I’m going to return to a distinction between opposing models of language I’ve made before (most recently here: http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/2020/06/toward-a-media-moral-synthesis/) and would like to drive to some new conclusions here. This is the distinction between, on the one hand, language as comprised of individual words, whose meanings can be defined, along with grammatical rules which determine the correct ways of articulating words and thereby creating an, in principle, unlimited number of possible sentences; and, on the other hand, language as “chunks” which are learned together in practice, and which become “commonplaces” and “constructions” as pieces from different chunks can be exchanged for pieces in other. The former model is shared by most of modern linguistics, most prominently in the generative grammar of Noam Chomsky; the latter is advanced by the social psychologist and primatologist Michael Tomasello and, within linguistics, advocates of “construction grammar” and perhaps “grammatization” theorists (who focus on grammatical changes over time) and no doubt others—anyone, really, who treats language as historical rather than structural.
Sampling on the Data Exchange
Sampling on the Data Exchange
Sampling on the Data Exchange
I’m going to return to a distinction between opposing models of language I’ve made before (most recently here: http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/2020/06/toward-a-media-moral-synthesis/) and would like to drive to some new conclusions here. This is the distinction between, on the one hand, language as comprised of individual words, whose meanings can be defined, along with grammatical rules which determine the correct ways of articulating words and thereby creating an, in principle, unlimited number of possible sentences; and, on the other hand, language as “chunks” which are learned together in practice, and which become “commonplaces” and “constructions” as pieces from different chunks can be exchanged for pieces in other. The former model is shared by most of modern linguistics, most prominently in the generative grammar of Noam Chomsky; the latter is advanced by the social psychologist and primatologist Michael Tomasello and, within linguistics, advocates of “construction grammar” and perhaps “grammatization” theorists (who focus on grammatical changes over time) and no doubt others—anyone, really, who treats language as historical rather than structural.