What is this dispute anyway?

Jon Aske jaske at ABACUS.BATES.EDU
Sun Jan 12 15:47:30 UTC 1997


I was distracted for one day and now there is so much I would like to
reply to.  I will keep it brief though.  Or you can just press the D key
right now.

To Patricia K.: I don't see how you can study "meaning" in the abstract
any more than you can study "form" in the abstract, other than in very
limited ways.  Through typological comparison we can get a sense of what
meanings and functions are important for humans to communicate and get
expressed in language, more or less frequently, both lexically and
grammatically, and how the different instantiations vary.  But I don't
believe those meanings and functions exist in an abstract (least-common
denominator) form.  So when you study meaning you have to deal with
form-meaning units, i.e. lexemes and constructions.  There is just no
other way about it.

To Edith M.: I just don't see why we would want to restrict our
linguistic analysis to the more formal aspects of constructions and
ignore their function/meaning pole, their history, and so on.  I haven't
seen the point since my undergraduate days 15 years ago.  I remember
going through all those transformations and wondering why things
transform themselves into other things, e.g. what was the point of a
passive or a dative-shift construction, and why some languages had those
alternative constructions and others didn't.  To me, studying the formal
aspects of such constructions without looking at what they are made for,
how they are made, etc. *as a matter of principle*, just doesn't make
sense.

I came to the early realization that these constructions should not be
studied as merely formal operations.  These constructions exist for a
purpose, and their form reflects the function that they arose for in the
first place, even if they have picked up additional bagage along the
way.  And to me that is the most interesting part of analyzing
language/grammar.

I realize that our present inability to predict the use of, for example,
even the English passive, makes a lot of people skeptical that the study
of meaning/function along with form is a realizeable goal.  And I
realize that until we get a firm hold of the meaning/function of
particular constructions, we may need to play around with formal
constraints (eg constraints on 'extraction') and correlations found on
those constructions.  But along with formal constraints we need to
analyze semantic and other functional constraints and correlations.  We
just can't separate the two.  Separating the two as a matter of
principle, to see how far we can go, or some other such reason, to me is
unconscionable.

David P. tells us that now they use "functional" categories in their
grammatical theory.  Well, I'm glad you finally figured out that
functions are important to linguistic analysis, even if it just a
handful of the wrong kind of functions. But, as you said, your functions
are nothing like our functions.  Your functions are abstract, pristine,
pure, and perhaps even innate.  Your language systems are clockwork
mechanisms that have a pure form where things move up and down,
branching direction is fully consistent, etc.  Then, for some strange
reason, things get muddled on the surface, maybe a particular
construction decides to branch in an inconsistent way and "scrambling
rules" mess up an otherwise neat and underlying perfect system.

Well, I just do not believe that that is what languages are like.
Languages are not underlyingly pristine and then they get messy.  They
are just plain messy to begin with.  And that makes sense once you
realize how it is they got that way. The functions of language
instantiated in grammar, which you reduce to a handful of abstract
formal-functional categories, do not come to us in abstract and pristine
form, and they are a lot more than that handful, and they interact with
each other in much more complex and richer ways than you can imagine,
...  Well, I'll leave it at that.

To John M.: I understand your frustration and your points are well
taken.  Still, I don't see any harm done in these periodic outbursts on
linguistics lists.  Anything which means contact between members of
different linguistics schools, even if it is in a dark room, is welcome,
as I see it. I too would like to see more data oriented discussions on
this list (any takers?), and I would like to figure out why they don't
take place, but that is no reason to stop the other type of discussion.
If they come up, it must be for a reason.  It sounds to me like you have
it all figured out, but there are a lot of people out there who don't
(students, for instance).  And if the problems are political, that needs
to be aired out too.  After all, you also seem to have very strong
feelings about some of these things and decided to air them out, rather
than stop your posting somewhere around the middle.

Anyway, I've used up my alloted space for about a week, so I'm stopping
here. Do keep it coming.  And let's keep it civil.

Best, Jon

--
Jon Aske
jaske at abacus.bates.edu
http://www.bates.edu/~jaske/
--
Nolako egurra, halako sua
"Such as is the wood, thus will be the fire."



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