form and function

[Edith A Moravcsik]

This is to respond to two points in John Myhill's recent posting.

One of the points he made was that there were syntactic phenomena that
could not be described in formal terms. If describing syntactic phenomena
in formal terms means describing the coocurrence and linear relations
among words without reference to meaning, then I cannot quite see how any
syntactic phenomenon would defy such a description. The resulting formal
description may not be explanatory or general to any extent; but it should
be possible. If all else fails, the formal description would say: "X may
occur with anything in any order."

Formal descriptions seem not only possible in all cases; they are
also necessary for a functionalist to have available. If functionalists
are trying to explain form by function, then some description of form is
a prerequisite for their endeavor. - The dependency relationship
between formalists and functionalists also holds in the other direction:
if describing and explaining sentence form is a shared goal between them,
then functionalists depend on formalists for their explananda just as
formalists in turn depend on functionalists for functional explanations
for those aspects of form where such are available.

John's other point has to do with whether discourse analysis is beyond
the pale of the formalist approach. John implied that it was. But why
couldn't the same distributional analysis that formalists impose on
sentences be also carried out on discourse, by looking at cooccurrence and
linear order across, rather than within, sentences?

Edith M.



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                         Edith A. Moravcsik
                         Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics
                         University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
                         Milwaukee, WI 53201-0413
                         USA

                         E-mail: edith at uwm.edu
                         Telephone: (414) 229-6794 /office/
                                    (414) 332-0141 /home/
                         Fax: (414) 229-2741