Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id TAA10798 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Mon, 19 Feb 2001 19:06:43 GMT From: <Zylogy@aol.com> Message-ID: <6b.100965fa.27c2c81f@aol.com> Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 14:03:59 EST Subject: Re: Darwinian evolution vs memetic evolution To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk CC: Zylogy@aol.com Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="part1_6b.100965fa.27c2c81f_boundary" Content-Disposition: Inline X-Mailer: 6.0 sub 10506 Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
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My guess is that animal complex concepts are relatively strictly limited to
combinations of sensorimotor primes as well as a few hierarchical relations-
so basic adjectival notions such as big/bigger, colors, shapes, textures,
weights, etc., basic verbs such as go, do, be, see, hear, touch, hit, etc.,
and basic nouns such as you, me, kin, various classes of predators, foods,
trees, water (and perhaps also fire, extended from concepts of
day/light/heat). The interesting thing about the above basic set of terms is
that these are the ones which tend to grammaticalize in the history of
language as it goes from one without grammatical morphology to one with a
lot. They are generics, good over broad ranges of application.
Grammaticalization is considered by linguists to be a form of
syntacticization of lexical items. Indeed, after abstracting away word order
and movement, they RUN the grammar, in ways that belie the actual meanings of
the ancestral lexical items, often retained to some extent as the terms shift
usage.
Opposite this are extremely specific manner terms, the ideophones- found in
probably more than half the world's more than 6000 languages- which are
extrasyntactic in origin, and completely phonosemantically transparent. Given
that most of the languages with large sets of such forms are lacking in most
morphology (indeed, have many fewer verb roots than you would expect, and
those are very general, as above), I've now posited that ideophones are
actually unbound grammatical elements, cut loose not only from the lexical
items from which most grammatical items in other languages hang but also from
the syntactic train.
Animals may or may not have something like ideophones in their communicative
repertoires. I just don't know. Nobody's ever thought to ask, so none have
looked. But if they have basic terms (even just as memes), then they likely
have the other as well- just encoded differently from humans, in holistic,
relatively time-invariant signals.
Note that the generics are basic level terms, in cognitivist terminology- you
can get more or less specific/shift scope and still be within normal
vocabulary. When you get to ideophones, though, they are outside completely.
They don't have any particular lashings to any particular lexical items, at
least at first. That can change, but when it does, apparently other aspects
of the Roschean hierarchy shift as well. Cyclic?
Jess Tauber
zylogy@aol.com
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