Re: THEORY: two questions

And Rosta wrote:

>I'm skeptical that the notions of basic word order and of the equivalence of
>notions of O, S and V across languages are anything more than an
>impressionistic shorthand for mere usage tendencies within languages and
>'family resemblances' between languages.
Agreed--I think:  I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "usage
tendencies".

>In my view, typological universals are due to constraints imposed by the
>hardware - the implementation of language in the brain - and to functional,
>darwinian selectional pressures (languages have to be fit to do their job).
>UG does not exist as anything beyond a mere language faculty that imposes no
>constraints upon language except those that follow from general properties
>of the mind/brain. I should come clean and declare myself to be a rabid
>antiempiricist platonist.
So I guess you believe that those aspects of language design which are
decidedly non-functional are remnants of earlier developmental stages
in language evolution--the cognitive equivalent of an appendix, or a whale's
finger bones.  I suppose that's a valid point of view.

>Of course, as a believer in UG, you have a harder time, and indeed, coping
>with differences between languages has been and continues to be the Achilles
>heel in Generative Grammar - an ineradiable stain of arbitrariness.
Actually, UG is the easy way out.  Superficially, language appears to be
autonomous from other cognitive systems, with its own unique properties,
and so generativists like me attribute the language faculty to some mysterious
black box in the brain.  I prefer to think of UG as a working model rather than
a belief.  Belief implies faith, and I have no faith in UG.  It's just that the
UG explanation is, IMHO, the best one we've been able to come up with so
far.

As for the ineradiable stain you mention:  There's nothing wrong with
arbitrariness, as long as it can be persuasively explained away as
being superficial.  :-)

The fun (and frustrating) thing about human language is that it is systematic
enough to make us think it must have structure, but fluid enough to make
the nature of that structure entirely non-obvious!