Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id VAA11235 (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 21:08:47 GMT Message-Id: <5.0.2.1.0.20010219155933.00a73cd0@mail.clarityconnect.com> X-Sender: rrecchia@mail.clarityconnect.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 5.0.2 Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 16:06:54 -0500 To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk From: Ray Recchia <rrecchia@mail.clarityconnect.com> Subject: Re: Darwinian evolution vs memetic evolution In-Reply-To: <6b.100965fa.27c2c81f@aol.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
This sounds interesting, but I and suspect others on the list lack the
background in linguistics to follow much of what you are saying. What I am
getting is that there is a distinction between two classes of words that
might go towards the differences in animal and human thinking. That a
first class is a more simple but is universal among all languages and may
also be part of the thinking processes of animals. The second class
'ideophones' are not universal to all human languages and have a different
role when they are present. Could you give some examples of an 'ideophone'
and explain how they differ from the basic set of terms without using terms
like 'extrasyntactic' that go a bit past me?
Raymond Recchia
At 02:03 PM 2/19/2001 -0500, Jess Tauber wrote:
>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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