Re: Obsessed with Mouth Noises

From:    Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
> So this is an endless and useless quest, phonology
> being the most external part of the language. When an
> engineer wants to build a car, he doesn't spend five
> years thinking of the paint colour of it, or on the
> exact form of the rear mirror.
But that's the problem:  phonology is *not* mere decoration,
since there is NO communication without it. We aren't telepaths:
it's absolutely essential to the grammatical system. It's more
like having the right kind of fuel or oil.  But these analogies
trivialize grammar unnecessarily.  One might as well downplay
the kinds of complementation various kinds of verbs have. Afterall,
what's the big difference between a dative construction and a
ditransitive with a PP?  Obviously, only certain classes of
verbs can undergo dative-shift, and that fact has necessary
implications for the internal structure of the lexicon and
thus the rest of grammar.  The same can be said for phonology:
you can't know what the speakers know about what they say
until you know what the speakers in fact say.

And later:
> The idea is not to pretend that phoneticians' work and
> science is of no value at all. I myself am interested
> in it, to some point. But syntax and, most of all,
> semantics, are very much nearer the core of a
> language. We should think seriously about phonetics
> when we have already built the fundaments of the
> language, and not the contrary.
The idea that phonology is somehow unimportant is precisely
the kind of hierarchical syntactocentric nonsense that Chomsky
and friends have been propounding for decades.  It was wrong
then, and it's wrong now.

(Not that Chomsky is unique in this fault.  There are plenty of
people who make other modules, like semantics, the pole star
around which the rest of the grammar is fit, such as work
done by Van Valin.  But these monomodulocentric models usually
if not always create more problems than they solve.)

 =========================================================================
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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