Information about a quote

[aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk]

Dear Brian

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 British 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.

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.

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.

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. 
  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,

Aubrey Nunes

On 17 Dec 2005, at 21:18, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> Dear Aubrey,
>
>    Can you provide an example of an evolutionary "new idea" that does 
> not arise from old parts?  Without concrete examples of this,
> I have no idea about how to distinguish canny marketing from crude 
> cannibalism.   Of course, intervention from a Divine Marketing 
> Department will work, but I don't assume that you have that in mind.  
> 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.
> Of course evolutionary wildfires are usually something more like 
> glaciers that advance at the pace of a millimeter a millenium, right?
>
> --Brian MacWhinney
>
> On Dec 16, 2005, at 8:51 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote:
>
>> 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?
>>
>> Aubrey Nunes
>> PhD, FRSA, MRCSLT
>> Director Pigeon Post Box, Ltd.,
>> 52, Bonham Road,
>> London SW2 5HG
>> 0207 652 1347
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>