Re: ergative? I don't know...

At 10:22 AM -0400 10/26/98, Charles wrote:

>It does appear that Americans have a different point of view.
>This may be the legacy of Chomsky and others who generalized
>about all languages from a study of just one (well, some say
>that; I was anti-Chomsky before it became fashionable ...)
>Or maybe it is a legacy of French philosophical tradition
>that they (or some of them) prefer the semantic approach.
>If we are lucky, somebody with an orthogonal viewpoint
>will contradict both of the others; the more the better.
>Down with all linguistic theoretical universals!
The bit that you clipped from my response tries to make the point that the
people I'm quoting are _not_ committed to particular schools of theory, but
are concerned with the practical issue of describing languages. Payne is an
SIL linguist, from the last hotbed of Tagmemic theory, though he seems to
have a more eclectic stance himself. Many descriptive linguists (and me,
but I'm not a linguist) are vehemently non-Chomskyan, for reasons similar
to those you mention. All of the books that I read about clause structure
were written by non-Chomskyan linguists, and that seemed typical of the
books in the ares, based on my wanderings through the library stacks. My
experience of being driven from linguistics by a mistaken impression (from
my syntax course) that _all_ linguists believed Chomsky's theories perhaps
makes me a bit sensitive on the topic.

[I will note that MIT linguistics has moved much more to a pan-linguistic
base of data. I'm not convinced that the theory is any better nowadays, but
it's become so opaque that I can't understand it any more, so I couldn't
criticize it if I wanted to. For a real joke (that I could understand),
read the book "Principle Based Parsing" (MIT press, editors unknown). It
describes applications of some variation of "principles and parameters"
theory to parsing of a number of natural languages. There's not one clear
algorithm in the book. From a computer science point of view, it's just a
bunch of unprincipled random hacks, of no general power. The principles
lurk somewhere in the murk of the theory, but don't seem to be able to make
it into the parsers. That was late 80's early 90's. I'm sure things have
changed, but I personally doubt for the better.]

The levels of universal here are typological. As an artlanger, I'm
interested in understanding the range of natural variation in grammars so
that I can be naturalistic (or not) as I desire.

I really want to avoid being tarred with theoretical stripes that I have
tried to explicitly disavow, and would prefer to leave discussions of truth
to others. I explicitly disavow claims of universality (as do most of the
people documenting the range of typological variation), but I think that
there's a lot to be said for summaries of language variation as evolved by
those who spend the majority of their professional lives describing widely
variant languages.

They certainly give me ideas for my own projects.

  -- David


>> I don't want to engage in a discussion of whether this is a "true" theory
>> of meaning, or the extent to which language determines, or reflects
>> fundamentally different conceptions of the world. I haven't seen any such
>> discussions make progress, so I stay out. I will say that your accusation
>> that this analysis is based on English is a bit bizarre.
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