Chess and Syntax

[F. Newmeyer]

Diego Quesada writes:

>   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.

Saying that the 'meaning' of a rook is the ability to move in a straight line
harkens back to the crudest use / instrumentalist theories of meaning that were
rejected by virtually all linguists and philosophers of language decades ago and
are *surely* rejected by 'cognitive linguists'. It reminds me of things that
people used to say long ago like 'the meaning of stops in German is to devoice
finally' or 'the meaning of the English auxiliary is to front in questions'.

So, as far as I can see, my chess analogy still holds (at the level of
discussion).

--fritz newmeyer