Cladistic language concepts

[Ghiselin, Michael]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
               Thanks for your very thoughtful commentary.  What you
          say points out the fact that when we start asking what some
          of these fundamental units are, they become increasingly
          problematic; and when we try to compare across kinds of
          systems the parallels are evident, but they too are
          problematic.
               The problems of what a species is and of what a
          language is are not unusual.  Indeed I would be surprised to
          find a theoretical term in any science that is not hard to
          define in a way that pleases all the practitioners.  Small
          wonder then, that we cannot easily find exact parallels
          between the fundamental units of interest to linguists and
          to biologists.  We can say that there are phonemes, words
          etc., and we can say that there are nucleotide pairs ...,
          but what we are looking at is hierarchical structure without
          exact functional correspondence.  Geneticists do not agree
          as to what a gene is, though they work with them and talk
          about them all the time.
               One point that I still would like clarified is the
          relationship between the speaker of the language and the
          language itself.  The speaker is a part of a language
          community and the vocabulary, grammar etc. are parts of the
          language.  The speakers may be said to know, understand,
          speak, participate in, etc. the language.  But we usually do
          not call them parts of the language.  There are a whole
          range of related problems with respect to culture in
          general.  The way Tylor defined "culture" it includes
          concrete artifacts.  There must be an extensive literature
          on such issues.  But such material as I have read (including
          the 1952 review by Kroeber and Kluckhohn) does not really
          face up to the ontological issues.
          MG