Cladistic language concepts

[Robert R. Ratcliffe]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Roger Wright wrote:
 
> ----------------------------Original
> message----------------------------
>
> >    I have really enjoyed Michael Ghiselin's contribution to this
> list.
> >Analogies from biology have been very powerful in linguistics (as
> many
> >of the responses have shown.) So it's comforting to see that so many
> of
> >the foundational concepts in biology are as problematic and
> ill-defined
> >as the foundational concepts in linguistics.
>
>         The great value of these interesting discussions has been
> in the demonstration that the two fields are not identical, and that
> the
> analogies from biology are only helpful if we don't take them too
> seriously.
>         It's time to do the same with the pervasive analogy from the
> construction industry, isn't it, and accept that languages aren't
> really
> "structures" at all, however helpful that analogy once was ...
>                                                         RW
 
    I hadn't really thought of the construction industry, but I like the
analogy now that you mention it, maybe because I live in the country
with the largest public works budget in the world.  Linguistics has
always sought prestige through analogies with other fields, and now that
science has lost some of its lustre...
    Of course we always have to try to avoid getting trapped in  our
conceptual frameworks.  But I must admit I can't really see how one can
escape talking about language as a structure. Any theory which assumes
the existence in a language of subcategories (such as phonemes, or parts
of speech) and relationships between them (such as constraints on word
order, or paradigmatic contrasts) is assuming that language is a
strucuture.  It is hard for me to see how we can abandon this approach
and still have anything to say about the formal properties of languages.
Of course I am strongly sympathetic with the view that language isn't
ONLY a structure. There are things to be said about language and
cognition, language and communication, which perhaps can be said without
reference to form or structure.
    How about in anthropology, are structuralist approaches to
non-material culture still prominent, or has a better way been found?
 
-RR
 
 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Robert R. Ratcliffe
Senior Lecturer, Arabic and Linguistics,
Dept. of Linguistics and Information Science
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
Nishigahara 4-51-21, Kita-ku
Tokyo 114 Japan