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What Is The Relationship Between Language And Thought?: Linguistic Relativity And Its Implications For Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo
What Is The Relationship Between Language And Thought?: Linguistic Relativity And Its Implications For Copyright, Christopher S. Yoo
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To date, copyright scholarship has almost completely overlooked the linguistics and cognitive psychology literature exploring the connection between language and thought. An exploration of the two major strains of this literature, known as universal grammar (associated with Noam Chomsky) and linguistic relativity (centered around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), offers insights into the copyrightability of constructed languages and of the type of software packages at issue in Google v. Oracle recently decided by the Supreme Court. It turns to modularity theory as the key idea unifying the analysis of both languages and software in ways that suggest that the information filtering associated …