The real cause of word-order harmonies - a reply to Hawkins
Patrik Austin
October 2019 

We answer Hawkins’s question why functional grammar is ‘functional’, reciprocating the question to concern his processing explanation of word-order variation. Our own research uncovers a link between economy, information structure and the place of connectives. Based on this clue and background knowledge from neurolinguistic research, we found a crosslinguistically prevalent pattern which offers a simpler explanation of harmony. This gives us the opportunity to reject Hawkins’s EIC principle as redundant, and to underline that both main sociobiological approaches to theory of language – Darwinian and generative linguistics – after decades of extensive research, remain without a scientific basis.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004779 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	forthcoming
keywords:	early immediate constituents, typology, generative grammar, word order, universals, functional grammar, cognitive linguistics, economy, sociobiology, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [September 2019]
Downloaded:	227 times

 

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