Re: CHAT: Umberto Eco and Esperanto

Ah, that one was very helpful.  The criticisms from Elizabeth Bates
pretty much summed up my reactions to it:  I don't buy the idea that
language processing is different in kind from general cognition (and
therefore unique to humans and arose "suddenly" via a "mutation",
which is what Chomsky and Bickerton both hold).

It's like, bat wings can do things that my fingers and arms, or
another mammal's forelegs and forepaws, could never do, but that
doesn't mean bat wings aren't just a highly specialized counterpart to
fingers and arms.

I see Chomskians as essentially saying, "bat wings must have nothing
to do with fingers and arms, because they're just so different; they
must have evolved out of nowhere by a sudden mutation, and they must
be studied as if they had nothing to do with fingers and arms, or
forelegs and forepaws; indeed, as if they had nothing but aerodynamic
properties -- no muscles, no bones, no skin -- we must study them not
using biology, but using techniques developed to study airplane wings
or helicopter rotors."

For an argument towards a theory of language and language evolution
based on general cognitive abilities, see Mark Turner's _The Literary
Mind_.

For a linguistic theory that is amazingly comprehensive but assumes
that *no processing is used to understand/produce language that the
brain is not known to be capable of using in non-linguistic
situations*, see Ronald Langacker's two-volume work on _Cognitive
Grammar_.


Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Charles wrote:

> > > Who Bickerton?
>
> I forgot this one; it's short, introductory, and critical:
> http://www.ling.su.se/Creole/Archive/Eklund-1.html
>
> > http://williamcalvin.com/bk-lingua/index.htm
> >
> > http://www.siu.edu/departments/cola/ling/glosyg_l.htm#lbh
>