In order to model how language originates or how grammar changes (or how an infant invents a sequence of grammars gradually approximating the grammars of its interlocutors), one must employ a formalism which is rich enough to represent intermediate stages. To insist on discrete jumps between distinct systems with distinct functionalities, is to face unsurmountable difficulties which are reminiscent of Zeno's paradoxes. This is demonstrated, for instance, by Jerrold Fodor's innateness thesis, which we discuss on a separate page.

To be able to represent intermediate stages, is to admit that the object we set out to study (grammar, for instance) is not a constitutive element of ultimate reality. It is implemented on a substrate which is more basic. In physics this happens all the time. Baudrillard: "Doesn't every science live on this paradoxical slope to which it is doomed by the evanescence of its object in the very process of its apprehension, and by the pitiless reversal this dead object exerts on it?"

If we are to account for language change and language acquisition, grammar must be an emergent property of neural networks or exemplar-based models.

          

Quotes

Every mammal has a mammal for a mother,
but there have been only a finite number of mammals, so
there must have been a first mammal,
which contradicts our first premise, so, contrary to appearances,
there are no such things as mammals!

Sanford (1975) [Quoted in: Dennett (1991)]

L'opposition synchronie/diachronie se situant à l'interieur de la langue, le changement est, chez F. de Saussure, le lieu d'un paradoxe: c'est par des actes de parole que la langue change.

Robert (1977)

The assumption of a consistent and complete system has been one of the pillars of Chomsky's syntactic tradition as well as Montague's semantic tradition. I would like to cast some doubt on this assumption. When we assign a central role to concrete language data, the consistent algebraic language system becomes an epiphenomenon which may turn out to be largely illusory. It is very well possible that the language system is a non-deterministic conglomerate of incompatible but overlapping "subsystems".

Scha (1990)

References

J. Baudrillard: Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Daniel C. Dennett: Consciousness Explained Away. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991.

Jerrold A. Fodor: The Language of Thought. New York: T.Y. Crowell, 1975.

F. Robert: "La langue." In: D. Causset et al.: La Linguistique. Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1977.

D. Sanford: "Infinity and Vagueness." Philosophical Review 84 (1975), pp. 520-535.

Remko Scha: "Language theory and language technology; competence and performance." In: R. de Kort & G.L.J. Leerdam (eds.): Computertoepassingen in de Neerlandistiek. Almere: LVVN, 1990, pp. 7-22.

Remko Scha: "Virtual Grammars and Creative Algorithms." Gramma/TTT 1, 1 (1992), pp. 57-77.