pitfalls of complexity

[Tom Givon]

Well now, Esa. To take a youthful slogan out of context, not cite the 
fuller (some still erroneous, of course) details of the original 1971 
paper, not cite the considerable elaborations & corrections in "On 
Understanding Grammar" (1979; chs 5,6), not cite the countless following 
papers that corrected & elaborated & expanded on the diachronic relation 
between morphology & syntax, not only mine but many others', and then to 
skip over altogether the recent "The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity" 
(2009), is not exactly an edifying way of reviewing the topic. While I 
do count Hermann Paul as my all-time guru in linguistics, with all do 
respect we do know some things now that the great IE tradition did not. 
Not much more, but some. And we do know them because some of them, 
particularly H. Paul, pointed the way toward a broader 
cross-disciplinary approach to language.  Best,  TG

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Esa Itkonen wrote:
> Dear FUNKNETters: Nowadays complexity seems to be on almost everybody's agenda. But it is not a simple notion, as you can see if you just care to read the last addition to the list of "available as full texts" on my homepage (click below). 
> Esa
>
> Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen
>
>