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<font size=3><x-tab> </x-tab>Let
me chime in here with an endorsement of what Joan Bresnan and Martin
Haspelmath have said about the functional nature of current phonological
theory. It was interesting to note that at the Milwaukee conference
on formalism and functionalism held a few years back there was a radical
difference between the kinds of talks that the syntacticians and
semanticists and typologists gave and those that the three phonologists
gave. I felt that Joan Bresnan, Bruce Hayes and I all had things to
say to each other, and listened and learned from each other, while
the others seemed to be talking past each other. And it seems to me
it was precisely because the 'formalists' in phonology have (in many
cases) insisted that phonological structures be grounded (either in a
technical sense, as used by Archangeli et al., or in the more general
sense that functionalists use the term) in facts about production and
perception. This, of course, is what Stampe and the Natural
Phonologists proposed in the sixties and seventies. When Stampe
used the term 'innate' he meant, explainable by the nature of the
physiology, physics and psychophysics involved.
Unfortunately, at the time, Chomsky was using 'innate' to mean
unexplainable extrinsically, and NP's message got rejected by those
rejecting Chomsky's version of innateness.<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>All this
is water under the bridge now, but I will second, (third?) the plea that
theories founded purely on negative impulses are unlikely to gain us the
insights we are looking for. And many valuable insights about the
nature of language have arisen from purely formalist investigations, even
if, as Karen van Hoek and Paul Deane (not to mention Lakoff, Langacker
etc.) have shown, the insights have reasonable non-linguistic
explanations after all.<br>
<br>
Geoff</font><br>
<font size=3><div align="center">
Geoffrey S. Nathan <br>
Department of Linguistics<br>
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale <br>
Carbondale, IL, 62901-4517 <br>
Phone: (618) 453-3421 (Office) / FAX (618) 453-6527<br>
<x-tab> </x-tab>(618)
549-0106 (Home) <br>
</div>
<x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab><x-tab> </x-tab>geoffn@siu.edu</font></html>