From: connolly@memstvx1.memst.edu
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Subjectless verbs
Date: 13 Oct 92 13:08:39 -0600
Organization: Memphis State University

In article <1992Oct12.192711.6949@spss.com>, markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
> In article <1992Oct12.100915.3623@memstvx1.memst.edu> connolly@memstvx1.memst.
> edu (Leo Connolly) writes:
>>In article <1992Oct11.140719.23157@enea.se>, sommar@enea.se 
> (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>>> Of course all this morpheme business is just a recontruction post
>>> facto; more or less rules for a recreational game we've made up.
>>
>>Come now!  Is it any more a "reconstruction post facto" than any
>>other form of linguistic analysis?  Surely you don't mean to say
>>that linguistics is just a hobby?  If so, we should all take up
>>some other form of dishonest labor, such as banking.
> 
> I think there's an interesting question lurking in Mr. Sommarskog's question,
> which I was edging toward too with my question about null morphemes: 
> what does it mean to say that (say) the 2.sg. personal ending in Spanish 
> "is" -s?  
> 
> Does it mean that this is the case in the most parsimonious theoretical
> statement of the morphology we can come up with?  If so the statement may
> bear only an indirect relationship to whatever cognitive system Spanish
> speakers actually have in their heads; in this case the statement has
> "only" theoretical validity, and this could lead to Mr. Sommarskog's
> characterization of the analysis as a "game."  
> 
> Or does it mean that all or most Spanish speakers actually do have a 
> mental grammar in which the 2.sg ending is -s?  That may be; but such a 
> theory should presumably be supported by psychological not just 
> morphological evidence; and it should tolerate the possibility that not 
> all speakers' grammars are identical.  There are many ways of learning a 
> language and perhaps each path leads to a different grammar.
> 
> How do you see things-- in one of these two ways, or have you got a
> tertium quid up your sleeve?

Right from the horse's sleeve: I have no tertium quid, but neither do
I see things in *one* of these two ways.  I meant my analysis to repre-
sent a parsimonious system; I leave it to experts to decide whether it
is the *most* parsimonious one.  So I do see things the first way,
with some caution that didn't come across in the posting.

By the way, I do not value parsimony as such.  In other words:
while it is true that in any initial English cluster C1C2-, if
C2 is a stop, then it must be voiceless and C1 must be [s], I
assume that the psychological reality is /sp- st- sk-/, with
the features fully specified.  That's not parsimony!

As to Spanish speakers' psyches and grammars: Again I am no expert,
but I would not be surprised if they did indeed have a mental con-
struct where -s represented 2.sg. in many, but not all, verb forms.
Again I tend to see things this way, but with considerably more
caution than in the first instance.

Thanks to your rephrasing, I now see that there is an interesting
question involved, though I'm still not sure that it's the one Mr.
Somarskog meant to raise.  I have always hoped that linguistic
analyses will reflect reality, such that they are not arbitrary.
I do not know how to determine whether any analysis in fact does
so, though I guess we'd all agree that some do not.  I keep looking
for, and trying to develop, an analysis that *does* reflect psycho-
logical reality.  Such an enterprise is not a game.  But if one
assumes a priori that any analysis is a mere model divorced from
psychology, then one is condemned to mere gameplaying, which I
find boring.

Perhaps my wish is a reflection of my training in historical lin-
guistics, where the ideal has long been to reconstruct *actual*
protoforms to the extent possible.  While historical linguists
recognize that they must inevitably err in this process, any
reconstruction is valid only to the extent that it reflects
historical reality.  Elegance and consistency have no value as
such for the historical linguist of the old school.

--Leo A. Connolly

In the beginning was the word.  Now if we could only figure out
which one it was...