"loss of generality"

Rob Freeman rjfreeman at email.com
Mon Jun 28 07:15:42 UTC 2004


On Saturday 26 June 2004 00:17, Sydney Lamb wrote:
>
> > ...Reading Newmeyer's analysis it struck me
> > that Chomsky's evidence ... was not so much of innateness, or
> > that the fundamental focus of the structuralists of the time on
> > "contrastive function" was wrong.
>
> > ... 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?

One way of seeing the connection is to equate "relaxing the linearity
requirement" with structural subjectivity. This seems natural to me. They
both imply you need to look at the whole utterance to know the elements.

If there were only one way of describing language elements (or if they were
invariable primitives) it is hard to see how their combination would not be
linear. If each context dynamically selects different generalizations to
characterize as elements, however, it follows naturally that their
combination will not be linear.

Another way of looking at it -- if you allow combinations of linguistic
elements to be non-linear, your results will be indistinguishable from
strings formed by "linear" combinations of subjective elements.

I think "relaxing the linearity condition" and "subjective elements" are
saying very much the same thing. Unless we can think of some other mechanism
explaining how non-linear combination might occur.

Can you think of anything which might distinguish the two?

Thanks for letting me know how the debate developed all those years ago. I was
curious to know what happened to Chomsky's (and Halle's?) observation after
reading an account of it recently in Newmeyer's book.

I prefer your interpretation.

Perhaps there is more evidence of this sort lying around undiscussed.

What is the evidence? Is it that language has a single, universal structure,
or that structure is generalized, subjectively, on the spot, parameterized
only by meaningful contrasts?

What was the subsequent theoretical and practical impact of your observation
that there was a need for "relaxing the linearity requirement" over
combinations of phonemes? Has this been taken on board by people trying to
model phonemes for speech recognition, for example?

Best,

Rob



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