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Stenka25 Posted 11 years ago
Vocabulary
The meaning of dash (-)
the meaning of dash (-)
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
Some anthropologists have returned to an ethnographic record that used to trumpet differences among cultures and have found an astonishingly detailed set of aptitudes and tastes that all cultures have in common. This shared way of thinking, feeling, and living makes us look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operators, from romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every society ever documented. It's not that every universal behavior directly reflects a universal component of human nature — many arise from an interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal properties of the body, and universal properties of the world.
In the underlined sentence I want to know the meaning of dash.
It seems to mean ‘rather’ or ‘instead’ at a glance. (Because the former part of dash contrasts with the latter of dash.)
Do you agree with me?
If not, what is the right meaning?
Regards.
The passage below is from ‘the Blank Slate’ by Steven Pinker.
http://evolbiol.ru/blankslate/blankslate.htm
Some anthropologists have returned to an ethnographic record that used to trumpet differences among cultures and have found an astonishingly detailed set of aptitudes and tastes that all cultures have in common. This shared way of thinking, feeling, and living makes us look like a single tribe, which the anthropologist Donald Brown has called the Universal People, after Chomsky's Universal Grammar. Hundreds of traits, from fear of snakes to logical operators, from romantic love to humorous insults, from poetry to food taboos, from exchange of goods to mourning the dead, can be found in every society ever documented. It's not that every universal behavior directly reflects a universal component of human nature — many arise from an interplay between universal properties of the mind, universal properties of the body, and universal properties of the world.
In the underlined sentence I want to know the meaning of dash.
It seems to mean ‘rather’ or ‘instead’ at a glance. (Because the former part of dash contrasts with the latter of dash.)
Do you agree with me?
If not, what is the right meaning?
Regards.
Top answer
It doesn't have a meaning, it's punctuation used to increase legibility. Since there is a list separated by commas at the end of the sentence, the author probably chose to use a dash to separate the clauses instead of a comma. The sentence doesn't seem to clash to me.
- It doesn't have a meaning, it's punctuation used to increase legibility.
- Since there is a list separated by commas at the end of the sentence, the author probably chose to use a dash to separate the clauses instead of a comma.
- The sentence doesn't seem to clash to me.
- To paraphrase: Not all behaviors are from human nature, some come from the mind, body, or the world.
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4 Answers
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It doesn't have a meaning, it's punctuation used to increase legibility. Since there is a list separated by commas at the end of the sentence, the author probably chose to use a dash to separate the clauses instead of a comma.
The sentence doesn't seem to clash to me. To paraphrase: Not all behaviors are from human nature, some come from the mind, body, or the world.
The sentence doesn't seem to clash to me. To paraphrase: Not all behaviors are from human nature, some come from the mind, body, or the world.
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Stenka25 I want to know the meaning of the dash.There is no meaning. It's just a way of separating related thoughts that didn't seem to require separate sentences (in the opinion of the author). A semicolon would have done just as well.
Stenka25It seems to mean ‘rather’ or ‘instead’ at a glance.
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Thanks a lot as always, CJ.
Thanks a million for your pointing out my grammatical error.
And I'm totally absorbed in this book.
Thanks for everything.
Thanks a million for your pointing out my grammatical error.
And I'm totally absorbed in this book.
Thanks for everything.
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