Dan Everett: Honorifics, etc. (reply to Alec Marantz)

[Martha McGinnis]

  Folks,

  Just a couple of comments on Alec's posting:

> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Martha McGinnis" <mcginnis at ucalgary.ca>
> > To: <DM-LIST at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> > Sent: Sunday, September 02, 2001 11:38 AM
> > Subject: Alec Marantz: Honorifics, etc. (reply to Mark Volpe)
> >
> >
> > > DM endorses the claim of the "Strong Lexicalist Hypothesis" that
> > > derivation doesn't occur before inflection (and that in fact the
> > > derivation/inflection split is a false dichotomy)
> >

 Isn't this self-contradictory? Its understanding must depend on some
 assumed background information.

> > > DM claims
> > > that all morphology is syntactic, with the syntactic structures
> > > determining morpheme position also determining interpretation.

 Are there references someone could provide for me as to how DM handles the
 kind of semantic constraints on morpheme ordering that Bybe (over many
 years) and Keren Rice (her recent CUP book on Athapaskan), among many
 others, have shown to be relevant in many languages?

> > > On the other hand, of course, not making any strong
> > > claims about a particular set of data is nothing for a theory
> > > to brag about.

 Why not? Boas would most certainly have taken pride in/bragged about this,
 as would any pragmatist of the James-Peirce-Dewey tradition. The love of
 'strong' claims is, to me at least, a residue of Cartesian/Platonic
 'essentialism' and is questionable at the very least. The point of
 mentioning this is that readers of this list and practitioners of DM and
 other structure-based theories (though this applies to, howbeit with less
 novelty, to semantic-based theories as well) ought to be aware that making
 'strong, falsifiable hypotheses', while seemingly a matter of 'common
 sense' after so many years of Popperian influence in Linguistics, is not
 necessarily the best way to go about the business of science. Certainly it
 is not the only way. Likely it is often the least enlightening way. (For an
 interesting perspective, see the recent issue of Current Anthropology's
 discussion of Boas and Pragmatism. For more general reading, try out some
 Rorty. Perhaps the best evaluation of the typical view of knowledge in
 Linguistics is presented in Lakoff & Johnson (1999, 469ff). And I have some
 work on progress on this as well.)

  -- Dan Everett