Continuity

A decline in disorder, more order

By the principle of entropy, order naturally declines. But where the natural process of language acquistion goes awry, patterns emerge in the resulting disorder. By the principle in entropy there should not be any patterns. Why should this be? 

Nunes (2002) proposed an answer on the basis of a proposal originally due to Martin Atkinson (1982), then popularised by Steven Pinker (1984) under the name of ‘Continuity’, no funtionality can be postulated in acquisition which is not evidenced in competent language. I postulated a dedicated acquisition functionality. But I now reject that proposal, and propose instead that the ‘Continuity Hypothesis’ should be extended:

• By a human-specific adaptation, the evolution of language was linear and continuous from the start, losing disorder as it progressed.

In support of the continuity principle as extended here, there is evidence that the first phonemes are themselves defined on constituent features. This is not to say that the first phonemes were like modern phonemes, but only that they were constituents. The evidence is from disorder. By one severe disorder, the features treated as properties of words rather than their constituent phonemes. For instance, one child at the age of two had very little speech; but of the few words he had, he could say more with a lip articulation in the M and corresponding lip rounding in the vowel and knee with a tongue tip articulation in the N and a corresponding high front articulation in the vowel, but in me and gnaw the M and N sounds were seemingly unpronouncable.

By the proposal here, the apparent order in disorder is a function of the way speech evolved.

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