Language in daily life

Ellen F. Prince ellen at CENTRAL.CIS.UPENN.EDU
Tue Jan 14 20:27:16 UTC 1997


huh? speak for yourself, please. i certainly have NOT found that spoken
language is very different from what one would think.

the main 'surprises' i have found are:

1. certain forms that have been claimed to be ungrammatical do in fact seem to
be well-formed but in very constrained contexts (e.g. for english: resumptive
pronoun relative clauses where no island violations are involved, topicalized
indefinites, nonrestrictive _that_...).

2. certain claims about genre/style/... distribution are unfounded (e.g. the
claim that left-dislocation is characteristic of 'unplanned' speech, the
20-yr-ago claim that only yinglish speakers could topicalize certain
things...).

3. most claims about topichood and focus.

i certainly have found no evidence to question the notion 'sentence' -- au
contraire -- just try to account for how entities that are introduced by
quantified expressions are referred to subsequently without a notion of
'clause', much less sentence!

and none of the computational linguists whose work i find interesting have
abandoned the notion 'sentence' either...

i hope people are more careful making generalizations about their data than
some people seem to be when making generalizations about 'what funknetters
believe' or what 'people who work on interactional, spoken language find'...


Susanna Cumming <cumming at humanitas.ucsb.edu> wrote:

>Bralich says,
>
>"if linguists limit themselves to what occurs in very daily life, we would
>(and do) have very primitive linguistics."
>
>We may have a very primitive linguistics -- I hope so, because that would
>imply we're going to know a lot more someday -- but that would certainly
>not be because we know about language that occurs in daily life. Indeed,
>this is precisely the kind of language we know least about, because it is
>only very recently that linguists have had the tools they needed to look
>at it seriously. As Aske has pointed out, if you take everyday,
>interactional, spoken language seriously on its own terms -- that is,
>without editing it first into something that resembles written language --
>you have to start by abandoning or at least fundamentally re-examining
>many of the basic concepts that underlie "traditional" linguistics, for
>instance "sentence". This is why some of us feel strongly that no matter
>what tools the linguist has in their tool-bag -- and sure, I agree that
>the more we have the better -- one of them is in fact a sine qua non:
>access to natural, interactional, spoken discourse. Experience shows that
>such data tends to lead to radically different conclusions at the levels
>both of description and of explanation.
>
>As far as the impact of linguistics on the outside world is concerned,
>surely it is by knowing something about what people really do with
>language that is going to have practical applications that will impress
>non-linguists. A computational linguist in particular should appreciate
>this -- effective interfaces which use natural language need to be able to
>deal with actual speaker-hearers, not idealized ones, and they need to be
>able to take into account the dynamics of interaction, as much exciting
>work in computational linguistics is doing these days.
>
>Susanna



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