Re: LANGUAGE LAWS
| From: | Raymond A. Brown <raybrown@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, October 23, 1998, 18:36 |
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At 3:09 pm -0700 22/10/98, charles wrote:
.....
>So, a holophrase can take an argument,
>as in "allgone shoe!" or "ticket, please?" ?
>Then it would seem like an idiomatic formula.
Yep - I suppose that's about it.
>Jesperson said that "originally" languages would
>have been "holophrastic." On the auxlang list,
>we tried to make sense of this, and failed (I think).
If he's using holophrastic this way then he'd be saying that language began
with the sort of unstructured utterances children use as they are beginning
to acquire language.
On the principle that ontology encapsulates phylogeny, I guess that at some
stage this is very likely to have happened. The main difference between
theorists, as I see it, is whether this proto-language development took
place before homo sapiens sapiens or in a "pre-sapiens" period.
Ray.