linguistic axioms

[Tom Givon]

Just a little dose of honesty.  TG

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Paul Hopper wrote:
> WOW! "post-modernist ploy," "logical fallacy", "dubious", "just this type of reasoning", "illicit trick", "less-then-respectable argument"... 
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> This is the rhetoric of a threatened and angry person. I honestly don't think we've sen this kind of rage on Funknet since it was founded. What's gotten into you, Tom?
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> Paul
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>> Well, Roy Harris's "questioning" is a typical post-modernist ploy based on
>> the logical fallacy that "if meaning is not 100% absolute, it must 
>> therefore be 100% relative". Many functionalists have indulged in this 
>> dubious mode of reasoning, and some of us have even recanted leter. 
>> Hopper's "emergent grammar" thesis is based on just this type of 
>> reasoning. Sandy Thompson's theoretical conclusions about the status of 
>> V-complements are founded on such reasoning. And I myself used this 
>> illicit trick in an article  titled "Logic vs. pragmatics, with human 
>> language as a referee" (J. of Pragmatics 1981). Nice title, but it was an
>> intellectually less-than-respectable argument then, and it still is now.
>> Best,  TG
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>> =======
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>> Ellen Contini-Morava wrote:
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>>> Re axioms:  There's Bloomfield's classic "A set of postulates for the 
>>> science of language", Language 2 (1926), pp. 153-64.  The main one, 
>>> slightly rephrased in his 1933 Language (p. 159):  "In a 
>>> speech-community some utterances are alike or partly alike in sound and
>>> meaning".  Though some have questioned the assumption of a "shared code"
>>> (e.g. Roy Harris, "On redefining linguistics". In Hayley Davis and
>>> Talbot Taylor (eds.), Redefining Linguistics. London: Routledge 1990,
>>> pp. 18-52.)
>>>
>>> Happy new year,
>>>
>>> Ellen
>>>
>>>       
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