Emergence and epiphenomena (5)

[Cameron, Richard]

Hi folks, I find the following comments from Rob Freeman very interesting.

"...you must also allow for the possibility of discontinuous change.

 What evolves gradually is the corpus of usage. Grammar is in a state of
 constant, discontinuous change. It is that which is responsible for the
 novelty of syntax."

    A question or two:
    What do you mean by discontinuous change?
    How would you know that "Grammar is in a state of constant, 
discontinuous change."?

    No challenge is implied, just curiosity. Thanks - Richard Cameron



On Sun, March 5, 2006 3:38 pm, Rob Freeman said:
> On Sunday 05 March 2006 05:34, Salinas17 at aol.com wrote:
>> In a message dated 3/3/06 4:38:39 PM, lists at chaoticlanguage.com writes:
>>
>> <<If anyone is interested in an implementation of this they can write to
>> me
>> and I can give them a model, right down to algorithms.>>
>>
>> Or you can summarize it here so the rest of the list can see it.  I
>> don't
>> suppose anyone would complain.
>
> No point.
>
> By way of flavor, though, I think contemporary work which attempts to
> explain
> language in terms of emergence, such as that of Joan Bybee (also
> Cognitive,
> Langacker, etc, and almost all exemplar-based or connectionist NLP) is
> chiefly limited by a failure to realize it is not enough that your model
> be
> based on generalizations of usage, you must also allow for the possibility
> of
> discontinuous change.
>
> What evolves gradually is the corpus of usage. Grammar is in a state of
> constant, discontinuous change. It is that which is responsible for the
> novelty of syntax.
>
> -Rob
>