pitfalls of complexity

[Esa Itkonen]

Dear Tom: Thank you for your comments on "Concerning Dahl's (2004) notion of linguistic complexity". Contrary to what you seem to think, this is not about your relationship to Hermann Paul. Surely you are yourself the only person competent enough to write about such a topic (and about many, many other topics as well).
Esa

Homepage: http://users.utu.fi/eitkonen

----- Original Message -----
From: Tom Givon <tgivon at uoregon.edu>
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 6:52 pm
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] pitfalls of complexity
To: Esa Itkonen <eitkonen at utu.fi>
Cc: funknet at mailman.rice.edu


> 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
> 
> ================
> 
> 
> 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
> >
> >   
>