"loss of generality"

[Sydney Lamb]

On Mon, 28 Jun 2004, Rob Freeman wrote:

> > >  ... 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.
> ...

It could be that the problem I am (still) having is related to
your definition of subjectivity. To me, subjectivity implies
that each individual forms and uses his/her own individual
representation of linguistic structure. This surely has to be
so, imho. Objectivity means that there is some common linguistic
structure shared across different individuals. To some extent,
the different individual (subjective) structures share enough
with respect to linguistic expressions and their correlations to
make communication possible (to some extent, though always
limited). To the extent that such sharing occurs one could speak
(with some danger of being misunderstood) about objectivity of
structure. More meaningfully, perhaps, we may speak of
objectivity at the level of the neural substrate, as all people
use the same general neural mechanisms in substantially the same
way for developing their (subjective) representations of
linguistic structure.

But all this has nothing to do (as far as I can see) with
whether or not we recognize non-linear features in phonology.
One could have either subjective or (hypothetically)
across-the-board objective representations of phonological
structure with some non-linear features.

> ...
> 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 don't follow this at all. Are you sure you want to say this?

> 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.

The mechanism can be explained on an objective basis in terms of
ease of articulation (applicable for everyone, hence objective).
In the case of obstruent clusters -- of Russian or English or
what-have-you -- it would be very difficult to produce clusters
in which voice could be turned on and/or off in the middle of
the cluster -- much easier if the whole thing is either voiced
or voiceless. We therefore posit the feature of voicing or
unvoicing as extending for the length of the cluster -- it's
what Harris called a long component. Rather than having it
repeat for each segment. It is for this reason that the
linearity requirement (as stated by Chomsky) has to be abandoned
(although it was mistakenly retained by Chomsky and Halle).

> ...
> 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?

I go with the latter view, although there are universal
properties, because of shared biological and environmental
features.

> ...
> 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?

What happened was weird. Chomsky responded to my published
account (e.g. Prolegomena to a theory of phonology, Language
1966) by saying that (approx quote) "Lamb's attempt at
refutation amounts to accepting my solution in toto with
a change of notation". (!!) This despite that fact that
Chomsky's solution retains linearity while rejecting
biuniqueness (contrastive function), while mine rejects
linearity while preserving biuniqueness.

The whole story (there is more) is related in Lamb and
Vanderslice, On thrashing classical phonemics, LACUS Forum 2,
1975).

How did others (besides Chomsky) react? As far as I can tell, by
simply ignoring these published refutations of mine, with their
alternative solutions. It came to be generally accepted that the
notion of a contrastive phoneme (Chomsky's "biuniqueness") had
been thrown out by Chomsky. The phoneme was dead for the next
two or three decades. Nobody (other than my students) was even
aware of my refutation of his argument.

In those days, Chomsky was the sole source of truth, and it was
not considered necessary to pay attention to opposing views.

All best,

 - Syd


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