The Necessity of Syntax

[Steve Long]

In a message dated 12/9/02 1:19:05 PM, oesten at LING.SU.SE writes:
<< But if one language puts adjectives before nouns, another puts nouns
first, and a third language allows for both possibilities, are all these
choices motivated by

communicative needs?  >>

There is fur and feathers and scales.  Do the contingencies of environmental
survival "motivate" all of them?  Yes.  Are there different local
environments that might give rise to different solutions?  Yes.  Can two
different solutions arise to satisfy the same function?  Yes.  Do all
function to acheive the same ultimate outcome?  Yes?  Are the differences
more important than the basic underlying function of all three?

The idea is that syntax or its equivalent fundamentally arose because it
enhanced communication.  The particular shape it takes does not take away
from that fundamental function.  The particular shape is a matter of local
time and place.  Time and place may change how language might be shaped to
serve that function.  It does not change the function of syntax.

<<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.>>

When the difference is fur or feathers or scales, it hardly helps us ever to
forget that local environments dictate different answers for the same
function.  Communication is as multifaceted as the physical environment.  So
if the basic communicative function "hardly helps us" understand syntax, I'd
suggest nothing will.  Again, structure cannot be correctly explained without
context, because the same function dictates different structures in different
contexts.  So only by looking for the communicative function of a structure
in a context can the structure make sense.

And also speaking of "need" here may be inaccurate.  Since neither survival
and communication "need" language, any more than the ancestors of elephants
needed to get big to survive (some relatives didn't get bigger and survived
well enough as much smaller species).  Neither life nor language "needs" to
go where it goes.  But where they go, they are constrained by parallel
functional demands, if they are going to continue to keep going.

Steve Long