The Literary Mind.pdf

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LANGUAGE
Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in
the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets,
theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists,
biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can
be got out of grammarians.
Russ Rymer in The New Yorker
Light, heat, gravity, chemical affinity, human will, have this
in common, that they redistribute force. Their unit of
process can be represented as: term from which, transference
of force, term to which. If we regard this transference
as the conscious or unconscious act of an agent we can
translate the diagram into: agent, act, object.
Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character
as a Medium for Poetry
THE DOMINANT CONTEMPORARY THEORY of the origin of language
proposes that genetic change produced genetic instructions for building a
special module for grammar in the human brain. Before genetic specialization
for grammar, people had no grammar at all: no grammatical speech, no parsing
of grammar, no concept of grammar. To be sure, they communicated (birds and
bees communicate), but their communication was totally ungrammatical. It was
not language. This grammar module was autonomous: it borrowed no structure
or processes from any other capacities like vision, spatial navigation, understanding
of force dynamics, parable, and so on. Adherents of this theory—who form
a large group of distinguished scholars that includes Noam Chomsky, Steven
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