form, function, data, description

[John Myhill]

I feel a little bit strange jumping to the defense of formalists after
my recent contributions, but I can think of at least two occasions upon
which my own (functionalist) thinking has been significantly influenced
by articles by formalists (and I'm not talking about cases like Dixon's
Dyirbal grammar, which are basically descriptive but use formal tools).
These are (1) Chomsky's article 'on wh-movement', in which he connected
syntactic phenomena related to relativization, topicalization, and clefting,
a connection which was at the time (1977) quite striking to me at least,
and (2) Burzio's various articles on VS word order in Italian, which
showed how a variety of factors could motivate word order alternations.
I doubt that either of these two formalists would approve of the use I
made of their ideas (and they might not even understand how my use
was related to their work), but to me it was quite clear that my thinking
was influenced significantly by these articles.

Regarding 'how much Japanese' to learn to understand jibun to see that
formal 'reflexive' accounts don't work--in this case I don't think much
beyond reading ability. Even minimal reading ability. Get a Japanese book,
an English translation, a Japanese-English dictionary, and a basic grammar.
Learn how jibun is written in Japanese. Scan the Japanese text for this
combination (depending upon the text you should find one every 5-10 pages).
When you find a token, translate the whole sentence, with the help of the
English translation. After a
while, you will doubtless notice that few or none of the tokens of jibun
translate as reflexives or have an antecedent in the same clause. At this
point, the absurdity of attempting to define the use of jibun syntactically
will be obvious. In terms of a more fine-grained analysis, well, that's
another question, but I was particularly addressing the question of the
plausibility of formal accounts of this.

John Myhill







>I disagree with a number of the recent postings about the value of
>formal
>work, the nature and use of data, and from my heart with the sharp
>divide that
>some seem to want to draw between functionalist and formalist.
>
>1. Matthew Dryer is unaware of "any instance in which the descriptions
>provided by
>formal linguists have been of value", and that typologists will find
>descriptions of
>form in descriptive grammars rather than in anything provided by
>formalists.
>
>Having written a few grammars, I know how little one should trust these,
>but that is a different issue. There *are* descriptive grammars informed
>by formal
>theory and these are very useful to the typologist. To cite a well known
>example,
>though the theory is quite dated, Dixon's grammar of Dyirbal is largely
>based in the then current generative phonology/transformational grammar
>framework. I suspect that
>it was not just the facts of the language that generated such interest
>in this grammar -- an interest that has persisted -- but Dixon's
>explicit use of the formal tools then at hand.
>In discovering where these tools worked and where they didn't we learnt
>a lot about
>this language and looked at quite a few others in a different way.
>
>Generally, I would agree with Dryer's statements that functionalists do
>not depend on
>formalists for their explananda. But I have to say that many descriptive
>grammarians,
>writing the descriptions on which a range of research enterprises
>(including functionalist ones) are based, depend very much on formalist
>linguistics for many of their *questions*.
>
>How important was it to describe the properties of reflexive pronouns
>before the advent of binding theory? Descriptions of argument structure
>and case relations, of Equi etc. are fairly standard in grammars these
>days. It hasn't always been like this.
>
>2. John Myhill asks that David Pesetsky learn enough Japanese to see for
>himself, though John assures us that the issue is not about knowing or
>not knowing Japanese.
>One wonders, given the obvious complexity of jibun (as far as I can
>glean from the discussion) just how much Japanese one would need to
>learn. At what point in their acquisition do second language learners
>provide intuitions as reliable as those of native speakers? At what
>point can a linguist learning a language trust his or her own
>intuitions? Can only native speaker linguists write 'correct'
>descriptions?
>
>3. Please don't ask, as a requirement, for descriptive linguists to
>learn the languages they write descriptions of. The material available
>for secondary description/analysis would dry up pretty quickly. And
>please don't write off those descriptions/grammars that have been
>written by linguists who didn't 'know' the languages as necessarily
>incomplete. Please take into consideration that any description is
>limited -- by the nature of data, by the knowledge of the informants, by
>the interests and expertise of the describer, etc. etc. Especially,
>please don't expect that grammatical descriptions of any kind, whether
>written by 'formalists', 'functionalists' or just plain eclectics say
>all there is to say about a phenomenon, or more importantly ask the only
>questions worth asking.
>
>4. Incidentally, I wonder how many term papers have been prompted by the
>discussion of jibun.
>
>Alan Dench