the pseudo-issue of autonomy

[Martin Haspelmath]

I agree with Edith Moravcsik and John Moore that autonomy is not the
central issue that divides Chomskyans and functionalists. Just look at
any descriptive grammar (quite a few functionalists have published such
works) and examine the morphology section: Inflectional classes, various
stem forms, morphophonemic alternations ? all this is systematic
arbirariness, i.e. autonomy (in Newmeyer's 1998 definition).

In my view, what often divides the two camps is that Chomskyans are
primarily interested in solving Plato's Problem ('How can we acquire
language?'), whereas functionalists are primarily interested in
explaining language structure. Jo Rubba is right that "it was clear from
early in the program that generative linguistics had explanation as its
goal", but not explanation of language structure. Chomsky's "explanatory
adequacy" is only about explaining language acquisition. The practical
goal of spelling out the principles of UG is subordinate to the
theoretical goal of solving Plato's Problem. From this it follows that
functional explanations are anathema in generative linguistics ? because
they undermine UG, and hence Chomsky's solution for Plato's Problem.

Martin

P.S. The above argument is presented in some detail in my review article
on Fritz Newmeyer's (1998) book, due to appear in the next issue of
Lingua.

--
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at eva.mpg.de)
Max-Planck-Institut fuer evolutionaere Anthropologie, Inselstr. 22
D-04103 Leipzig (Tel. (MPI) +49-341-9952 307, (priv.) +49-341-980 1616)