Tomasello Not Answering

Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: Tomasello Not Answering · New blog on the kid: How did human language "evolve from non-human"? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Adam Reisman's Response, Mr. Flibble's Debate · Andrew Winkler's Response and Debate · Creation vs. Evolution: Odd Perfect Numbers? Less Impossible than Abiogenesis or Evolutionary Origin of Human Language!

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From: Hans-Georg Lundahl (hgl@dr.com)

To: scholars@duke.edu

Monday, September 18, 2023 at 8:14 PM

Subject: For Tomasello, please ...

// Tomasello also resorts to an evolutionary two-step scenario (see below), and to philosophical concepts borrowed from Paul Grice, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and anthropologist Dan Sperber.
At one point in time, after the emergence of the genus Homo two millions years ago, Homo Heidelbergensis[9] or other close candidate became obligate foragers and scavengers under ecological pressures of desertification that led to scarcity of resources. Individuals able to avoid free-riders and to divide the spoils with collaborative partners would have gained an adaptive advantage over non cooperators. The heightened dependence on joint effort to gain food and the social selection of partners are supposed to account for an evolution toward better skills at coordinating individual's roles and perspectives under a common attentional frame (that of the hunt or scavenging) and under a common goal, giving rise to joint, interpersonal intention. Later, around 200,000 years ago,[10] new ecological pressures presumably posed by competition within groups put those in "loose pools" of collaborators at a disadvantage against groups of coherently collaborative individuals working for a common territorial defense. "Individuals ... began to understand themselves as members of particular social group with a particular identity".[11] //

So ... in apes, we find phoneme = morpheme = phrase.

In man we find phonomeS => morpheme, morphemeS => phrase.

Human speech is subdivided not just once but twice in relation to ape communications, so, which subdivision came first and how does it correspond to your two steps of human evolution ?

Do you admit there is such a thing as notionality and that it is lacking in apes, but present in man?

That man can and apes can't say "I ate riz-au-lait instead of yoghurt today at noon"?

That this makes for making the double subdivision (or double articulation to use the standard term) interesting, but also needs it ?

If you first subdivide phrase into morphemes, as each morpheme is still just one phoneme, you can't get enough notions to have an interesting playfield for phrases.
If you first subdivide phrase/morpheme into phonemes, the increase in phrases will be negligible, since there is no true notionality without a judgement structure, predicating X of Y, and you can't have that without phrase subdivided into morphemes.

Hans Georg Lundahl

[When this is published, he'll have had 10 days.]