Re: THEORY: two questions

Madth Bfiysn (Matt Pearson):
> 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".
I meant that, say, various orders are possible in a language, but certain
ones predominate, statistically, in usage.

> >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.
I'm not sure what you have in mind by "decidedly non-functional". Disfunctional
elements would not be remnants of earlier stages in lg evolution; just
remnants of an earlier stage in the history of lg. I think that in general lg
is disfunctional only in 2 ways. First, temporarily, in the history of a
particular lg (e.g. if sound changes create too many homophones). Second,
like biological evolution it operates on the principle "just good enough is
good enough".

> >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.  :-)
I was thinking of the conspicuous lack of practical success of the highly
appealing notion of parameters, and the apparent fundamental conceptual
conflict between Minimalism's working assumption that UG is 'perfect' and the
failure (possibly remedied since early Minimalism?) to explain syntactic
variation across lgs in terms of interface/output conditions.

> 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!
And when things do seem obvious they usually turn out to be wrong.

--And.