Chomskian linguistics and human uniqueness

[David Bowie]

From:    "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>

<snip>

[The "trait" in what follows is whatever allows language to occur in,
at minimum, humans.]

> The trait is more likely, in mathematical terms,
> a network, with various traits (aspects of
> language capability) present or absent in various
> animals and the most such traits (or all, if one
> lets the wrong people define what the set of
> traits of language capability is) present in
> humans.  Scalar traits went (or should go) into
> the trash with The Great Chain of Being.

I should clarify that what i described in my earlier post was what the
Chomskian language faculty must be, if (and only if) the "hard-
wired"ness is accepted as correct. Basically, we couldn't find a way
to pin it down, and it remained pretty hazy.

And i'd agree with you that whatever it is, if it exists, it's most
likely a network trait—but i'd argue that that that does mean it may
well be scalar, if you view it as an individual trait resulting from
other, more basic networked traits. I don't see why you want to throw
out the concept of scalar traits—here are, after all, plenty of them,
including several that result from networks of other traits.
(Consider, for example, hair color.)

Very truly yours,
David Bowie

p.s. Why doesn't the digest version of this list play nicely with
Unicode characters? There was an ellipsis in my previous post, but it
came across as a line break in the digest.

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