Double Articulation

[Dan Parvaz]

This in from Sherman Wilcox (wilcox at unm.edu):

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The only thing I would add is that I think we need to realize that duality
of patterning, double articulation, is not some a priori, inherent
property of language. It is an emerging property: I assume it has a course
of development, and I assume it has some driving force. Haiman has written
lucidly about the issue of driving force, especially in "Talk is Cheap,"
including wonderful examples of emergence in process, elements that lie on
the borderlines of dual patterning, etc. His compost pile metaphor is
great. A hint for those not familiar with Haiman: repetition.

On the matter of the development, my assumption is that we should not
expect to see the same course, or the same pacing, across language in
different modalities, since it seems to me that whatever the driving force
is, it acts on the actual phonetic "stuff" (articulatory gestures,
optical/acoustic signals) of language.

I'm not a subscriber to SLLING. If you want to post this on my behalf,
that's fine.

--
Sherman

____________
DAN PARVAZ
Computational Linguist, CSI, Inc.
PhD student, University of New Mexico
dparvaz@{mac.com,csi-inc.com,unm.edu}