No subject

[Ellen F. Prince]

Susanna Cumming <cumming at HUMANITAS.UCSB.EDU> writes:

>In my view this is what crucially separates functionalists on the one hand
>from cognitivists on the other, or if you prefer discourse functionalists
>from cognitive functionalists: discourse folks believe that language
>removed from its communicative setting is sufficiently different from
>"real" communicative language that there's not much point in studying it,
>because you don't know what you've learned about real language when you're
>finished. If you take this point seriously there isn't much difference
>between the cognitivists and the formalists, since they are both (with
>some noble exceptions) content to base their analyses on "unnatural" data.
>
>In other words it's not "autonomy" that's the main problem, it's the
>"competence-performance" dichotomy.

i think you're confusing what one takes to be the data and what one's ultimate
theory looks like. there are those (incl me) that base their analyses on
naturally-occurring data but that may wind up concluding that syntax is
autonomous from meaning. in fact, i'd add that, if the choice of type of data
locks one in to a particular conclusion, the actual research would seem pretty
pointless...