why cant ug have evolved through natural selection? ok so its
more complex than it needs to be so some of it has to be
piggybacking, but is that such a big problem?
the way i see it there would always have been a variation in
the language abilities of the human population as a whole,
that is some people would have been comparatively more
fluent and interesting in what they said and how they said
it. this variation would be roughly congruent with the
variation in intelligence. these fluent intelligent speakers
would have developed certain word order rules which would
have governed the way they spoke.
to begin with these rules may have been fairly idiosyncratic,
with each person following their own set of rules. however
the people who followed the rules which communicated whatever
they wanted to say best, would be more attractive to the
opposite sex so would have more children. thus over a number
of generations the more successful grammar rules would have
survived and maybe become the strong regular rules which we
all know and love, and maybe the less successful rules could
have become the strange backbench rules which make unstared
sentences wrong.
i know that this is all vague conjecture, but it all seems
perfectly possible. i realise that it probably isnt though.
please tell me why.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Tue Feb 13 2001 - 16:23:09 GMT