form without meaning

[Jon Aske]

Edith (and all),

Thank you for your very interesting and thought-provoking posting.  It
made me think and here are the results, in condensed form, of my
thoughts about all this.  A lot of the things I am arguing against do
not necessarily follow from what you said, that is I am not saying that
that is your position, though it may be an extreme version of your basic
position.  I am just trying to understand why anybody would want to
exclude function and explanation and non-formal factors from description
at all.  None of this is meant to be taken personally by anyone.
(Paraphrasing what David said the other day, I do not believe who people
who disagree with me have "character flaws").

I agree with you that the description of the data is our primary goal.
Constructions, no matter how well motivated, may have a great deal of
idiosynchratic characteristics which have to be described and, as long
as we don't understand the functions involved, all we can do is describe
the facts in as much detail as we can and draw as many generalizations
as we can, facts and generalizations about form, *and* about meaning,
about usage, about anything and everything which correlates with form
and any variations in form.  And, in many cases at least, these
descriptions are but steps that we follow in order to understand the
constructions and what they do and why they are the way they are.  That
is, while we describe, we can, and should, start making guesses as to
what motivates the constructions, diachronically *and* synchronically.

In my work I deal with speech act constructions and here I find that
discourse pragmatics and information structure are central to
understanding these constructions: their form and their uses.  Notions
such as topic, focus, topicality and "focality", contrast, emphasis,
scope, etc., etc.  And the motivations I see here are not just
diachronically sedimented on the constructions in question, and
irrelevant to the synchronic description of the the constructions. I
believe that the motivations for these constructions are to a large
extent synchronically transparent and real for the speakers as well,
that is, that they are part of the speakers' representations of those
constructions.  At least I want to find out to what extent they are
synchronically motivated for speakers.  I think this is an important and
major thing that we should attempt to do.

Surely, these categories and principles, which are iconically reflected
more or less transparently in different aspects of the constructions,
are also mixed with other more or less arbitrary aspects, the result of
different constraints and extensions added to these constructions
throughout their history.  All that has to be described too, and not
swept under the rug just because we don't understand it or dismiss it as
uninteresting just because we cannot understand it..

So, for instance, I do not believe that we can describe (in any
meaningful way) the English passive construction, or the dative shift
construction, left dislocation, right dislocation, do-support,
inversions of different types (from canonical order), question
constructions, and a great number of other constructions, all major
constructions, all constructions which in which discourse pragmatics
properties and roles are involved, without the function
(discourse-pragmatics) of these constructions and the elements of these
constructions playing a central part in those descriptions.

The passive construction, for instance, does not exist somewhere in some
real or ideal grammatical realm and then it is put to some arbitrary use
because it happens to be there, which is how I feel that some linguists
approach this construction.  The passive cosntruction exists to perform
a function, or a set of functions in different contexts, and it has the
form it does to a great extent because of the functions that it is
designed to express.  I believe that that is central to the
construction, and not an ancillary issue which can be left for other
investigators to worry about.  When we describe a construction we have
to describe the details of the form *and* semantic and pragmatic
charactersitics of the constructions, the patterns of use, and so on and
so forth, and along with all these the functions of the constructions
and the possible reasons for their form, whether they are only
diachronic or partially or fully synchronic as well.  I just don't see
how we can possibly ignore all these things while we are describing some
aspect of a language.

And we had better look at other languages along the way to see how the
functions performed by the passive constructions in English are
performed in them.  And if they don't have an equivalent construction to
the passive construction then we should try to figure out why.  And if
there is a passive-like construction and it's used differently, we
should figure out how they are used differently and attempt to
understand why.  What parts of those languages system pick up the slack,
and so on and so forth.

Here I feel compelled to bring up an analogy from another science and I
hope I won't be unduly chastised for my boldness and my ignorance.  I
just can't imagine that a biologist, for example, would attempt to
describe a particular organ in some organism without at the same time
attempting to understand its function (what it's for), how it may have
gotten to be the way it is, what it does, how it does it, how it
interacts with other organs of the body, and how it compares with the
way other organisms perform those functions.  Surely a lot of
descriptive work will have to be done before the organ is fully
understood, or understood as well as it can be understood, but I doubt
that functional considerations will be ignored during the descriptive
stage, or, even worse, completely ignored as unworthy of study and
uninsteresting.  Surely we'll come across things such as the appendix
which doesn't seem to have a function (though it may have at one time),
surely we'll come across things that we don't understand, and things
that we will never understand, but how can we even dismiss the search
for understanding from the start?

I think I'll stop here.  I do tend to get carried away.  I am just
trying to understand.  If I got it all wrong, or some of it wrong, I
want to know.

Best, Jon

--
Jon Aske
jaske at abacus.bates.edu
http://www.bates.edu/~jaske/
--
Eguzkia nora, zapiak hara
"Where the sun is, that's where you should hang your clothes."