Reply to Fritz Newmeyer

[Matthew S Dryer]

Different people use the expression "autonomous syntax in different
ways, and these differences are often a source of confusion, as I
think they have been in the current discussion.  This medium is not
very suitable for straightening these things out; but, very briefly,
the expression is used for at least the following views:
(1) people are born with innate syntactic knowledge that drives
acquisition and explains universals
(2) one can explain syntactic facts in terms of syntactic notions
(3) syntax/grammar exists (although that too can mean different
things)

Arguments for the autonomy of syntax (such as some offered in print
by Fritz Newmeyer) often involve no more than arguments for (3).
For me (and I assume that this was what both George and Tom meant),
rejecting autonomy of syntax involves rejecting (1) and (2).

As for Fritz' claim that my evidence that the word order
correlations involve branching direction rather than head position
provides an argument for the autonomy of syntax, I would argue the
opposite.  Those who assume that the correlations reflect head
position generally treat consistent head position as an explanation
in itself.  For example, a common position among formal linguists
most closely aligned with Chomsky is that there is some sort of
head-position parameter that is part of innate knowledge.
Conversely, I have suggested that the tendency towards consistent
branching direction reflects (in addition to grammaticization
factors) parsing problems associated with mixed branching, i.e.
"performance" problems extracting the intended meaning.  If this
view is correct, then the explanation lies in the nature of human
working memory, and thus is inconsistent with notions (1) and (2) of
autonomous syntax.

Matthew Dryer