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).
>
That's right. Eskimoan is holophrastic and yet not quite 'original' :-)
Maybe because Jespersn did not tell how far he thought presentative was from
holophrastic structure ;-) (I'd bet he couldn't).
> 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.
>
I never read anything about that but I can tell you my little cousins went : 1.
word 2. theme/rheme (usually reversed : amazing for French children !) 3.
predicate/argument (or reversely) 4. verbal structure (svo for French). They're
the most lovely guinea-pigs I know :-)
> 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.
>
>
Yes, indeed : holophrastic structure exists only if there no predicative
presentative structure. And presentative is already a structure differentiating
perception (what I know/feel) and affirmation. Therefore the term 'sapiens' is
very well-come here :-) Language of those who 'know' vs. language of those who
don't know yet :-)
Mathias
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