Re: "Theory informs practice" - OK?

John V. wrote:
<<
I initially thought you were trying to take the definition of
"natural(istic) language" wider than it should. I'm sure we can agree
that
the folloing is a necessary condition:
  1) The language must be usable by humans
I'd add a 2nd one, however.
  2) It must be possible for the language to come about by linguistic
change
because otherwise everything we've created here would automatically fall
under "natural", no matter how engelangy.
 >>

As a metric for naturalness in a conlang, I think this is a lot
better than finding every feature in an existing natlang.  It
has problems, though, and the ones you pointed out are fine
examples.  What I guess I'm saying, then, is that we need some
other metric for defining naturalness in a conlang.  Currently,
I think we're at the state where we all know it when we see
it, but it'd be nice to have something more reliable.

Back to theory, I don't think linguistics has yet provided us
with the tools for measuring naturalness.  That is, all that can
be found in linguistics can tell us a lot about language, but it
can't show us, simply, *why* some language like Turkish or
Tagalog or Thai is natural.  What it amounts to is a collection
of isolated facts or fact bundles about a language.  Frameworks
like Optimality Theory are an attempt to try to get at some
sort of explanation, though it, of course, is nowhere near
adequate (e.g., most OT analyses are restricted to phonetics
and phonology, and while there are others that have been
applied to syntax, pragmatics and morphology, it's rare that
*everything* in the language is fed into the same mechanism).
The result is that we're left with the present situation: We can
spot a natural language and a naturalistic language from a
mile off, but we're hard-pressed to explain it.

The closest I've seen is an attempt to work with Bochner's
obscure framework.  A former colleague of mine had an
interesting account of the stem alternation in Polish.  He
modeled it very well, but then the next question was, with
two likely alternatives, how does a speaker of Polish figure
out which alternation to use--or with novel or nonce forms?
The idea, in my mind, is to attempt to predict how a speaker
will act.  The future may be dealing with percentages based
on patterns, but we'll see.  To me, the fact that, as a joke, an
English speaker can make up "blunk" for the past tense of
"blink" says something important about language that
theorists need to pay attention to.

John V.:
<<
I could imagine taking this the other way around: designing a conlang to
conflict with a theory, then seeing if it can be taught to (and
persist as
spoken by) linguistically uneducated speakers.
 >>

This, of course, has been done (or, at least, the first part).
Kelen, for an example, is an attempt at an all-noun language,
since they don't exist in the wild.  Aside from  Fith, I've
never seen an unlearnable language, including those that
test "universal" constraints.  I don't think this is very surprising,
though, since linguists routinely sell human brains short.
Just because feature x doesn't exist in any natural language
doesn't mean humans can't learn it in a language.  Our brains
are buff; we can handle a lot more than we do in everyday
life!

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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