Re: Nattiki (was: Re: speaking and saying)

Matt Pearson wrote:

> Mathias asked:
>
> >Does making up this language make your students more comfortable with
> >linguistics ?
>
> I don't know.  The purpose of the project was to allow me to introduce
> the concept of principles and parameters to the students - i.e., what
> kinds of variation are found in natural languages, versus what sorts of
> features seem to be universal.
Do you mean by this the sort of typological univerals empirically
discovered by Greenberg, Haiman, Comrie, et al, or the sort of
universal grammar principles and parameters rationalistically
postulated by Chomsky?

I'm curious because the term 'principles and parameters' is so
strongly associated with Chomsky, but that the sort of work on
universals that is concrete enough to be actually usable for language
construction is done by more Greenbergistical types, and the
theoretical and methodological chasm between the two yawns deep and
wide.


Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---