Dan Everett: Word formation constraints (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Martha,

Good attempts at answers. I enjoyed reading them.

I am afraid that I recognize little of structuralism in your account of it
however. Generative linguistics seems structuralist in exactly the same
ways as, say, Tagmemics, except more so (because Tagmemics was not only
the very first theory, long before Morris's arguments against the
'phoneme' - which, by the way, have been shown to be wrong: the major
lesson of Lexical Phonology is that something like the 'taxonomic phoneme'
is a necessity in linguistic theory, but Tagmemics also allowed semantics
and pragmatics to play a causal role in syntax. Tagmemics is not that
great a theory. But it is less structuralist than MP). All structuralists
I have read (and met) said things like, "Of course languages are more
alike than they are different or we couldn't have a theory of Language".
Structuralists believe(d) in universals (Greenberg, not Chomsky, first
drew our attention to them; structuralists are mainly responsible for our
knowledge of 'exotic' languages, because, like Mead, Benedict, Sapir, and
other students of Boas, they believed that there are universal patterns of
language that need to first be documented and then explained).

But the real hallmark of structuralism is that the only solutions that
count are distributional and structural. And this has ALWAYS been true of
generative linguistics. We all know that Noam, to take a random example,
accepts x as a solution to y just in case x is stated in terms of
structural relationships. That is basically the motivation for MP. As I
recall from lectures back in the mid 80s Chomsky was getting fed up with
the multiplication of entities beyond necessity. He wanted to get back to
the basics, which MP is supposed to be. And the basics are trees and a
lexicon. No indices. No meaning intrusions (e.g. 'affectedness',
'achievements' vs. 'accomplishments', etc.) These things are all to be
derived. And derived by trees. That just IS structuralism, which Zellig
Harris taught at Penn.

As to the specific questions I raised. 'Gone fishing' is the answer I will
take away from this discussion.

Best,

Dan