Information about a quote

Tue Dec 20 17:05:18 UTC 2005

small note: temporal and spatial symmetry should not be casually  
equated. For spatial symmetry we can look back and forth from one  
side to another; evolution-wide, being able to find the middle of a  
gap automatically is very useful for getting thru narrow places with  
minimal  bruising.  Temporal symmetry, with our fast-fading auditory  
memories, is much less obvious, and that's the kind one would need  
for structures.  the ability to consciously remember auditory  
sequences is temporally asymmetrical, for sure -  what 's your  
telephone number backwards?  And unconscious temporal processing is  
probably similarly limited - mirror image rules are rare indeed.  We  
don't have that particular kind of computational ability built in.

		Lise
On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:22 PM, aubrey at pigeonpostbox.co.uk wrote:

> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>

Lise Menn                      Office: 303-492-1609
Linguistics Dept.           Fax: 303-413-0017
295 UCB                         Hellems 293
University of Colorado
Boulder CO 80309-0295

Professor of Linguistics, University of  Colorado, University of Hunan
Secretary, AAAS Section Z [Linguistics]

Office Hours Fall'05: Tues 2-3:30, Thurs 11-12
Lise Menn's home page
http://www.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/lmenn/

"Shirley Says: Living with Aphasia"
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/Shirley4.pdf

Japanese version of "Shirley Says"
http://www.bayget.com/inpaku/kinen9.htm

Academy of Aphasia
http://www.academyofaphasia.org/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20051220/53271519/attachment.htm>