Function and convention

[Wolfgang Schulze]

> David Tuggy quotes Fritz Newmeyer:
>
> ****
> Is 'convention' admissible as a category of functional motivation? (That
> would raise a host of problems, no?)
> ****

Perhaps we should replace 'convention' by 'routinization' (based on
'ritualization') in order to avoid the intentional connotation, the term
'convention' seems to imply. I think that the grammar of a language has to be
explained on the basis of the acquired cognitive and (cognition based)
communicative practise of an individual integrated into a collective. This
practise is dominated by massive hypotheses about the self-attachment to a
collective; it RE-presents a strongly ritualized but construing interaction of
the individual with environmental or world stimuli which corresponds to the
habitus of a collective and which takes place in form of the tacit (poiematic)
and/or articulate (pragmatic) activation of an acquired (and tradi-tional)
knowledge system.
 Linguistic practise can be thought to represent the individual reaction to a
collective communicative and cognitive standard which itself is predominantly
historical in nature. By this is meant that the linguistic knowledge system of
an individual and its instantiation in a 'communicative community' always
reflects strategies of linguistic adaptation that have been functionalized long
before the individual has acquired a given system. Hence, it can be argued that
language as a ‘metaphysical’ phenomenon owns strong anachronistic features: It
hardly ever meets the immediate synchronic needs of information processing and
communication. It follows that functional and semantic aspects of language
architectures are mainly to be explained in a diachronic perspective, though
the potential to adopt newly established communicative and cognitive routines
plays an important role in the dynamic potential of language systems (what I
call 'Pragmatic Intervention' (PI)). The assumption of an anachronistic
ontology of language systems has an important consequence for linguistic
explanation: Contrary to some other cognitive approaches, the framework
underlying these assumptions ('Grammar of Scenes and Scenarios' (GSS) does not
establish a direct synchronic relationship between language systems and
cognition. Language systems and cognitive activities are thought to be
structurally coupled on the basis of a mainly diachronic relationship. From
this it follows that routinization (or if you want 'conventionalization') plays
a crucial role not only in the dynamics of linguistic functions and in the
functional architecture on language systems, but also in the motivation of
these functions emerging from the cognition<>communication interface.

Wolfgang

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Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schulze
Institut fuer Allgemeine und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet München
Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1
D-80539 München
Tel.: +89-21805343 / Fax: +89-21805345
Email: W.Schulze at lrz.uni-muenchen.de
http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~wschulze/
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