Universality of GR's

[Joan Bresnan]

>>>Avery Andrews said:

 > > is also cogent.  (But why call this recent work "lfg-like"?  
 > 
 > I guess I put it that way because some of the authors were trying to be
 > somewhat neutral w.r.t. LFG or HPSG, and at any rate they're all
 > proposing substantial innovations, which one can think about expressing
 > within more than one formal framework.

*All* substantial ideas can be expressed in more than one formal
framework.  That's what makes them substantial, rather than purely
theory-internal, by definition.  I wish more linguists understood
this.  There is far too little acknowledgement of the commonality of
linguistic *ideas* shared by frameworks making using of variant
formalisms.  Many of the formal linguists treat their systems with the
religiosity accorded to a favorite programming language.  Many of the
descriptive linguists simply confuse the substance of an idea they
like with whatever formalism it is expressed in.  This gives a very
false impression of disunity in what is truly a remarkable convergence
in the the field of syntax: every linguistic framework
originating on the Pacific Rim is FG-like, making central use of the
idea of grammatical functions (under one or another label), as well as
the discourse, markedness, and pragmatic factors that shape syntax.

Let me give just one example: Tom Givon recently sent me a copy of
Bill Croft's paper "Intonation Units and Grammatical Structure in
Wardaman and English" given at the Santa Barbara FG conference on
Constituency.  Tom says that this paper "blows the
`(non)configurationality' myth clear out of the water..."  [I don't
think he would mind this quotation from a personal letter.]  It is a
very nice paper.  But Tom doesn't realize that the analysis of Wardaman
that Croft argues for on the basis of a statistical analysis of texts
is essentially the same as Rachel Nordlinger's analysis of Wambaya and
other Australian nonconfigurational languages in LFG (as well as
earlier work by Simpson, Andrews, and Austin and Bresnan): there is
constituent structure, though VPs are absent, and most importantly, NP
arguments may be true arguments rather than adjuncts to zero or bound
pronominals.

Few of those working in the field of syntax seem to see the big
picture presented by these developments.  Moreover, the formalized
syntactic frameworks of the Pacific Rim are *formally* convergent: they
are *all* LFG-like (or CG-like, as Paul Kay would put it).  

[further followup later]