La evolución de las lenguas (las de carne y las otras)

lunes, 22 de junio de 2015

La evolución de las lenguas (las de carne y las otras)

Comentamos algunos aspectos de la teoría evolucionista darwiniana aplicada al problema del origen y evolución del lenguaje humano y de la diversidad lingüística, releyendo en detalle desde el cognitivismo contemporáneo los textos en los que Darwin habla sobre esta cuestión en "The Descent of Man", así como de modo más somero algunas teorías biolingüísticas actuales inspiradas por el generativismo.

La evolución de las lenguas (las de carne y las otras) 

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2620851

 

English abstract: 

The Evolution of Tongues (Fleshy and Otherwise)

This paper examines some aspects of the Darwinian theory of the evolution of species as they bear on the problem of the origin and the evolution of the human language ability and of linguistic diversity, through a close rereading from a contemporary cognitivist standpoint of the passages of "The Descent of Man" in which Darwin addresses this isssue. Some contemporary biolinguistic theories inspired by generativism are also briefly commented on.

 

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 31

Keywords: Darwin, Darwinism, Evolution, Origin of language, Biolinguistics, Cognitive linguistics, Language, Communication

La evolución de las lenguas (las de carne y las otras)

 

Retropost #22: 3 de noviembre de 2004

lunes, 22 de junio de 2015

Retropost #22: 3 de noviembre de 2004

3 de noviembre

Otro dia histórico: gana Bush, según parece, las elecciones americanas. Pintan bastos para la inteligencia, como le digo a una amiga que está en Texas. Houston, tenemos un problema. Recomiendo ver la película de Michael Moore Fahrenheit 9/11 para ambientarse para el nuevo orden mundial (y el viejo, que decía Chomsky).

En Zaragoza, noticia universitaria también histórica: se aprueba (aunque esto va por capítulos) la primera universidad privada de Aragón, que se llamará Universidad San Jorge; de momento lo más parecido que impartirá a nuestras humanidades son las carreras de periodismo y comunicación.

Retroposts

—oOo—

 

82 en Alianzo

lunes, 22 de junio de 2015

82 en Alianzo

Tengo una puntuación de 82 en Alianzo, que no sé exactamente cómo funciona ni qué quiere decir, pero me imagino que nada muy malo. Y soy sociable.

A cambio, tengo cero fans. Cero. Como decía Ben Jonson, la admiración, mejor, on this side idolatry.

Hay muchos ránkings en Alianzo. En el "Alianzo Rank" estoy en posición 288. Pero depende en qué fila te pongas. Este es mi botón de ránking en Aragón.






En Aragón estoy el octavo en sociabilidad, y en Zaragoza soy la séptima persona más sociable:





Como decía E.M. Forster en The Machine Stops, "en algunas direcciones, la sociabilidad se había desarrollado extraordinariamente."

Seguimos en la Cima de la Cima

Retropost #21: 2 de noviembre de 2004

lunes, 22 de junio de 2015

Retropost #21: 2 de noviembre de 2004

2 de noviembre

Me escriben de una revista holandesa de narratología para pedirme que forme parte del consejo de redacción. Me lo voy a pensar un poquito, pero creo que me voy a concentrar en lo que ya tengo entre manos antes de meterme en más cosas.

Quemando etapas rápidamente en el progreso humano, los nenes construyen calabazas de Halloween por Internet, gentileza de una amiga que nos envia a do-it-yourself pumpkin kit.

Retroposts

—oOo—

Mi casa hace cien años

lunes, 22 de junio de 2015

Mi casa hace cien años

La foto está tomada más o menos desde donde ahora está el monumento de la Plaza de los Sitios. La calle Joaquín Costa, que supongo no se llamaría así, era "bastante" ancha.

