[Corpora-List] Stubbs' analogy?

John F. Sowa sowa at bestweb.net
Wed Dec 14 22:06:02 UTC 2005


I agree that the analogies to wave/particle duality
in quantum mechanics might more confusing than
enlightening.  But I'd like to add a reference to
a long-forgotten (i.e., pre WWW) source:

Pike, Kenneth L. (1967) _A Unified Theory of Human
Behavior_, 2nd edition, Mouton, The Hague.

Pike was a linguist and anthropologist who was one of
the founders of the Summer Institutes in Linguistics.
He did a lot of work on prosody in various languages,
and he generalized the distinction between phonemics
and phonetics to a general principle that applies to
all of human behavior.  He separated the suffixes _etic_
for the continuous and _emic_ for the discrete aspects
and used them as general terms.

Pike coined the word _behavioreme_ and analyzed many
examples of behavioremes in sign language, rituals,
dances, and games.

Anyone who has access to a large university library
may be able to find a copy of Pike's book, which is
still a good source of examples.

John Sowa



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