The Literary Mind.pdf

LANGUAGE 159
The cast of "characters" in the second version includes creationism, evolutionary
theory, and other theories. The actions include sharing, displacing,
and proving. The second version presents characters in the story and the
actions in which they are involved. The first version does not. The second
version is easier to read. In my words, the grammar carries expectations about
narrative structure because it is created by projection from narrative structure;
the second sentence meets the inevitable expectations of correspondence
better than the first.
According to Williams and Colornb, readers will regard a paragraph as more
cohesive if the topics of its sentences present consistent information—which
usually means referring to the characters in the story. Such paragraphs will also
be more coherent if their sentences' topics present a consistent "point of view."
In my terms, the larger grammar of the paragraph derives from the conceptual
structure of a story, in which characters are involved in actions. Readers therefore
expect the string of topics from sentence to sentence to connect the main
characters, and expect one of those characters to dominate this topic string so as
to present the scenario from a consistent viewpoint.
If this is right, then the prototypical grammars of clauses, sentences, and
texts all derive from the same source: parable.
Everyone agrees that acquiring language helps an infant develop mentally
by making it possible for the infant to express thought and to understand the
expression of other people's thought. If grammar arises through parable, acquiring
language could help the infant develop mentally in an additional, altogether
different way. A grammatical structure corresponds to a story structure; the two
structures are blended in a grammatical construction. Under parable, there can
also be projection back from the blend to input spaces. The development of grammatical
constructions could therefore reinforce the learning of story structure.
The learning of a language may quite literally change the neurobiology of the
infant in ways that are influential over cognition. This creates the intriguing
possibility that speech and writing could be ways for the brain of one person to
exert biological influence upon the brain of another person: thinking may be
affected abidingly by experience with language.
If we use the old metaphoric conception of the brain as an agent who "deals
with" language or as a container that for a moment "holds" language while examining
it for storage or discard, then it is natural to think of the biology of the
brain as unchanged by its dealings with language. But if we use instead the conception
of the brain as an active and plastic biological system, we are led to consider
a rather different range of hypotheses: The brain is changed importantly
by experience with language; language is an instrument used by separate brains
to exert biological influence on each other, creating through biological action at