criticisms of grammaticalization

[Scott DeLancey]

On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 hilpert at rice.edu wrote:

> 1. Unidirectionality, if it exists, is an even greater problem for
> functionalism than if it turns out to be false. Developments that span
> centuries would have to be explained independently of speakers, who only
> have access to three generations of other speakers. (I attribute this one to
> Janda 2001.)

So how is this different from the argument that says that the eye could
not be the result of evolution through natural selection, since that
would require the organism to teleologically look many generations
down the road to see the culmination of the process?

Scott DeLancey
Department of Linguistics
1290 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1290, USA

delancey at darkwing.uoregon.edu
http://www.uoregon.edu/~delancey/prohp.html