Chess and Syntax

[Diego Quesada]

On Fri, 10 Jan 1997, F. Newmeyer wrote:

> 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'.
        Indeed, but, who is saying that? I reiterate that the meaning of a
constituent DETERMINES (in the strong version) or CONDITIONS (in the weak
version) both its combinatorial properties and the functions it can
perform in a language L.  We thus come back to the present where, after
decades of mechanicism, the essentials of language are given its
deserved place.

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

Diego