Re: THEORY: two questions

At 02:35 PM 3/29/2000 -0600, Matt Pearson wrote:
>Dirk Elzinga wrote:
>
>>Yes, I know what you mean. Many of these kinds of questions seem
>>to be addressed in functionalist literature. The functionalist
>>explanation for these kinds of facts don't preclude UG, though
>>(or do they?), and I find many functionalist arguments extremely
>>compelling in phonology. I don't know enough about syntax to
>>have a clear opinion, but I suspect that of the range of
>>possible human languages (WRT word order anyway), there is some
>>winnowing done by functional principles which might lead to this
>>kind of skewing.
>
>Speaking as a devout-but-moderate generativist, I have no problem
>with functional explanations in principle.  After all, language is
>used to communicate, and it's reasonable to assume that that function
>shapes the design of language to some degree.  What I object to is
>the sweeping claim that functionalist arguments can explain *all*
>every aspect of language design.  That seems to me to be patently
>false.
I'm really glad to hear you guys saying these things.  Although I'm
speaking as an outsider to the field (a reasonably well-read amateur, not a
professional), the more I read about this stuff, the more I'm convinced
that the formalists and the functionalists are both right, that they're
just asking different questions, focusing on different facets of the
overall problem.  And I can't help but suspect that the tendency to see
these two approaches as mutually incompatible -- the tendency for each
group to see the other as "wrong" -- may be largely an artifact of the way
academia works in our culture: the struggle for tenure, publish-or-perish,
etc., a system designed to favor competition over cooperation.  (Or maybe
it's just the general human tendency to want to be part of an in-group,
which can only be defined as such in opposition to an out-group -- a
tendency which, ironically, is probably one of the driving forces of
linguistic diversity.)

In fact, I'm inclined to go even further and to say that at this stage,
_any_ attempt to "explain" language from _either_ a formalist/generativist
or a functionalist perspective is probably premature, because we don't have
enough data.  This is _not_ to say that we shouldn't be trying, only that
real success is still a long way off.  At this point, I tend to agree with
Dixon (in the book that Matt cited earlier, "The Rise and Fall of
Languages", which I read a few months ago and was tremendously impressed
by) that the most important thing for linguists to be doing right now is
not theorizing but gathering data for future theorists to work on:
describing as many languages as possible, in as much depth as possible,
before they go extinct.

- Tim