settled in a safe position

1. So if adults manifest domain-specific damage, and if it can be shown that infants come into the world with some domain-specific predispositions, doesn’t that mean that the nativists have won the debate over the developmentalists still ensconced on the theoretical shores of Lake Geneva?

Question 11

Apportioned

Answer 11

Distribuido

1. Functions in the brain seem to be apportioned asymmetrically to the hemispheres

Question 12

Groping

Answer 12

Moving or going about clumsily or hesitantly, showing or reflecting a desire to understand, esp. something that proves puzzling

1. Similarly, the compensatory respones, which in organic epigenesis consist of groping explorations coupled with action upon the environment, naturally show these characteristics reinforced in the case of cognitive development.

Question 13

Arcane

Answer 13

Understood by few, arcano

1. Finally, the project introduced a generation of experimental psychologists to the arcane world of FLT: The branch of mathematics that concerns itself with finite algorithms, which generate potentially infinite sets of strings.

Question 14

Farfetched

Answer 14

Unlikely, unconvincing, implausible

1. But if all aspects of a language developed like this, then we would expect each language to be a unique reflection of the cultural history of its people-group. It would be a farfetched coincidence if two unrelated languages, spoken on opposite sides of the world, ended up being essentially the same by this kind of gradual and accidental process.
2. Although I was glad to see that brain science was getting cover-story attention, some of the claims and statements in the article, specially those offered by childcare advocates who were not brain scientists, seemed far-fetched.

Question 15

Sundry

Answer 15

Of various kinds, several

1. Likewise, human linguistic expressions may lack a kind of significance that is exemplified by bee dances, or by invented formulae whose interpretations are stipulated. We can and should allow for many types of languages, whose expressions may be significant in sundry ways.

Question 16

Procrustean

Answer 16

Enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality

1. One of the persistent debates in the field has been whether the use of language for encoding and elaborating thought is primary—as an “inner tool”—or whether its use for communication was the consistent core function. I think that this is a misleading dichotomy. Contemporary language clearly functions both in our inner mental lives and for communication, and it seems Procrustean to denote one as “primary”.

Question 17

Herculean

Answer 17

Requiring great strength, hercúleo

1. After all, the average high school graduate knows up to 60,000 words, a vocabulary achieved with little effort, especially when contrasted with the herculean efforts devoted to training animals.

Question 18

Cavalier

Answer 18

Casually indifferent or disdainful, nonchalant, carefree, lighthearted

1. -English just isn’t a very serious scientific abstraction. Viewed that way, the English language has as much the status of a natural object as, say, the French liver does. -Hold on, I don’t know about the French liver, but I wouldn’t be so cavalier about dismissing even madder constructs.

Question 19

Judicious

Answer 19

Juicioso

1. Infinity is a powerful tool for abstraction, and its judicious use in mathematics allows a kind of certainty that is wonderfully satisfying.

Question 20

Idle

Answer 20

Pointless, lazy

1. A point aptly made by the linguist is that much of the traditional philosophy of mind and language is idle, because the most basic facts are drastically different from what they appear to be upon simple introspection or straighr conceptual analysis.

Question 21

Felicitous

Answer 21

Well chosen or suited to the circumstances

1. Universal Grammar is thus instantiated in the mind/brain of the speaker of a given language or dialect by means of a complete set of specifications for (as it were) a panel of “switches” (this felicitous metaphor is due to James Higginbotham)

Question 22

Ectopic

Answer 22

In an abnormal place or position, ectópico

1. Fly with an ectopic eye under the wing and on the antenna.

Question 23

Blistering

Answer 23

Expressed with great vehemence, virulento

1. An important challenge to this view arose in the late 1950s, when the young MIT linguist Noam Chomsky published his little book Syntactic structures, followed by a blistering critique of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist manifesto, Verbal behavior.

Question 24

Glaring

Answer 24

Blatant, obvious

1. So, logical behaviorism provides a construal of mental causation, and the glaring question is whether the construal it provides is adequately robust to do the jobs that need doing.

Question 25

Empyrean

Answer 25

Relating to heaven

1. I am making my plea by gentle example, rather than by tendentious frontal assault in the empyrean realm of philosophical abstraction.

Question 26

Preternatural

Answer 26

Beyond or not conforming to what is natural or according to the regular course of things

1. Hearing the expression “The bass from hell” one got a mental picture of man emerging from the pits of Hades to torture us with a preternaturally unpleasant singing voice.

Question 27

Reticent

Answer 27

Reticente; reluctant; not revealing one’s thoughts or feelings readily; hesitant or not wanting to take some action

1. This raises a question about which prior discussions of NS have been, it seems to us, remarkably reticent: it is pretty generally agreed, these days, that the Skinnerian account of learning is dead beyond resuscitation. So, if it is true that Skinner’s theory and Darwin’s are variations of the same theme, why aren’t the objections that are routinely raised against the former likewise raised against the latter?

Question 28

Rampant

Answer 28

Rampante; flourishing or spreading unchecked

1. Thus the story of English includes not only the changes in its sounds and grammar that transformed Old English into the language I am writing in, but at the same time rampant vocabulary mixture with other languages.

Question 29

Acrimonious [ˌakrɪˈməʊnɪəs]

Answer 29

Mordaz; angry, acid, and sharp in delivering argumentative replies

1. As the weeks went by, the meetings grew increasingly acrimonious, with the experts finding
   themselves divided into two groups they dubbed the “engineers” and the “logicians.”
2. It is a topic that we will try hard to unpack in the chapters that follow, but one to which we would like to devote some space in this one, as it is perhaps the origin of many misunderstandings and of some of the most acrimonious debates in the field of evolutionary linguistics.

Question 30

Desultory [ˈdɛz(ə)lt(ə)ri]

Answer 30

Inconexo; lacking a plan, purpose, or enthusiasm; (of conversation or speech) going from one subject to another in a half-hearted way

1. My own course of reading and of study has been somewhat desultory of late but not I trust without fruit.

Question 31

Pernicious

Answer 31

Pernicioso; having a harmful effect, especially in a gradual or subtle way

1. Furthermore, as Overall has shown, the prevalence of
   studies deficient in statistical power is not only wasteful but actually pernicious: it results in a large proportion of invalid rejections of the null hypothesis among published results.

Question 32

Perspicuous

Answer 32

Perspicaz; clearly expressed or presented

1. While this gives the device at least two discrete states and therefore may make it possible to convert it to a universal Turing machine, it does not thereby make it a practical device for AI or a perspicuous way of representing cognitive processes.

Question 33

Ostensible

Answer 33

Stated or appearing to be true, but not necessarily so.

1. Vygotsky’s book is ostensibly about the ‘problem of thought and language’, a problem that bothered his generation more than it bothers ours.