<div dir="ltr">Form versus function. Vertebrate wings, fins manipulate fluid vortices to generate thrust, and generally operate in the same fashion, moving in a figure-8 while rotating the 'tilt' of the effector. This alters the pressure profile around the effector, and movement of the body then re-equilibrates it. There are a number of different types of eyes that have evolved, but they all seem to have originated in small eyespots that one sees, for example, in planaria. Poor at generating images, but sometimes can gauge distances, as well as help orient the body in space. Same with balance organs. Jellyfish domes have spherical mineralized concretions in a cupola at the tops of their domes, with a jelly-like matrix surrounding them with nerve receptors coming out of the walls into the matrix. When the animal moves 'off-axis' (that is, the body's symmetry axis) you get positive pressure on one side of the cupola and negative on the other, and the animal uses this to orient. Our semicircular canals in our inner ear complex operate pretty much identically. But biophysics and biomechanics canalize new structures towards common solutions. There are many roads to Rome.<div><br></div><div>Jess Tauber</div><div><br></div></div><div id="DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2"><br>
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</table><a href="#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2" width="1" height="1"></a></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Dec 8, 2021 at 9:35 AM Martin Haspelmath <<a href="mailto:martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de">martin_haspelmath@eva.mpg.de</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
I'm not sure about physics, but for biology, there's a nice recent
paper in "Linguistic Typology" by biologist Lindell Bromham:<br>
<br>
<div style="line-height:1.35;margin-left:2em">
<div><font size="2">Bromham, Lindell. 2020.
Comparability in evolutionary biology: The case of Darwin’s
barnacles. <i>Linguistic Typology</i> 24(3). 427–463. (doi:<a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-2056" target="_blank">10.1515/lingty-2020-2056</a>)</font></div>
<span title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1515%2Flingty-2020-2056&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Comparability%20in%20evolutionary%20biology%3A%20The%20case%20of%20Darwin%E2%80%99s%20barnacles&rft.jtitle=Linguistic%20Typology&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=3&rft.aufirst=Lindell&rft.aulast=Bromham&rft.au=Lindell%20Bromham&rft.date=2020-10-01&rft.pages=427-463&rft.spage=427&rft.epage=463&rft.issn=1613-415X&rft.language=en"></span></div>
<br>
Before Darwin, biologists were struggling with concepts for
comparison, attributing homologies to an obscure "unity of type" or
"pure form" (this is actually the origin of Goethe's "morphology",
which was later adopted by linguists; see also this blogpost:
<a href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1210" target="_blank">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1210</a>).<br>
<br>
But when it comes to terms like "wing" (in comparative biology) or
"money" (in comparative anthropology) (as recently discussed by Nick
Evans, see <a href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2421" target="_blank">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2421</a>), there may be
terminological issues in these fields, but biologists (and
anthropologists) don't seem to confuse their terminological problems
with theoretical problems. Nobody thinks that "wing" or "money"
might be pre-established building blocks – very clearly, they are
*comparative concepts* specifically designed for the purpose of
biological/anthropological comparison.<br>
<div style="line-height:1.35;margin-left:2em">
<div><br>
</div>
<span title="url_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fzotero.org%3A2&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1515%2Flingty-2020-2056&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Comparability%20in%20evolutionary%20biology%3A%20The%20case%20of%20Darwin%E2%80%99s%20barnacles&rft.jtitle=Linguistic%20Typology&rft.volume=24&rft.issue=3&rft.aufirst=Lindell&rft.aulast=Bromham&rft.au=Lindell%20Bromham&rft.date=2020-10-01&rft.pages=427-463&rft.spage=427&rft.epage=463&rft.issn=1613-415X&rft.language=en"></span></div>
As Adam Tallman noted: If we have specific "views" about the innate
building blocks of grammar (as in Chomsky 1970), we may well
interpret a traditional term like "clitic" (coined by Nida 1946) as
a kind of innate building block – and if we do this, then indeed one
may say that our definitions are dependent on our findings about
innateness. (In other words, our terminology is bound up with our
theories.)<br>
<br>
But if we are non-committal about innateness, then it seems to make
more sense to regard the meaning of "clitic" as purely a matter of
arbitrary convention.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<br>
<div>Am 08.12.21 um 13:05 schrieb Sebastian
Nordhoff:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">Dear
all,
<br>
two observations:
<br>
<br>
- physics by definition deals with things that we can experience
first-hand with our senses. This is true for the other
experimental sciences as well. Language use on the other hand, has
to be inferred via complicated procedures. You can easily get
people to agree that the current temperature of a substance is
97.4°C It is more difficult to get people to agree on how many
sounds/formatives/morphemes/words there are in a given string.
<br>
<br>
- at a workshop at the MPI-EVA about 10 years back on terminology,
all present linguists were surprised to hear from a participating
biological morphologist (dealing with bones and joints and
skeletons and so on) that there is a "linguistic problem in
morphology", meaning that one person's "wing" is completely
different from another person's "wing". One could have easily
replaced the terms in his presentation with our typological
concepts and it would still have made sense. So, I do think that
linguists tend to overestimate the beauty and neatness of the
natural sciences, a case of
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy</a>
<br>
<br>
Best wishes
<br>
Sebastian
<br>
<br>
On 12/8/21 12:47, David Gil wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">Dear all,
<br>
<br>
Adam poses the question ...
<br>
<br>
On 08/12/2021 13:10, Adam James Ross Tallman wrote:
<br>
<blockquote type="cite">/why /we appear to be in so much
disagreement about terminological issues. It's not as if any
linguists are purposely trying to obfuscate things - so how
did we end up where we are?
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
Adam proposes one answer, which is kind of specific to clitics,
and about which I have nothing to say. But I think that, in
addition, there is a more general answer to Adam's question.
<br>
<br>
Let's compare linguistics to physics. Although physics has
foundational questions every bit as far-reaching as those of
linguistics, to the best of my knowledge, physicists don't spend
their time fretting over terminological issues the way us
linguists do. So why is this the case? I think there's
actually a relatively straightforward reason why. Most of the
things that physicists deal with are either so small (sub-atomic
particles) or so large (galaxies etc.) that they have little or
no interface with our everyday experiential universe. So
there's no big reason to care what physicists choose to call
things. On the other hand, linguistics deals with stuff that
impinges directly on our lives on an everyday basis. So calling
something a clitic, or a DP, or an antipassive, seems to be
saying something about the language that is an integral part of
our everyday lives. Of course, as conscientious scientists we
ought to be able to divorce our technical analyses from our
everyday experiences and reflections; but in practice there
seems to be seepage. And it is this seepage, I would like to
suggest, that may be at least one reason why we seem to care so
much more than say physicists about what we call things.
<br>
<br>
(Of course, the seepage is not just terminological but also
substantive, a prime example of that being the notion of word.
We all deal with the layman's notion of word in our everyday
lives, every time we press the space bar on our keyboards, and
then do a word count of our texts; but then in many cases we
uncritically import the layman's notion of word into our
grammatical analyses.)
<br>
<br>
David
<br>
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote>
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<br>
<pre cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/" target="_blank">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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