SGP wrote:Asking as an underground musician who interlinks music and other languages: why does the Copy Cat Principle appeal to a multitude of musicians, singers and writers (both songwriters and novel authors)? Sure, money reasons... but I am asking for what is beyond that, for anything Below the Iceberg's Surface.
Well I'm hardly equipped to converse, debate or even comment on such things! But you know... everyone has an opinion, however misinformed. My musing on this is:
Humans like patterns, structure, and for things be both repeatable and 'expectable' (to make up a word)... but we also do like surprise. I think for spoken language, music, or just about any art form really one needs the right balance.
Too much surprise makes the brain work too hard in an attempt to extract the patterns and structure that it looks for. Its like a complex picture with too much going on and no overarching structure. It's a lot to take in with no guides to help the brain.
Too much pattern and structure can make something seem very formulaic. For me its why some music artists who develop their own 'style' can become boring or dull after their first couple of albums.
And of course when we're not familiar with the patterns and structure, we may recognize the presence of them but still exert much mental energy because we cannot 'expect' or predict what lies ahead. This for me is like when I meet someone who tends to phrase their sentences really differently to what I am used to. They certainly do employ patterns and structure in their communication. But its like I mentally exert more energy to parse what is being said. A bit like reading a book written long ago when the use of English was a little different.
All of this, to my mind, applies very much to language learning. I'm not just getting used to individual grammatical patterns and words, but getting used to how these parts are usually combined into a whole. Theres ways of expressing things which are technically correct, but not natural for a Korean... and then some that are. I need to train my mind to find the latter to be natural. To recognize that structure, those patterns and be able to repeat them and predict/expect them.
EDIT: My naive uninformed 2c