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[Susanna Cumming]

I'd like to reiterate here my original point, which seems to have gotten
lost in the shuffle: is there any point in attempting sentence-level
parsing? The issue is not so much the separation of syntactic analysis
from semantic analysis (though I am certainly not in favor of that either,
and I fully agree with Matthew's points on that topic), but the separation
of linguistic analysis at any level from goal-driven, multi-functional,
socially-enacted communicative context.

In my view this is what crucially separates functionalists on the one hand
from cognitivists on the other, or if you prefer discourse functionalists
from cognitive functionalists: discourse folks believe that language
removed from its communicative setting is sufficiently different from
"real" communicative language that there's not much point in studying it,
because you don't know what you've learned about real language when you're
finished. If you take this point seriously there isn't much difference
between the cognitivists and the formalists, since they are both (with
some noble exceptions) content to base their analyses on "unnatural" data.

In other words it's not "autonomy" that's the main problem, it's the
"competence-performance" dichotomy.

Susanna