Chess and Syntax

[Diego Quesada]

On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, Frederick Newmeyer wrote:

> Nobody could
> deny that the rules of chess (pieces, possible moves, etc.) form an
> autonomous system. But functional factors could have (indeed, surely did)
> enter into the design of the system. A ruling from the International Chess
> Authority could change the rules (resulting in a different, but still
> autonomous, system). Furthermore, when playing a game we have a choice as
> which pieces to play, which moves to make.
>
> Syntax, then, is autonomous in very much the same way that chess is
> autonomous. We mentally represent an autonomous system.

The analogy is not that felicitous. Fritz overlooks a crucial aspect of
these two putatively autonomous games [it's revealing that an analogy was
drawn from a game; indeed formal linguistics sometimes seems no more than
an intelectual excercise for the sake of entertainment, but that's another
disk], namely that in order for every piece to move, and how to move it,
one needs to know what is it, in linguistic terms this means that we need
to know what the MEANING of the combining element is; otherwise one could
have the horse move diagonaly, the tower jump in all directions and so on,
just as constitutents could be shifted around irrespective of what they
mean. As G. Lakoff (if I remember correctly) put it and as -I assume- all
Funknetters think, as long as any combination is determined by semantic
content there can be no autonomy.

As for innateness (of either the so-called UG, or autonomous syntax), I
don't think we are explaing much by clinging to that, which is, at its
best, a truism: it all boils down to saying that language is exclusive of
humans. That might have been perceived as a revolutioary time bomb back in
1957 in Skinner-influenced linguistics. Nowadays it is simply a trivial
fact as saying that all languages have vowels. It happens that many of the
so-called "hypotheses" in generative grammar turn out, on chronological
account, to have been "patches" to objections; for instance, the so-called
mentalism and innateness. Givon (1984: 7) has already pointed out this
when he says that "Whether the particular mix and its coherence or lack
thereof were the product of design or accident is still a matter of
debate". I guess he was trying to be diplomatic...

J. Diego Quesada
University of Toronto