back and forth

[Mark Durie]

Like others, I cannot resist throwing in my two bits worth.

1. The 'form-meaning' terminology has become extremely confusing, because
many 'formal' approaches treat (either explicity or implicitly) at least
some kinds of meaning as a kind of form (e.g. Jackendoff's conceptual
structure, HPSG's treatment of meaning, the examples Pesetsky refers to in
his recent posting etc. etc) in which semantic elements becomes yet another
part of the system of grammar for which the linguistic is seeking to
explicate principles of 'well-formed-ness'.

2.  In a related vein, it is also confusing to treat form-meaning and
form-function as somehow equivalent wordings. The discussions have swung
backwards and forwards between talking about 'function' and 'meaning'.
Surely some kinds of meaning are pretty good candidates for being inside
the structural system of language (i.e. having the character of 'form'),
and others are obviously not.  My first point reflects this.

3. Isn't Fritz's chess analogy precisely Saussure's.  Saussure used the
chess analogy to illustrate what he saw to be a clear-cut difference
between what is 'in' langue (='grammar' in generativist  terminology, I
suppose) and what is out of it, and the separate nature of the internal
system as such.  Even Sapir described language as an 'arbitrary system'.
Of course Saussure included (a certain kind of) meaning in his 'system' but
then so do many formal approaches today, as I noted above.

So the autonomy hypothesis in Fritz's sense (divorced from any
consideration of innateness) is structuralism.  Or have I completely
misunderstood?


Mark.

------------------------------------
From:  Mark Durie
       Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
       University of Melbourne
       Parkville 3052

       Hm  (03) 9380-5247
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M.Durie at linguistics.unimelb.edu.au
http://www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/Dept/LALX/staff/durie.html