"loss of generality"

[Sydney Lamb]

Hi Rob!

You wrote:

> On Friday 25 June 2004 00:56, Sydney Lamb wrote:
> > ...
> > Chomsky ... correctly pointed out that the usual
> > solution incorporates a loss of generality, but he misdiagosed
> > the problem. The problem was the criterion of linearity. He
> > stubbornly holds on to this criterion, although it really is
> > faulty, and comes up with a solution for the Russian obstruents
> > that obscures the phonological structure. I showed (in accounts
> > cited below) that by relaxing the linearity requirement we get
> > an elegant solution while preserving "centrality of contrastive
> > function of linguistic elements".
>
> Syd,
>
> I think I am with you on this one.
>
> Am I right in understanding that "relaxing the linearity requirement" means
> the phonetic value of a sequence of phonemes is no longer taken to be the
> sequence of phonetic values of isolated phonemes? In short that the phonetic
> value of a phoneme is no longer taken to be independent of its context?

Yes, that is exactly right. In Russian (as in English and most
languages with obstruent clusters), voicing or lack of it
applies to the whole cluster. Therefore a description loses
generality if it assigns voicing or lack of voicing to each
individual segment of the cluster. In English the voicing of the
whole cluster is determined by the first element; in Russian, by
the last element (even if it is part of the following word).
Thus you could say that voicing of the other obstruents is
determined by their context. (And therefore it is not
distinctive -- has no contrastive function.)

> ...
> I'm not so interested in the conclusions Chomsky drew. I'm just looking for
> evidence of subjectivity. Reading Newmeyer's analysis it struck me that
> Chomsky's evidence (which I think we can give him credit for observing
> clearly) was not so much of innateness, or that the fundamental focus of the
> structuralists of the time on "contrastive function" was wrong.

I agree. These phonological arguments of Chomsky have nothing to
do with innateness. (Quite aside from the fact that they are
erroneous.) And the structuralists were right to focus on
contrastive function.


> ... Rather it
> looks to me to be evidence that a focus on the "centrality of the contrastive
> function of linguistic elements" (which is also the foundation of
> Functionalism) implies structural subjectivity in language.

I'm sorry to say that I don't see this connection. I'm not
disagreeing (necessarily) -- just don't get the implication.
What am I missing?

> ...
> I think you are supportive of the same basic issues. Am I wrong? Do you
> believe language structure is universal and capable of being objectively
> codified?

There surely are universal properties of language structure, and
there certainly are subjective properties as well. As to
"objectively codified", if you really want my opinion I'd need a
better idea of what you mean by this phrase.

All best,

 - Syd



Sydney M. Lamb			http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lamb/
Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences
Rice University, Houston, TX