Well, there's no short or agreed answer to this question. Not even some kind of a vague consensus. On one end, you have people who think that having once upon a time heard the word "water", and as a result having added it to your vocabulary, is sufficient for competence. On the other end, there are people who think that there is a sense of "complete" or "independent" competence, which is supposed to be the basic sense, on which you have to be able to individuate (distinguish, more or less) water from all other things in order to be competent. This doesn't mean that you in practice have to be able to do this but rather that you know distinguishing characteristics of water. There's another view, too, probably mine, according to which there's no such thing as a "competent speaker". This phrase seems to suggest that there is some norm of competence that some of us meet and some of us do not, and I don't myself know where this norm is supposed to come from. Of course, if one wants to stipulatively introduce...

There are other sorts of examples that pose a more interesting question. There is a phenomenon known as "code switching" in which a bilingual speaker will begin a sentence in one language and end it in another. A simple example would be something like "The man in the funny hat tiene un perro loco". There are examples, better ones, in which it's clear the syntax isn't that of either of the two languages used by the speaker, since, taken as a whole, it violates both. This one is close, since, in English, adjectives generally precede the modified noun whereas, in Spanish, they generally follow the modified noun, but there are exceptions in both cases. One of the things that is interesting about these examples is that the places switching may take place are determined by the underlying grammatical form of the sentence, as described by theoretical linguistics, not by the surface form of the sentence. So this kind of phenomenon provides an interesting sort of evidence for the "psychological reality" of...

Linguistics is a branch of empirical science. The central questions in linguistics concern how human beings manage to speak and comprehend language. Philosophy of language is a branch of, well, philosophy. Empirical results are relevant to it, but its questions are not necessarily empirical in character.

It is an empirical question to what extent one's capacity for thought depends upon one's ability to speak various languages. See the entry on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on wikipedia . Regarding your other remarks: (i) It's not obvious that you needed English to learn French, since native French speakers did not; (ii) Even if you did, it is not obvious that you learned to speak French entirely by learning how to translate French into English. That said, an argument of the form you mention figures prominently in Jerry Fodor's The Language of Thought , with English replaced by the language of thought. The (extremely radical) conclusion of the argument is that all concepts are innate. Suffice it to say that even Fodor no longer accepts the argument.

No, that wouldn't be proof that Chomsky was right. No one ever denied that something innate was involved in language acquisition. And for all we've been told, it might be that the gene in question had something to do with a child's ability to dissect the acoustical stream at a stage far prior to anything linguistic. That said, the empirical evidence continues to suggest that some very general linguistic principles and categories are genetically provided.

Human beings and human languages are made for each other. So far aswe have reason to believe, any (normal) human being can learn any humanlanguage as his or her first language, and young children are capableof learning many languages, if they are exposed to them.It seems that, as one matures, the part of one's brain devoted tolanguage-learning more or less shuts off (much as, in many people, theenzymes devoted to digestion of milk cease to be produced). And so, atthat point, one's language-learning no longer proceeds in quite the way it would have when one was younger. So it's possible, to be sure, that some languages yield more easily to the methods of acquisition we are forced to employ as adults. But it's hard to imagine there would be any absolute measure here. It is, famously, not particularly difficult for native speakers of Portuguese to learn Spanish, but I doubt Spanish would be terribly easy for a native speaker of Japanese or even of German. So it seems plausible that there is some...

Sentences of this kind are sometimes called `Liar setnences', and they give rise to the Liar paradox. What is "weird" about such a sentence is is that, if it is true, then it follows that it is false, and if it is false, then it follows that it is true. Or, at least, that's what intuition suggests. That seems to imply that, if the Liar sentence is either true or false, then it is both true and false. If so, then either one has to deny that the Liar is either true or false or accept that it is both true and false. (There are other options, in fact, but I won't discuss them here.) I'm not sure what "ambiguous" sentences you have in mind. Perhaps you mean sentences like "John is bald", where one might have the intuition that he sort of is and sort of isn't. But does one have any inclination to say that he sort of is and isn't ? I don't think so. So my own sense, for what it's worth, is that this intuition isn't very robust. And, in any event, we don't seem to have any inclination to say that, if he...

I don't know that anyone's taken a vote on this, but the view that language is required for thought certainly was once a very popular one, and it is still held by many. Perhaps the most famous defense of this view is in Donald Davidson's paper "Thought and Talk". An even more radical view is that language is a prerequisite for conscious experience . This view has been defended by John McDowell, in his book Mind and World and in later papers. As often in philosophy, this debate often seems to turn on what people mean by certain terms. The key one here is "thought". The claim is not, or need not be, that language is required for any kind of mental state, but rather that it is required for a particular kind of mental state, for which we reserve the term "thought". And once it is clear what "thought" is being used to mean, a good deal of the seemingly radical character of the position evaporates. (That is not true of McDowell's view.) It is perhaps also worth adding that some psychologists have...

I'm not sure I understand what it is that you really want. Certainly in logic, there are well-established techniques for discussing the language of logic itself. See any good textbook on Goedel's Theorem (say, Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey, Computability and Logic ) for more on this. If it's natural language in which you are interested, then you might find the work of Richard Montague interesting. Montague was one of the first to try to extend logical techniques to provide a semantics for natural language. And then, of course, there is contemporary theoretical linguistics more generally.

What Alex says here seems right, including the last bit. This (5) I noticed Bob kissing Sue. seems a lot better, perhaps because "Bob kissing Sue" seems to denote an event in this usage, but the absence of the possessive also matters here. On the first, something like (6) I noticed Bob being tall, which involves a stative, is a lot worse, to my ear, anyway. And I get a strong contrast between these two: (7) I saw Bob's kissing Sue. (8) I saw Bob kissing Sue. Indeed, I'd mark the first ungrammatical. I think the questioner is probably interested in something like the following contrast: (9) I heard Bob propose to Sue. (10) I heard Bob proposing to Sue. (11) I heard that Bob proposed to Sue. The first two involve hearing Bob, whereas the latter need not. Similarly, "I noticed that Jill was sick" need not involve noticing Jill: You may have seen a note, or simply observed that she has not been at work lately. On the other hand, "I noticed Jill being sick", in so far as...