Re: Natlang most similar to your conlang [WAS: Analyzing Ayeri's syntactic and voice alignment (long)]
| From: | Michael Poxon <mike@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, April 2, 2008, 8:59 |
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The life sciences (I'm thinking especially of palaeontology here) use
cladistics as a way of organising the taxonomy. Possibly something along
those lines, but again it is at heart a "yes/no" system. Maybe we simply
shouldn't be building systems for the sake of system building? Mm.
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Bates" <chrisdb@...>
> Are we talking about principles and parameters here? I'm dubious, since:
>
> 1. The list never seems to be complete. New parameters always seem to be
> required to deal with a new case found.
>
> 2. Many of the parameters seem to be an attempt to turn a situation
> without obvious hard boundaries into a set of binary options (This is why
> people in linguistic typology started talking about "clines", because they
> realised that simply yes/no for a list of features was not sufficient to
> describe a language's grammar, or the variation between languages).