our BBS paper

[Tom Givon]

Dear Steve,

Thanks for your most temperate note. I have already received the paper & 
have read it. In a way, I see multiple points of possible convergence. 
We both see the futility of either the "surface universals" approach, 
which for better or worse people have attributed to Greenberg. This is 
not unnatural, since Joe was only an implicit, reluctant theoretician. 
So his later forays into diachrony and evolution have been largely left 
out of his presumed "canon". And of course, you are absolutely right 
about his word-order universals. Beginning with 1971 (CLS #7 paper), I 
have tried to show that their only cogent interpretation is diachronic. 
And in person, in case it matters, Joe fully agreed with this 
interpretation. It is thus a pity that his self-appointed inheritors 
(Haspelmath, Comrie, Dryer) have converted typology into a strictly 
synchronic, decidedly a-theoretical enterprise. And you are absolutely 
right in pointing out that no universals filter out of their tight 
"empirical" mesh. My point is, and has been for a long time, that 
empirical generalizations, to use Carnap's term, should not be expected 
to be, by themselves, Universals. Only theoretical generalizations, 
hopefully taking into account the empirical ones but going far beyond 
them in constructing explanatory hypotheses, could yield Universals. In 
the case of language, explanatory hypotheses must take into account, 
communication, cognition, neurology, diachrony, acquisition and 
evolution. This was the main thesis of my "On Understanding Grammar" 
(1979), and in the intervening years I have tried to flesh this out with 
some of the gory details.

You are, of course, equally right in pointing out that the Chomskian UG 
is a hopeless enterprise, for reasons we are all (all) too familiar 
with: Non-substantive "data", non-substantive "universals", ignoring the 
three developmental trends as venues of universals, and ignoring the 
actual empirical descriptive data. So far so good.

What I think is unfortunate, and perhaps unintended on your part, is the 
implication that because the two extreme positions on universals, 
Chomsky's and Bloomfield's, are misguided for clear philosophical 
reasons, the whole enterprise of Universals is bankrupt. It is not only 
in my own work that the alternative "middle-ground" approach to 
universals has been pursued, for a long time. The whole body of 
grammaticalization literature has pointed in the same direction. True, 
they concentrated only on diachrony & paid scant attention to biology, 
evolution, neurology, cognition and child language. Indeed, Slobin has 
scared them away from considering child language part of the agenda, by 
his rather intemperate comments about its presumed irrelevance to 
evolution & diachrony (in a volume I edited in 2002; "The Evoluition of 
Language out of Pre-language"). But if you look at Heine & Kuteva (2007) 
"The Genesis of Grammar", I think you will find the right theoretical 
impulses there. So what I have been worried about in the case of your 
article is the same thing that worried me about a recent summary of the 
Universal literature by Fritz Newmeyer: There is either Chomsky or 
Comrie, nobody in-between (of course, with the gratis anointment of 
Chomsky's "deep universals" as the right(eous) approach...). Well, there 
have been some of us in-between, explicitly, and for a long time.

Since you have been so sweet about this, and since fundamentally we have 
been working in the same direction, maybe I should regale you with a 
copy of my "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" (Benjamins2008; I'm 
waiting for extra copies from the publisher), where all these issues are 
covered in great detail, and where I think I have gone as far as I can, 
given current knowledge. In the interim, I will zip you the e-version of 
the intro chapter of the book (incl. table of contents & preface), which 
might give you an idea about the scope.

Thanks again & my best regards, TG

===========



Stephen C. Levinson wrote:
>
> Dear Tom,
>
> Nick Enfield passed on you Funknet comment, which I find interesting. 
> I think you are right about development as key in biology, and also 
> about exceptions. But the question is can we list the strong 
> tendencies? We also have a paper under review that shows that the 
> Greenberg word-order universals do not work in language development 
> over time …
>
> The BBS commentary is now closed, but LINGUA is putting together a 
> follow up set of commentaries if you are interested. Attached is the 
> offending paper.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Steve
>