“Big Bang of Grammar.” at one point language a primordial soup in which verbs, nouns, prepositions were all indistignuishable..
They still have in them, each part of speech, a part of every part of speech — verbs in nouns, nouns in prepositions. Even definite and indefinite articles, once thought to be indestructible particles, have been shown in a language-super-collider to have a preposition-like spin. (Could Finnegans Wake be called a language super collider?)
Syntactical constructions are only so many strings, which weave and bounce around like String Theory describes. Syntactical strings floating in a “soup” beneath the solid top strata of words. But do they move more like quanta or more like continental plates?
(Of particular note, at a moment shortly after the universe began, the simile split from the conditional phrase.)
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 