Re: Is language development evolutionary, or designed by the culture?

David Wright Sr. wrote:
>
> "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
> news:42B1834E.516A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>
> > David Wright Sr. wrote:
> >>
> >> "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
> >> news:42B0FE45.7116@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
>
> (snip)
>
> >> >
> >> > They never even got much past inflectional morphology. (Jack Rea,
> >> > comments?)
> >>
> >> Sorry, I don't understand your reference here.
> >
> > What reference? I asked Jack Rea for a comment. He was a contemporary
> > and sometime antagonist of Robert A. Hall, Jr., a favorite teacher of
> > mine, who you will recall featured in the recent KRS discussion.
>
> Your reference to 'not getting past inflectional morphology'. Sorry, I
> didn't pay any attention to the KRS discussion and since the comment was in
> response to a statement that I had made, I assumed that you meant to
> address me.

Even word formation (derivational morphology) was being left to the
future, while phonology and inflectional morphology were made rigorous.
See Zellig Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) (who showed
that no semantic information is required to do linguistic analysis,
other than "same" vs. "different").

> I don't recall that he ever insisted one way or the other. I always used
> 'Dr. Hodge' when I spoke to him and he never said one way or the other.
> Maybe, his attitudes had changed by the time you knew him, or whatever. As
> I said above, he probably would have let me call him Carleton, but I
> didn't, for reasons of my own,[1] and he seemed to have no objection to
> that.

He was quite shy but welcomed any approaches, especially from students
-- and had a wicked corny sense of humor.

Plus, he was an anti-smoking campaigner years before it was fashionable.

> (snip)
>
> >> >> say that linguists don't consider vocabulary to be an important part
> >> >> of linguistics. Did I understand you incorrectly or were you making
> >> >> a comment about most other linguists, or do I not understand what a
> >> >> lexicographer is?
> >> >
> >>
> >> Well, I still stand by the notion that the linguistics that I was
> >> taught certainly included vocabulary as an important part of the
> >> science.
> >
> > But you won't say why you hold that notion!
>
> Why should I change it? That was what I was taught. I don't specifically
> recall any one teacher saying it, but I certainly picked it somewhere there
> as part of the package.

Rephrase: You won't say where you got that notion!

> Can you rank all of the various linguistic subjects in some ranking of
> order that you consider to be important? I would like to see how you rank
> things and what weighting do you give to each?

What I do is writing systems, so of course that's the most interesting.
Then all things historical, all things socio, history of linguistics.

Chomsky's mathematical models are fundamentally misguided, so I align
more with the various functionalist approaches from both before and
after him.

And the American Descriptivist (and Jakobsonian Structuralist) tradition
I was raised in.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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