Michael, List:
The november 2015 TED talkk by Geneieve von Petzinger ("Why are these
32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe")
that I just found out this morning might be relevant and possibly
early evidence for diagrammaticity and iconic motivation for sign
functions, semiosis, and communication.
Best
Eduardo
On Nov 28, 2015, at 3:13 PM, Michael Shapiro wrote:
Edwina, Jerry
Edwina - Latin is not a good example of anything because it's not a
living language (sensu stricto). Classical Latin is after all a case
of arrested development because Medieval Latin and New Latin are
largely factitious continuations of CL and were only maintained by
an elite.
Jerry - I'm glad that you were able to apply what I said to a wider
sphere of disciplines. Sticking with language, here's a case from
our own time and place which demonstrates to a T––but from a
complementary perspective––what I meant by diagrammatization as the
telos of language evolution:
"Attenuation of Arbitrariness in the Semantics of Quantification
The overall drift in language development is toward
greater diagrammaticity (iconicity) between sound and meaning, which
thereby necessarily results in the attenuation of the arbitrariness
characterizing the fundamental relation of all language structure.
This can be illustrated in the history of English by the
gradual gain in scope of the quantifier of mass nouns less at the
expense of its counterpart fewer, which according to the traditional
norm is reserved for count nouns. Many speakers of American English
(but not only) regularly substitute less for fewer where the norm
specifies the latter to the exclusion of the former.
The iconic motivation of this usage is twofold. First,
less is shorter than fewer, thereby fitting it more adequately than
its counterpart to its meaning, namely ‘lesser quantity’. Second,
individuation as a semantic category is marked (more restricted in
conceptual scope) than non-individuation, so that a drift toward non-
individuation is a movement toward the unmarked member of the
opposition, instantiating the general iconic (semeiotic) principle
according to which language change favors replacement of marked
units, categories, and contexts by unmarked ones."
Michael
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