...by decoupling language from communication and making it a wholly cognitive faculty... — StreetlightX
So yes, Chomsky and his adherents are so stupid as to believe humans' capacity for language is a miracle of God, or due to some other magic. — StreetlightX
It might be interesting to know — Galuchat
Chomsky is mentioned incidentally as an influence on this idea....the idea that not only did language not evolve gradually as a form of communication, but that language isn't communication at all. — Xtrix
So the reason language evolved, was to be used as language? I don't know how to read this except as a tautology, so I'm genuinely perplexed by what you're saying.
Or are you just, in a roundabout way, saying that language evolved for the purpose of communication? But this is just to repeat a take on the question the thread started with, without offering any interesting support for the idea. There isn't much content to the rest of the post — Snakes Alive
I think language evolution is a crappolo idea, anyway, much like evolution. I believe that the ancient man had access (or since stone age, with stone axes, he had axxess) to the Oxford Dictionary of Standard English Definitions, Synonyms and Antonyms. Therefore they could strive for world hegemony, since they had a lingua franca the English langauge; and the English spleaking world still hasn't given up that idea. — god must be atheist
A quick word on this (I'm out right now and don't have access to my usual stuff): this cannot possibly be the case. — StreetlightX
Read: Language evolved for reasons other than language. About as clear-cut as you can get.
[...]
Read: FLN was not an adaptation. — StreetlightX
Read: FLN was not an adaptation. The 'argument from design' referred to above refers to nothing other than natural selection, which is clarified earlier in the paper: "Because natural selection is the only
known biological mechanism capable of generating such functional complexes [the argument from design], proponents of this view conclude... [etc]". — StreetlightX
Of course, for those not labouring under the delusions of Chomskian Grammar, the sheer diversity of various syntactic constraints were not so much useless hay to sort though in order to look for the needle of universals, but the very stuff of linguistic theory itself. — StreetlightX
The exaptation thesis has to ignore all of this, because it is utterly committed to the idea that language evolved for means other than language. It has to, on the basis of nothing other than a prior, theoretical and dogmatic commitment, entirely stuff all of the above under the bed and argue it away because it cannot, on pain of incoherence, admit any of it into it's theoretical remit. It's alternative? Some middling unsubstantiated, unargued for bullshit about how it probably developed from some other reason (unknown) than hopped the genetic barrier over to humans for, again, no reason given. Language is rich, full of rich features, many of which can, and have been tracked closely with the ways in which it has developed over time, among cultures, in addition to anthropogenesis. To condense this all into some unspecified 'genetic modification' is nothing less than waving a magic wand stamped 'science' and thinking this should be taken seriously by anyone with half a brain. — StreetlightX
That would be a great answer if Chomsky was not famous for entirely disregading linguisitc development in children — StreetlightX
The suggestion that FLN (narrow faculty of language) – namely, universal grammar (UG) – was an exaptation (traditionally termed “pre-adaptation” - strictly speaking, not an adaptation) is not contradictory to mainstream knowledge concerning biological evolution. — javra
. And it's not a question that can be answered by telling someone to read up on functionalist grammar. — Snakes Alive
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