Part of
Constructing Languages: Norms, myths and emotionsEdited by Francesc Feliu and Josep M. Nadal
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 13] 2016
► pp. 321–336
I examine four cases which are instances of the interference of emotional factors in the formulation of linguistic analyses: the determination of the primeval language, the chronology of the “birth” of Romance languages, the interpretation of two glottonyms in a 9th century Arabic text, and some ideas from Menéndez Pidal about the history of Spanish. In each of these four cases an illegitimate object is “invented” by transferring the positive subjective evaluations of the object, as if they are objective properties, to the object, and a fallacious argumentation is provided.