Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'

[Daniel Everett]

Dear Sherman,

I didn't mean to imply by 'motivated' that functional considerations
shaped form in a teleological sense. I recognize the difference between
form-selection and form-structuring, a distinction that I expend some
energy defending in a article of a few years back (1994. 'The
Sentential Divide in Language and Cognition: Pragmatics of Word Order
Flexibility and Related Issues', The Journal of Pragmatics & Cognition,
2:1, pp 131-166.). In that article I argued largely against the
position I now hold, which is that function does motivate form in some
important ways, in the sense that function is causally implicated in
syntactic form. And obvious example of a form-based vs. function-based
approach can be given from  'WH-movement'. In the Minimalist Program,
WH-words are found in the sentence-initial position to satisfy strictly
formal constraints, mainly the demands of morphological features. In
Lambrecht's or an RRG approach to information structure, the structure
of a WH-question is motivated by Illocutionary Force (IF) and Focus,
among other things. Direct reference to the communicative functions of
IF-marking and information-structure more generally is not possible in,
say, the MP, however. This is a large part of what the Generative
Semantics vs. Interpretative Semantics debate was about, the very
debate that in important ways led to the development of functional
linguistics.



-- Dan



On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 05:05  pm, Sherman Wilcox wrote:

> On 12/8/02, Dan Everett said:
>
>> If functional linguistics is right to believe that (most of) syntax is
>> motivated by communicative needs
>
> I would hope that functional linguists don't believe this. I would no
> more claim that "syntax is motivated by communicative needs" than an
> evolutionary biologist would claim that structure is motivated by
> functional needs.
>
> --
> Sherman Wilcox
> Department of Linguistics
> University of New Mexico
>
>
********************
Dan Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK
M13 9PL
Phone: 44-161-275-3158
Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187
http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/

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