<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Dear Aubrey,</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Right, there is certainly a big emphasis this time of year on marketing. That hadn't occurred to me.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I much agree with your line of thinking that foregrounds principles such as spatial symmetry, embedding, and recursion as precursors to similar functions in language. We all perceive the salience of symmetry in houses and drawings. But, like Lise, I would argue that symmetry cannot apply directly to language on the sentential level, since judgments of symmetry require the copresence of all pieces and language evolves through a rapidly fading temporal medium. Lise's example of saying your phone number backwards was lovely. There may be some symmetry effects at the level of the word and syllable, since those units are perceptually copresent. There could also be some symmetry effects on the discourse or rhetorical levels, but those would be probably backed up by long-term training in rhetorical form.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">In regards to the speed of evolutionary change, my remarks about glacial change applied not to historical change or creolization, as in the case of the emergence of Nicaraguan sign language, but to the emergence of traits in the species. When I think of language evolution, I am thinking about that, not about linguistic diachrony. </DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Having said this, I remain curious what evidence there is for "truly new" evolutionary ideas. Are you suggesting that binding and structural dependency are evolutionary new ideas? Let us focus first on binding, which is a clear phenomenon and which you mention in your message. I have become convinced that binding constraints emerge not from c-command but from pragmatic factors derived from perspective-switching (see my chapter in Pecher and Zwaan, 2005, "Ground Cognition). In this account, the child learns the binding principles by figuring out the cues to perspective switching. If we believe that the binding phenomena arise directly from c-command than that starts indeed to look like very much like a new evolutionary idea. But if binding is expressing perspective switching and flow, then it seems to be more closely pinned to cognitive developments that have emerged over millions of years in the context of shared social action. In that case, this is not a truly new idea, but an old function expressed by new forms, as Liz, Werner, Mayr, and Darwin would say.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Structural dependency is another matter. Children are clearly able to process structures with linked grammatical relations built up through recursion. But is recursion itself a new idea or an old idea with new clothing? We see the core of recursion in the child's early learning and processing of item-based patterns. One can see precursors of item-based processing in the motor world, but the shift of item-based slot filling to language does seem rather remarkable. Is it a truly new idea in evolutionary terms? As you know, that is at the core of much recent argumentation and I would say that the jury is still very much out on that one. Perhaps some other readers have ideas about that.</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--Brian MacWhinney</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:08 PM, <A href="mailto:aubrey@pigeonpostbox.co.uk">aubrey@pigeonpostbox.co.uk</A> wrote:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">Dear Brian</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">You're right in guessing that I wasn't invoking divinity. My metaphors were festive season ones. But in order to extend the idea of new parts from old to phenomena like binding, endocentricity, structure dependency, I think that the old has to be both identifiable and such as to help explain why things are the way they are. I just don't see how this can be done so as to account for the main outlines of these theories and various others. Take endocentricity and its most outward appearance with edgemost maximal projections. In human perception generally there seems to be a default expectation of symmetry. In single-family dwellings built in Britain for the last 150 years, a double-fronted layout is rare. But in a child's picture of a house, I have yet to see the normal terraced layout with the front door on one side. The same preference for symmetry seems to be attested in metaphor - with the centre favoured over the edges.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">In both syntax and phonology, a symmetrical layout would be easy to define, with words and sentences built strictly from the middle. But whatever the number of cases where this might be appropriate, it seems to me that they are so few in number, and that the preponderance of asymmetry and directionality in headedness, Wh movement, syllable structure, and more, should be treated as highly significant.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">I make no guesses as to the likely triggering or rate of spread of linguistic change. These seem to me to be some of the most fascinating questions in linguistics. But from the extreme case of the school for the deaf in Nicaragua, where an entirely new language is said to have emerged in a single childhood, it seems to me that linguistic theory must be at least capable of accounting for change at the wildfire end of the scale rather than the glacial.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">I certainly wasn't assuming that the speed of change might provide a way of telling whether a given phenomenon was a case of new from old or speculating as to how this might be done. None of the cases are simple.</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">Obviously the argument needs to be in detail. I was allowing that there might be a number of cases of new from old, and listed some cases where this seems to me most plausible. I was suggesting only that the new from old model may not be the only one, and that some changes may have been just by the odd roll of the genetic dice - to get back to the festive season,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">Aubrey</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF">On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote:</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">Dear Aubrey,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does not arise from old parts?</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">Without concrete examples of this,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude cannibalism. </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind.</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">Maybe what you have in mind is something like a "powerful idea" that arises in the usual way in one evolutionary configuration, but then spreads like wildfire because of the adaptive advantage it provides.</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">--Brian MacWhinney</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410">On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, <A href="mailto:aubrey@pigeonpostbox.co.uk">aubrey@pigeonpostbox.co.uk</A> wrote:</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">Speaking as one who believes in Darwinism, and (more or less) in the restrictive Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch hypothesis, and thus not in Uriagareka's exaptation, it seems to me that indeed language improvises with cannibalised parts, association, projection, range, etc,, but roughly once in every million years the evolutionary Marketing Department comes up with a new idea. This gives us the eight or so language universals, structure dependency, endo-centricity, binding principles, etc., since the point of human divergence. The interesting questions, it seems to me, are: in what order of things did the canny marketing prevail over the crude cannibalism? And: Why?</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">Aubrey Nunes</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd.,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">52, Bonham Road,</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">London SW2 5HG</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000">0207 652 1347</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#550000"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#006410"><BR></FONT></DIV><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"> <BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></P><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000DF"><BR></FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>