What is this dispute anyway?

David Pesetsky pesetsk at MIT.EDU
Sun Jan 12 17:05:17 UTC 1997


At 3:47 PM -0000 1/12/97, Jon Aske wrote:

> 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.

Do you really think that's what I said?

-David Pesetsky





*************************************************************************
Prof. David Pesetsky, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy
20D-219 MIT,  Cambridge, MA 02139 USA
(617) 253-0957 office           (617) 253-5017 fax
http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/pesetsky.html



More information about the Funknet mailing list