The necessity of syntax

[Dick Hudson]

Dear Oesten and Funknet,

Are we in danger of confusing syntax and grammar? It seems pretty obvious
to me at least that even if languages have similar amounts of complexity it
may be distributed differently between syntax and morphology. Marianne
Mithun gave a wonderful tutorial on Mohawk to the LAGB some years ago which
left some of us wondering whether Mohawk has any syntax at all - lots of
morphology, lots of coreference etc handled by pragmatics, but nothing that
could obviously be called syntax. Of course the boundary between morphology
and syntax is a matter of debate and no doubt it's possible to write a
GB/MP grammar of a language such as Mohawk which puts all the morphology
into the syntax. But we should at least recognise morphology as an area of
complexity and expressivity.
        Dick Hudson

>Or is it the existence of syntax as such that is
>motivated by communicative needs? That is what Steve Long seems to mean
>when he says "any human language -- prewired or invented by humans --
>will have syntax if it is to function as well as human languages do".
>But that will hardly help us in comparing different languages as to
>complexity, since presumably all languages have some kind of syntax. And
>the postings seem to be talking past each other.
>
>- Vsten Dahl
>
>

Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm