Monodialectal vs. Monodialectical

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:11 PM +0800 2/7/02, Salikoko S. Mufwene wrote:
>I was happy to see Donald Lance's posting yesterday on
>"monodialectal" versus "monodialectical". I had sent a similar
>posting to the server, but my posting was rejected due to a minor
>change in my address (nothing that should concern regular
>correspondents). However, this morning I was re-reading E. Sapir's
>article on "drift" and noticed that he used "dialectic" for
>"dialectal." This variation reminded me a little bit of that between
>"syntactic" and "syntactical", with the difference that I have never
>heard syntacticians use the second variant. Some months ago, I think
>Larry Horn had an equally interesting posting on "pragmatician" and
>"pragmatist"--a difficulty that I typically avoided by talking about
>"students of pragmatics," as I found "pragmatist" inadequate for the
>intended meaning but had never heard "pragmatician" nor
>"pragmaticist" before. Did Larry give this option too?

I would always take the "pragmaticist" option myself; the others are
either pre-empted for other meanings ("pragmatist") or awkward
sounding to my ear ("pragmatician").  What a pragmaticist does (at
least THIS pragmaticist) is closer to what a semanticist
(*semantician) does than to what a syntactician (*syntacticist) does.
The variation between "syntactic" and "syntactical" is partly a
question of field:  (some) philosophers tend to call a "syntactical"
analysis what (all?) linguists would call a "syntactic" one.  There's
a similar split between "semantical" and "semantic".

larry