Evolution, and 'functional' + 'social'

[Daniel Everett]

On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 06:31  pm, Tom Givon wrote:

>  
>
>
> The upshot of all this is that an adaptive approach to language (or 
> biology) cannot be practiced as a simplistic creed with the mantra "At 
> all time all synchronic structures must be, transparently, 100% 
> motivated--or else functionalism is falsified". Rather, it is a 
> long-term and oft-frustrating research program that strives to 
> understand the incredible complexity of the process that gives rise to 
> both iconic and counter-iconic features of the communicative code. 
> This may be fiendishly difficult, but in attempting to cope with our 
> predicament, we are traveling in excellent company. Cheers, TG
>
>
Yes, Tom, I agree completely. The point is not that a functional 
motivation must be found for all forms, but that a functional 
motivation may constrain any particular form *in principle*. That is, 
unlike the rules which emanate from Deans' offices, not all syntax 
(sentence-level is the focus here) is *necessarily* arbitrary, i.e. 
independent of semantics and pragmatics. The reason that the MP 
analyses, say, WH-movement in terms of morphological features is 
because its view of innatism prohibits it from referring to semantics 
or pragmatics in such cases.

Years ago, when Chomsky (based partially on suggestions by Ken Hale) 
was developing the ideas of CP and IP, it was pointed out to him in 
classes (I remember talking to him about it one Thursday afternoon 
after class on the way back to Building 20) that languages that have 
dislocated WH-words almost always place them at the beginning of the 
sentence/clause rather than the at the end, regardless of their 
underlying constituent order, violating the predictions of CP as it was 
then formulated (now too in my opinion). He said at the time that 
perhaps this has to do with processing constraints (the WH word at the 
beginning signals that a gap is coming and tells you how to interpret 
it). But this insight was never and in fact could never be built into 
Chomskyan theory or the latter would cease to be driven by form alone. 
And that is a non-negotiable (a large part of the impetus for 
developing the MP was to get rid of some of the baroque additions 
people were starting to make to structures in Principles and 
Parameters, e.g. indexes on structures, which, not being structural, 
were incongruous with the research program, much to the consternation 
of the Thursday afternoon audiences along the Charles River).

Interestingly, though, Pinker's attempts to provide an evolutionary 
underpinning for Chomskyan syntax in his articles on evolutionary 
psychology and in his debates with Gould in the NYR, rest explicitly on 
functional motivations for formal constraints. Small wonder that this 
aspect of Pinker's work has had negligible impact in Chomsky's 
writings. One reason (this is ALL my interpretation of things, of 
course) that Chomsky has claimed that Darwinian evolution cannot 
account for language is that most interpretations of that model would 
attribute function as an active constraint on the development (and use) 
of form.

-- Dan
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