autonomous syntax

[Jon Aske]

I guess I should let Matthew Dryer answer this, but my impulsive nature
prevents me from doing that.

Frederick Newmeyer wrote:
>
> A brilliant demonstration to this effect (and hence support for AS) has
> been provided by Matthew Dryer in an article in LANGUAGE. Dryer shows that
> the underlying generalization governing the Greenbergian word order
> correlations is not a semantic one (e.g. head-dependent relations or
> whatever), but rather the *principal branching direction* of phrase
> structure in the language. The two often are in accord, of course; where
> they conflict it is the abstract structural relationships provided by
> formal grammar that win out. In an in-preparation work, I argue that this
> is the norm for language. Yes, the fit between surface form and meaning is
> quite close. But yes, also, formal patterning has a 'life of its own', as
> is asserted by AS.

I reall fail to see how Dryer's generalization in any way shows anything
about the autonomy of grammar.

The relative degree to which languages display a consistent branching
direction in a number of centripetal constructions can indeed be
accounted by at least the following two facts:

(1) diachronically: from the fact that certain types of complements,
such as genitives, are often the source of other types of complements,
such as relative clauses and adpositional constructions.

(2) A 'relator-in-the-middle' iconic principle: there may be a
preference for "relators" or function morphemes expressing the relation
between heads and their complements for instance, such as adpositions,
to be placed between the two elements related.  Hence, postpositional
phrases tend to precede the noun they complement and prepositional ones
follow it.  The former are left branching and the latter right
branching.  This *may* influence certain choices that speakers make
diachronically leading to certain structural preferences in the system
of constructions of a language.

If there was anything like autonomy in grammar and Dryer's principle was
a formal, even innate principle (subject to parametric variation), I
would expect languages to be much more consistent than they are.  The
fact is that the constructions of a language are not all cut out of a
same pattern at a synchronic level but, rather, are all more or less
independent of each other (although they do seem to form a *system* of
sorts).  Many of these constructions are not even centripetal, and thus,
the notion of branching is irrelevant in them.

But the real question when it comes to autonomy vs. non-autonomy, is
whether the constructions of a language can, or should, be described
independently of the semantic and pragmatic meanings which they are used
to express, and independently, for instance, of the iconic and universal
principles, such as topic-comment or comment-topic, on which they are
sometimes based.

I don't think they can and I don't think they should.  The simple reason
for this is that I do not think that that is how humans learn or store
the constructions of a language.  Form is always stored and intimately
connected to function and that is how it should be described and
analyzed.

I hope I didn't forget anything.

Jon

--
Jon Aske
jaske at abacus.bates.edu
http://www.bates.edu/~jaske/
--
Zeinek bera nolako, besteak uste halako
"Everyone believes that everyone else is like them."