The Myth of ‘Function Defines Form’ as the Null-Biological Adaptive Process and the Counter Linguistics-Based Response. (The ‘ Accumulative Lecture’)

Abstract

This accumulative lecture serves as a springboard for discussion leading to data-collection and analyses of the types of linguistic corpora which demonstrate the fact that language, in its most ‘narrow sense’ of the term—viz., as a phonological/syntactic categorial representation buttressed by and resting upon recursive design—seems to defy all common-sense adaptive notions of the type championed by Darwin. Of course, Darwin got it right! There is no other theory. But his theory was not designed to handle, as Stephen Jay Gould terms, ‘punctuated equilibrium’—a phenomenon which does not at all abide by otherwise bottom-up, environmentally-determined pressures of the sort Darwin spoke of. Well-accepted terms of the day such as ‘adaption’, ‘evolution’, and ‘biological pressure’, would soon become replaced by ‘exaptation’, ‘skyhook’ (a top-down processing as opposed to a bottom-up ‘crane’), and ‘non-evolutionary’ accounts (of the sort Noam Chomsky would refer to as ‘hopeful monster’). The insights here pointed to a new direction which showed that language, in its most ‘narrow sense’, simply didn’t abide by the same rules and principles as found in the Darwinian world of evolution. But, in a more general footing, there may be some evolution left to language after all, as found in the more communicative ‘broad’ sense. It’s just the case that there is increasingly very little that a Darwinian theory can approach and handle within its parameters regarding the narrow scope of language as narrowly defined as a sole instrument of ‘recursion’.