And the special privileges of syntax

By the proposal here, a significant distinction is drawn between objects of discourse, ooh, ah, oh, eh, yes, no, OK, greetings , curses, expressions of religious devotion, sometimes switched around, commonly at the end of sentences in English, in some cases in various other positions, and objects of syntax, very rigidly ordered in English. This distinction is reflected in the fact that in some cases where speech and language are lost as a result of an accident or a stroke, only some discourse elements are preserved, at the expense of syntax, never the other way round. Conversely, it is common for syntactic objects, particularly names to be felt to be ‘on the tip of the tongue’. But the experience of a swear word on the tip of the tongue seems to be unattested. So there is good reason for thinking that discourse objects are represented separately in the brain from syntactic objects. But this seemingly categorial distinction does not prevent items being shifted in both directions from one category to the other. Historically, modern goodbye was God abide with thee. And the conjunction, oohs and arghs, has become an object of syntax. It seems to be an everyday operation of speech and language to recategorise item in either direction.

Sandiway Fong contrasts the relatively slow rate of neurophysiological transmission with the hypersensitivity of the auditory and visual receptors. It thus seems possible that the transmission speed of neurophysiological transmission is a bottleneck and a critical variable, While the relation between semantic and articulatory . perceptual factors is a matter of conceptual necessity across the whole range of speech and language evolution and development, this says nothing about any ordering or priority between them. So it is possible that syntactic and discourse objects are differentiated on this basis. Syntactic objects may be given some sort of priority and perthaps associated faster and earlier. And the difference may be critical.

The Faculty of Language, FL, involves two interplays, one between syntax and discourse, and the other within syntax between lexical words, comprising nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions, not all invariably represented in a language, and functors like a and the, definable only on the structures in which they occur. Used in questions, words like where and what involve both discourse and the functional projection. Both sorts of interplay are thus central to the formal characterisation of FL, and thus on how it can be mathematically encoded in a way that is legible to the biology.

Departing slightly from the standard canons of the framework here, I personally assume that discourse interacts with syntax in complex and intricate ways, allowing utterances: “Ah, there you are!” Ah, followed by a pause, marks this as a discourse opening expressing relief. There has has been displaced from the right edge where it might appear in a grammatical sentence in English. It keeps a locative reference, and contrasts with here. But it also becomes a discourse structure. So it blocks both negation and the formation of a question. There are no truth conditions. It does not make sense to say: “Ah, there you are! Is that true?”

One sort of structure, half way between discourse and syntax, consists in expressions like “The bigger the better” with no form of the verb, otherwise obligatory in any statement such that it be neither questioned nor denied. There is a statement here to the extent that it can be incorporated into a syntactic structure, as in “It is indeed the case that the bigger the better” which can be questioned or denied or both, as by “Isn’t it the case that the bigger the better?” But more characteristically there is just a primitive discourse wish, resurrecting a form of language which may have preceded the evolution of syntax. By the proposal here, such forms are characteristic of children’s first two word combinations.

By the proposal here, discourse was indistinguishable from any notion of syntax or grammar at the very beginning of human language evolution. Faint echoes of this still remain in

• Very early language with hello or good bye often in the first pairings of different sorts of element;
• The way discourse elements are allowed quite freely in sentences, often with a momentary pause before and after them – as with allegedly anywhere in the structure of “He works nights” – in any of all four logically possible positions with little effect on the meaning – to the effect that there is something dubious about the proposition. Perhaps he doesn’t work at all.