Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'

[Ole Nedergaard Thomsen]

Dear Dan,

A correction concerning the Minimalist Program, cf. e.g. Noam
Chomsky's New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind, CUP, 2000, p. 12
f.:
        "The displacement property of human language is expressed in terms
of grammatical transformations or by some other device, but it is always
expressed somehow. Why language should have this property is an
interesting question, which has been discussed since the 1960s without
resolution. My suspicion is that part of the reason has to do with
phenomena that have been described in terms of surface structure
interpretation; many of these are familiar from traditional grammar:
topic-comment, specificity, new and old information, the agentive force
that we find even in displaced position, and so on. If that is correct,
then the displacement property is, indeed, forced by legibility
conditions: it is motivated by interpretive requirements that are
externally imposed by our systems of thought, which have these special
properties (so the study of language use indicates). (...)"

That is, the formal features are where they are to satisfy language use!


Ole
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Ole Nedergaard Thomsen
Dept. of General and Applied Linguistics
University of Copenhagen
Njalsgade 80
DK-2300 Copenhagen S
Denmark
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On Tue, 10 Dec 2002, Daniel Everett wrote:

> 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/
>
>