back and forth

[David Pesetsky]

At 12:24 PM -0800 1/10/97, Tom Givon wrote:


> Seems to me I hear another argument between the partly deaf. Everybody
> concede that a correlation exists between grammatical structures and
> semantic and/or pragmatic functions. But two extremist groups seem to
> draw rather stark conclusions from the fact that the correlation is
> less-than-fully-perfect. The "autonomy" people seem to reason:
>      "If less than 100% perfect correlation,
>       therefore no correlation (i.e. 'liberated' structure)"

Do "autonomy people" really reason like this?  I don't think so.  In fact,
I think it's just the opposite.

Isn't most of the research by "autonomy people" actually devoted to the
hunch that there is a nearly *perfect* 100% correlation between grammatical
structure and semantic/pragmatic function -- and that "less than 100%"
correlations are actually 100% correlations obscured by other factors?

-       What, after all, is the functional category boom about, if not a
(possibly overenthusiastic) attempt to investigate a 100% correlation
hypothesis for properties like tense, agreement, topic, focus, and so on?

-       What was the motivation for the hypothesis of "covert movement" (LF
movement), if not the hunch that the correlation between grammatical and
semantic/pragmatic structure is tighter than it appears?

-       Why all the effort expended on the unaccusative hypothesis, the
Universal Alignment Hypothesis, and Baker's UTAH, if not in service of the
hypothesis that non-correlations between semantic function and grammatical
form are only superficial?

I think one might make the case that formalist "autonomy people" are among
the most faithful functionalists.

What divides linguists in this debate is not, I suspect, their faith in
robust form-function correlations, but rather their hunches about the
repertoire of factors that *obscure* these correlations.  That's where many
of us really do disagree with each other.

-David Pesetsky


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Prof. David Pesetsky, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy
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