How Functional is OT?

[Geoffrey S. Nathan]

         Let me chime in here with an endorsement of what Joan Bresnan and
Martin Haspelmath have said about the functional nature of current
phonological theory.  It was interesting to note that at the Milwaukee
conference on formalism and functionalism held a few years back there was a
radical difference between the kinds of talks that the syntacticians and
semanticists and typologists gave and those that the three phonologists
gave.  I felt that Joan Bresnan, Bruce Hayes and I all had things to say to
each other, and listened  and learned from each other, while the others
seemed to be talking past each other.  And it seems to me it was precisely
because the 'formalists' in phonology have (in many cases) insisted that
phonological structures be grounded (either in a technical sense, as used
by Archangeli et al., or in the more general sense that functionalists use
the term) in facts about production and perception.  This, of course, is
what Stampe and the Natural Phonologists proposed in the sixties and
seventies.  When Stampe used the term 'innate' he meant, explainable by the
nature of the physiology,  physics and psychophysics
involved.  Unfortunately, at the time, Chomsky was using 'innate' to mean
unexplainable extrinsically, and NP's message got rejected by those
rejecting Chomsky's version of innateness.
         All this is water under the bridge now, but I will second,
(third?) the plea that theories founded purely on negative impulses are
unlikely to gain us the insights we are looking for.  And many valuable
insights about the nature of language have arisen from purely formalist
investigations, even if, as Karen van Hoek and Paul Deane (not to mention
Lakoff, Langacker etc.) have shown, the insights have reasonable
non-linguistic explanations after all.

Geoff
Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of Linguistics
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517
Phone:  (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527
         (618) 549-0106 (Home)
                                                         geoffn at siu.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/funknet/attachments/19991210/68575586/attachment.htm>