Bloomfield's Taxemes

[Daniel Everett]

The following statement, come to think of it, is not quite accurate.
On Thursday, February 20, 2003, at 04:22  pm, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Dan,
>
>
> My impression is that so far, work within DM has focused on working
> out empirical problems, rather than on examining the historical
> origins of the framework.



Alec has an archaeological article on Chomsky's Remarks on
Nominalizations. Howard Lasnik published an entire book on Noam's
Syntactic Structures (which according to legend is just the published
version of his class lecture notes). And there are other examples, e.g.
Kiparsky's book on Panini. (And how much theoretical work these days is
based on literature review rather than fieldwork in any case? It would
seem that plundering articles for data is little different than
plundering them for ideas. I am in favor of both. A couple of the
advantages of literacy.)

These examples, and there are many others, show that it can be useful
to carefully consider the roots of ideas.

One other thing from Martha's remarks: as a former resident fellow of
Pitt's Center for Philosophy of Science, I don't react positively to
hearing that non-empirical considerations are the domain of 'the
philosophers'. Most philosophers would be bemused by that remark. And,
Martha, doesn't your diploma say that you graduated from a philosophy
and linguistics dept - the only one of its kind? No one has made
clearer the naturalness of intellectual ties between philosophy and
linguistics and the value of literature review than Zellig Harris's
prize pupil. (And while we are on that, everyone should read Harris's
47 book. In it is X-bar theory, CV-skeletal reduplication, and other
things.)

In Padre Ruiz de Montoya's early 17th century grammar of Guarani
(Robert de Niro's character in The Mission was partially based on
Montoya) there is an incredibly insightful discussion of
noun-incorporation in Guarani in which Montoya says that the reason
that the possessed item receives accusative case when the possessor is
incorporated is because the possessor no longer needs/can receive that
case. Read some Jesuit grammars. Full of ideas on morphology that will
have empirical consequences. Fieldwork is too, but there is no
dichotomy between careful scholarship and empirical research.

-- Dan



> ********************
Daniel L. Everett
Professor of Phonetics and Phonology
Department of Linguistics
N1.14 Arts Building
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, UK
M13 9PL
Phone: 44-161-275-3158
Department Fax: 44-161-275-3187
http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de/

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