synchronic and diachronic "explanation".

[R. Rankin]

> I know that this is the diachronic explanation, but
that doesn't offer a
> synchronic explanation. The speakers of the language
don't know the
> historical background, and can't use that to figure
out which positions
> these affixes appear.

This canard gets a lot of repetition from theoreticians
and is routinely used as an excuse not to study
history.  The fact is that your average 3 year old
doesn't need to know the history of his language in
order to place morphemes/words in the order of their
historical addition/development.  All the child has to
do is LEAVE THE SYNTAX ALONE and just keep it the way
s/he heard it from his or her peers/family.

Take the case of  Chinese "ba" for example.  The kid
doesn't know 'ba' used to be a real, active verb.  He
just leaves it where it was, and that turns out to be
the historical order.

Or take the Siouan 1st dual/plural and Dakotan 3rd pl.
animate pronominal prefixes as another example.  Both
certainly appear to be old incorporated nouns meaning
'man, person' in the various languages.  The kid
doesn't know they used to be nouns.  He just leaves 'em
alone in the position that incorporanda go (or went) in
the verb complex at the time they were grammaticalized.
And, presto, the pronouns in Siouan occur in very
peculiar orders.  The whole thing isn't because the
child did or did not know the history of the language:
it's because he left his morphotactics alone and DIDN'T
apply any "universal principles".  What's left is the
historical ordering.

The whole claim about history being irrelevant because
people don't have direct access to diachrony is a red
herring.  You can't divorce history from synchrony.

As for templates, that paper the 4 of us wrote for Bob
Dixon and Sacha Aikhenvald's volume on the "Word" as a
linguistic concept discusses the problem of templates
in Siouan at length, showing that they don't (and
can't) work very well for principled reasons -- mostly
historical of course,

Bob



> Your diachronic explanation would have to be fitted
> with a templatic account. I don't so much mind
templates, but they're not
> exactly popular right now, if you know what I mean.
Right now, the general
> feeling is that there should be rules that the
learner can use to figure out
> where things go rather than templates to learn.
>
> The SOV order isn't fixed for the double statives in
my data, but I do need
> to check this out again.
>
> Shannon
>