linguistic axioms

[Paul Hopper]

WOW! "post-modernist ploy," "logical fallacy", "dubious", "just this type of reasoning", "illicit trick", "less-then-respectable argument"... 

This is the rhetoric of a threatened and angry person. I honestly don't think we've sen this kind of rage on Funknet since it was founded. What's gotten into you, Tom?

Paul






> 

> 
> Well, Roy Harris's "questioning" is a typical post-modernist ploy based on
> the logical fallacy that "if meaning is not 100% absolute, it must 
> therefore be 100% relative". Many functionalists have indulged in this 
> dubious mode of reasoning, and some of us have even recanted leter. 
> Hopper's "emergent grammar" thesis is based on just this type of 
> reasoning. Sandy Thompson's theoretical conclusions about the status of 
> V-complements are founded on such reasoning. And I myself used this 
> illicit trick in an article  titled "Logic vs. pragmatics, with human 
> language as a referee" (J. of Pragmatics 1981). Nice title, but it was an
> intellectually less-than-respectable argument then, and it still is now.
> Best,  TG
> 
> =======
> 
> 
> Ellen Contini-Morava wrote:
>> Re axioms:  There's Bloomfield's classic "A set of postulates for the 
>> science of language", Language 2 (1926), pp. 153-64.  The main one, 
>> slightly rephrased in his 1933 Language (p. 159):  "In a 
>> speech-community some utterances are alike or partly alike in sound and
>> meaning".  Though some have questioned the assumption of a "shared code"
>> (e.g. Roy Harris, "On redefining linguistics". In Hayley Davis and
>> Talbot Taylor (eds.), Redefining Linguistics. London: Routledge 1990,
>> pp. 18-52.)
>> 
>> Happy new year,
>> 
>> Ellen
>> 
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Prof. Dr. Paul J. Hopper
Senior Fellow
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Albertstr. 19
D-79104 Freiburg
and
Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA5213