Response to Newmeyer's response

[Matthew S Dryer]

While I think that some of the recent discussion is terminological
(different people are using the term "autonomy" in different ways),
Fritz' response to my comments reflects a substantive difference
that is fundamental to differences between functionalist and
"formalist" approaches.  Fritz says

>>The sensitivity of speakers to the abstract (formal, structural)
>>notion 'Phrase structure branching-direction', a notion that
>>doesn't (as Dryer shows) correlate perfectly with semantic
>>notions such as 'head-dependent' supports the idea that speakers
>>mentally represent abstract phrase-structure relations
>>INDEPENDENTLY of their semantic and functional
>>'implementations'.

If by this Fritz means that speakers represent the fact that
different structures in their language involve the same branching
direction, then this doesn't follow at all.  My hypothesis is that
languages with both left and right branching result in structures
with mixed branching that in language USE are slightly more
difficult to process, and that over the millenia, this has
influenced language change so that one finds crosslinguistic
patterns reflecting a tendency toward more consistent direction of
branching.  But this does not entail that the fact that different
structures in the language employ the same direction of branching is
itself represented by speakers.  Rather, it simply means that
speaking a language in which structures branch in the same direction
will result in slightly fewer instances of individuals' failing to
extract the intended meaning of an utterance.

A common assumption of much formal work is that the explanations are
built into speakers' representations of their knowledge of their
language.  But since functionalist explanations obtain at the level
of language USE, they are not in general part of the representations
themselves.

Consider the following analogy from biology.  Selection of
combinations of features that are advantageous to survival leads to
individuals with those features surviving more often.  But the fact
that that combination of features is advantageous to survival is not
itself represented in the genetic code or in the structures that
result from their being advantageous.

Matthew