Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Nik Taylor wrote:

> I agree with you that only purely
> polysynthetic is restricted to stone age peoples, but I see no reason to
> think that polysynthetic is "less sloppy" than other types, and there's
> absolutely no evidence that I can see to say that it was the *only* type
> spoken before agriculture.  Polysynthetic would probably have been more
> common, and perhaps the relative ratios of the other types may have been
> different, who knows?  But on what evidence do you say that the human
> mind "may be predisposed to creating purely polysynthetic structures"?
When we are tiny children learning to speak our native language, nobody teaches us what
its morphemes mean: We figure out their meanings by ourselves, from the various contexts
within which each morpheme appears.  And a morpheme typically has a rich constellation
of meaning, so that what a typical morpheme means in one context isn't quite the same as
what it means in other contexts.  (I'll grant that some morphemes -- such as pronouns
and numerals -- may have invariant meanings, but nearly all other common morphemes
don't.)

The reason why a typical morpheme means something different in one context than it means
in other contexts, is that different  portions of its "rich constellation of meaning"
come into play in different contexts.

What purely polysynthetic structures do -- and other types of grammatical structures
don't do -- is provide a strictly limited number of contexts in which any morpheme can
appear.  So, if the human mind is "predisposed to creating purely polysynthetic
structures", that means it is predisposed to limiting the variety of meanings that a
morpheme can have.

That tendancy would logically go hand-in-hand with the tendancy to give morphemes "rich
constellations of meaning" -- since giving them rich constellations of meaning
automatically leads to them meaning different things in different contexts, so that the
only way to limit proliferation of a morpheme's meanings is by limiting how many
contexts it can appear in!

Of course, any type of linguistic structure keeps a morpheme from appearing in some
contexts, and hence limits proliferation of a morpheme's meanings to some degree.

So I have to agree with you: There's no reason to believe that *all* Stone Age languages
were purely polysynthetic until the advent of trade languages.

-- Tommie