I agree that the analogies to wave/particle duality
in quantum mechanics might more confusing than
enlightening. But I'd like to add a reference to
a long-forgotten (i.e., pre WWW) source:
Pike, Kenneth L. (1967) _A Unified Theory of Human
Behavior_, 2nd edition, Mouton, The Hague.
Pike was a linguist and anthropologist who was one of
the founders of the Summer Institutes in Linguistics.
He did a lot of work on prosody in various languages,
and he generalized the distinction between phonemics
and phonetics to a general principle that applies to
all of human behavior. He separated the suffixes _etic_
for the continuous and _emic_ for the discrete aspects
and used them as general terms.
Pike coined the word _behavioreme_ and analyzed many
examples of behavioremes in sign language, rituals,
dances, and games.
Anyone who has access to a large university library
may be able to find a copy of Pike's book, which is
still a good source of examples.
John Sowa
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