Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

From:    Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
> - as I said, we indeed communicate (on the list)
> WITHOUT phonology, because our messages are 100%
> written. I have no microphone connected to my PC.
But that's not what the debate is about. The debate is about
what use phonology and phonetics have -- "are they interesting" --
and whether you can understand human language without it. And
the answer to that is:  you can't.  The fact that we can now
communicate as well as we do via the internet does not diminish
the fact that it does not capture all aspects of human speech.

> So you first had to think: what is tense ?
> what concept is that ? shall I use it ? This of course
> all IMHO.
Beside the point.  No one here -- certainly not me -- is suggesting
phonology should take some kind of priveleged position among
the modules.  Of course you have to think about the other modules,
and they have their place.  But I would dispute the idea that you
have to create your conlangs in some kind of hiearchical order;
I know I certainly sometimes choose the sound of morphs first,
and the morphosyntax later. I know other conlangers have had
similar experiences.

> I'm not sure for ex that your example about dative
> construction # ditransitive is a universal question;
> perhaps it concerns only some languages, and other
> languages use other systems ? In that case, it would
> also be somehow peripheral, or superficial (in the
> meaning of surface forms), the really important thing
> being the deep (conceptual) structure: what do such
> forms really mean
Hardly.  You're missing the point.  The point was that a property
of verbs -- whether they take complements, and if so what kinds of
complements -- is fundamental to understanding grammatical patterning.
I was suggesting that minimizing the role of phonology is like
suggesting the complexities of complementation are not "interesting"
-- even though so much of grammatical questions revolve around it.
Likewise, many morphological questions (reduplication, e.g.) involve
questions of phonological structure just as much as morphological or
syntactic ones.  You simply can't ignore that fact.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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