Topsight and Textual Strategy

domingo, 21 de junio de 2015

Topsight and Textual Strategy

A passage from Stephen Bygrave's Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology (Routledge, 1993) in which he discusses Burke's translation of the term 'strategy' from a military to a rhetorical context. We are more comfortable, Bygrave argues, with the notion of texts having an 'ideology' than with the notion that they employ 'strategies'. Bygrave seems to take for granted that the 'strategies' referred to are not under the author's deliberate or planning control, any more than the ideology—but of course it is not a matter of all-or-nothing, as there may be congruent transitions from conscious design to unconscious 'strategy' just as there may be incongruent tensions between intent and results (of the kind often analyzed by deconstructors). Any such strategies, if they are an identifiable object, must be recognized by a reader, but they should be ascribed to the reader's perceptive (or critical) insights on the text; they cannot be ascribed wholesale to the reader's agency or ingenuity, as that would result in "hopeless relativism since we could no longer appeal to the text to validate the claims we made about it" (108).

But just now I want to draw attention to the relationship between perspectival dominion or topsight (dominant insight, if you will) and strategy, as against tactics, as discussed by Bygrave.

The martial associations of the term 'strategy' are to do with directing a campaign rather than a battle. A field commander in the presence of the enemy employs tactics. A strategy is rather the set of such operations, the logic they follow. It is evident that this may be a logic that can only be discerned retrospectively, and that strategies may need to be modified in the light of the contingent and the unexpected. A strategy has both a spatial aspect—the deployment of available resources—and a temporal or narrative aspect—those resources are deployed in sequence. The presence of an opponent anticipating your strategies and initiating their own, together with variables such as the weather, means that a strictly causal logic is likely only to be apparent when the sequence is complete. (108-109)

There is an ongoing narrative aspect (involving anticipated retropection, thence the narrative dimension) in the strategic confrontation, and each of the opponents may construct their partial and ongoing narratives. But these are contingent narratives which are subordinated to the major narratives depicting or interpreting the strategy, and these are possible only ex post facto, once the confrontation has been settled and a result has been achieved. Of course the agonists may still hold to different narrative interpretations of the confrontation, but many hypothetical elements in the agon have been resolved or determined by the end; secret plans have been unfolded and come to the light, and narrative topsight is largely shared by both parties in the confrontation, i.e. they share a knowledge of the main strategic dimensions of the conflict and a narrative interpretation of the agon which is largely common to both.

The link between topsight and retrospection is one I have underlined in a number of papers. As applied to textual structure, part of the implication has to do with the act of reading, an agon between text and reader which  reaches a partial endpoint with closure (and its concomitant retrospective dimensions). As applied to criticism, the agon is one a contest of insights, or of the perception of relevance, between different readers of a text (readers interacting or leaving a critical interpretation). Here we encounter the dynamics of blindness and insight described by Paul de Man, or the sequence of deconstructions surrounding Poe's allegory of interpretation in "The Purloined Letter" (see my papers "Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism", and "Benefit of Hindsight"). This contest can have no definite closure.

For an early approach to tactics and topsight, see my paper on Sun Tzu's The Art of War. A comprehensive theory of strategy is developed by Erving Goffman and applied to multiple interactional contexts in Strategic Interaction.

Poe-tics of Topsight

 

Sin Complejos 21/06/15: La crisis de Grecia

domingo, 21 de junio de 2015

Sin Complejos 21/06/15: La crisis de Grecia

Jameson on the Dialectics of the Subtext

domingo, 21 de junio de 2015

Jameson on the Dialectics of the Subtext

Fredric Jameson's observation on the retroactive dimension of a symbolic act, seen here as an intervention or an act of attention which reworks its own context, and redefines the sense of the subtext it refers to, by virtue of its very existence. This is to be associated to the narrative fallacy, by virtue of which a narrative reorganizes events with a view to the end from which the narrative is told.

 

"The symbolic act .  .  . begins by producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back over against it, measuring it with an eye to its own active project. The whole paradox of what we are calling the subtext can be measured by this, that the literary work or cultural object itself, as though for the first time, brings into being that situation to which it is also at one and the same time a reaction."

(1988: 141)

From an essay in Jameson's Situations of Theory, vol. 1 of The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, 2 vols. London: Routledge, 1988.

This might be related to G. H. Mead's ecological perspective on action: an organism defines its environment and actively constructs it by choosing some aspects of it among the diverse stimuli coming from the environment and responding to them.

Conversión, Reinterpretación, Topsight y Retroacción