new ideas

[aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk]

Dear Margaret,

If translational symmetry describes the echo, it may also also bear on 
syntactic merger and the surface expression of endocentricity in the 
auditory medium of spoken language - making Merge a plausible case of 
linguistic new from old. But do you mean that mathematical principles 
like translational symmetry are sufficient to explain all properties of 
what have been postulated as linguistic universals? or that 
translational symmetry represents just one case where they do? There 
seem to be obvious advantages in maximising the new from old. But if 
this is taken to the limit, there are no language-specificities. Both 
the general distribution and the detailed forms of children's speech 
and language disorders are then hard to explain other than as 
consequences of the parenting or quantity/quality of child-directed 
speech/language. This does not seem to me promising as a line of 
explanation - clinically or otherwise.

Aubrey

> Brian MacWhinney wrote:

>> principles  such as spatial symmetry, embedding, and recursion as 
>> precursors to  similar functions in language.

> The mathematical term "symmetry" covers a wide range of type of 
> self-similarity.
> A better one to look for in a moving temporal medium would be 
> translational
> symmetry, better known as repetition of a pattern in the same order 
> (rather
> than reflected).   *THAT* is quite salient in language and in related 
> domains
> such as music and poetry.
>
> Margaret
>   (Margaret Fleck, U. Illinois)
>
>

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