tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Aug 24 12:54:39 1994
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Re: Duj pIm
Hu'tegh! nuq ja' [email protected] jay'?
=>Um, you wouldn't be a functionalist then?
=I'm glad you defined your terms below; I'm not familiar with your labels for
=the major linguistic camps.
Well, let's just say they're the *functionalists'* terms for the camps.
(Being the embattled minority and all :) ).
=Well, don't leave out the structuralists, who don't even share the same goals
=of linguistic description. Still going strong....
Although not as active in theoretical discourse, perhaps?
=>I'm with the functionalists, [...]
=I'm not familiar with this approach, but it sounds something like a syntactic
=version of Sperber and Wilson's "Relevance."
They're certainly rather friendly to things like Grice and Relevance Theory.
I'd say the following linguists are doing functionalist work: Talmy Givon,
Sandy Thompson, Ellen Prince, Joan Bybee, Paul Hooper, Mark Halliday (who
tends to be disavowed by the rest of the camp :) ); and of course, the Prague
school back in the '30s. You'll tend to find them hanging around typology,
discourse analysis, and historical linguistics.
=>As a result,
=>we tend to think less of an independent language organ, and more of how
=>language fits into the patterns of cognition in general.
=This, I think, is where you and I will disagree most, then. I can't see how
=language could possibly fit into other patterns of cognition. How is it
=possible that a baby learning language can start with nothing, and end up
=with near-fluency in a language by the age of 4 or so? Observation? (They
=receive no formal instruction; even if some do, that can't be why, becuase
=there are those who don't and still learn language). And, babies are so
=bad at other cognitive tasks while they're learning language.
I'll grant you, functionalism is weak at language acquisition (at least some
functionalists think neural-networks are the great white hope for this
story; having been an electrical engineering student, I won't hold my
breath). By the same token, I don't think generative linguistics has an
adequate account of language change --- change is too gradual to be effected
merely by parameters, and the processes of analogy, iconicity, metaphor,
generalisation, and contextual association --- all of them generically
cognitive, not language-organ-specific --- are too strong.
I'm sure that ultimately, both are right --- there's a language organ,
but use of language is also subject to cognition in general. It's just
that I myself don't find the Chomskian programme, of trying to describe
Universal Grammar in language-organ terms, interesting. Those aren't
the questions I ask myself about language.
=>We also
=>explain linguistic change, not in terms of formal parameter alteration, but
=>in terms of alternative expressions 'competing', alternative communicative
=>motivations for expressions conflicting, and so on.
=Do you mean linguistic change, or linguistic variation? That is, change
=over time in the syntax of a single language, or variations between two or
=more languages at any given time?
Primarily change, although as some like to say, "there's no such thing
as free variation": if there are two forms meaning the same thing, people
will tend to find a distinction between them. Yesterday I was at a seminar
given on Taba Batak, a language in Indonesia. This language has very few
postpositions; the one for -Daq is either -lo or -o, depending on phonology.
-Daq is as ambiguous in Taba as in Klingon; but: the noun 'lo', meaning
inside, is still present in the language (presumably -lo/-o is descended
from it), and fairly recently people are starting to make -lo mean 'inside',
and -o 'at' --- where free variation allows for it. (Half the nouns in
the language have no choice but to take -lo).
The reason I speak of competition and change is that you'll get a long period
in language history where the old and the new form are both available to
speakers, until eventually the new one 'prevails'. In my thesis, I will look
(for starters, anyway) at relative clauses in Greek; there have been at
least 6 different ways to say them, and with the exception of Attic literary
Greek, there was never a time when at least two weren't available. (There
were two available in *non-literary* Attic --- the inscriptions of 400 BC.)
If you get two ways to say something, they'll get differentiated, and
reduced down, and compete, until a winner emerges --- as does a new
competitor.
=While I agree that knowledge about language affects matters of interpretation
=like you discussed, I think you're being misleading by calling the
=decisions "linguistics-motivated." Linguistic knowledge is unconcsious; a
=layman can't explain why "which cars were the hoods of damaged" is
=ungrammatical, or why "herself" in "Mary believes that Martha likes herself"
=can refer to "Martha" but not "Mary."
Oh, I would characterise anyone talking about "redundancy" as using overt
knowledge of linguistics, but that's a matter of definitions.
=Now, if some astute observer, like
=charghwI', notices patterns in the languages he knows, and applies this
=to a language he's learning, like tlhIngan Hol, I would not claim that
=he's employing his linguistic knowledge in his analysis of tlhIngan Hol,
=but more general powers of cognition. (A distinction lost in functionalist
=linguistics, if I understood your description above.)
Inasmuch as we think it's these general powers that make the shebang happen
in the first place... but it depends on the flavour of functionalism. Radical
functionalism does eliminate the distinction; moderate functionalism retains
it, but also believes that cognition goes a long way towards shaping language.
--
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Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne. [email protected]
[email protected] [email protected]
AND MOVING SOON TO: [email protected]