Re: THEORY: two questions

Tim Smith:
> 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.)
What you say is true but, importantly, not the whole truth. There is no
decent justification for formalists and functionalists telling each other
that they shouldn't be doing what they do, but in fact such a thing happens
only in a minority of universities in my experience (limited to Britain).

OTOH, there are several good reasons for insisting on not mixing up formalist
and functionalist approaches. One reason is that a great deal of work
sloppily and indiscriminately mixes up the two. A second reason is that
to some formalist varieties of theory (that take language to be an abstract
object and that aim only to discover grammars), functionalism genuinely is an
irrelevance, while to some functionalist theories formalist analyses are
an irrelevance. By "irrelevant" I mean truly irrelevant, rather than
complementary.

> 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)
I read somewhere or other a savagely contemptuous review of or response to that
book, so decided not to read it.

--And.