Do I get a Nobel for my "language isn't a product of evolution; being good at language is a product of evolution" theory? ;)
How do animals get ASL if they don't know any vocabulary? Or do you just mean using gestures?
--- On Thu, 7/16/09, mart <media314159 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: mart <media314159 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] More on Kenneally
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Thursday, July 16, 2009, 4:30 AM
>
> i think actually this the state of the art view people are
> coming around to---though phrased differently (people
> are primed not to be blank slates). i haven't read
> kenneally but s. kirby who apparently she discusses in a
> sense does this 'just-so-theory' via agent based
> modeling. i do think animals have 'proto'language,
> even if they dont speak spanglish or quebecois or
> ghettoese. i'd imagine asl actually is more
> comprehensible to them---i even use it (or sign language in
> general) with animals --they seem to get it. as
> for grammar not everyone needs it---one big 'attack' on
> chomsky which is in the litterture looked at a tribe in
> amazonia who had very little math sense/aka
> 'recursion'. they also didn't need abstract algebra
> (beyond intuition).
>