Commentary on Cristofaro - Cognitive Mechanisms Need to be Operationalized

Cristofaro (2010) voices a growing trend within cognitive-functional linguistics to explain language universals in terms of productive processes in language use rather than in terms of universal conceptual representations. Such mechanisms include metonymy and generalization. Even though I fully agree with this general approach, the proposed mechanisms remain too fuzzy and incomplete to shed new light on the matter of mental representations. This is not so much a criticism directed at Cristofaro as it is a plea for coupling empirical observations to computational models: formal modeling is the only way to demonstrate the validity and completeness of any linguistic theory, and hence forms a crucial part of empirical science.