'totally novel sentence'

[Jon Aske]

After I sent the previous message with Bolinger's quote, I found
another beautiful quote from his absolutely wonderful article "Meaning
and Memory" (1979), which makes a similar point (cf. the second
paragraph).  I just can't resist the temptation to forward it to you.
I am sorry if you don't find it as inspiring as I do :-) (By the way,
"Syntactic blends and other matters" was in Language 37:3:366-381)

"For a long time now linguists have been reveling in Theory with a
capital T.   If you assume that language is a system où tout se
tient--where everything hangs together--then it follows that a
connecting principle is at work, and the linguist's job is to
construct a one-piece model to account for everything.  It can be a
piece with many parts and subparts, but everything has to mesh.  That
has been the overriding aim for the past fifteen years.  But more and
more evidence is turning up that this view of language cannot be
maintained without excluding altogether too much of what language is
supposed to be about.  In place of a monolithic homogeneity, we are
finding homogeneity within heterogeneity.  Language may be an edifice
where everything hangs together, but it has more patching and gluing
about it than architectonics.  Not every monad carries a microcosm of
the universe inside; a brick can crumble here and a termite can nibble
there without setting off tremors from cellar to attic.  I want to
suggest that language is a structure, but in some ways a jerrybuilt
structure.  That it can be described not just as homogeneous and
tightly organized, but in certain of its aspects as heterogeneous but
tightly organized.

Specifically what I want to challenge is the prevailing
reductionism--the analysis of syntax and phonology into determinate
rules, of words into determinate morphemes, and of meanings into
determinate features.  I want to take an idiomatic rather than an
analytic view and argue that analyzability always goes along with it
opposite at whatever level, and that our language does not expect us
to build everything starting with lumber, nails, and blueprint.
Instead it provides us with an incredibly large number of prefabs,
which have the magical property of persisting even when we knock some
of them apart and put them together in unpredictable ways."

(Bolinger 1979:95-96, Meaning and memory, in Haydu, George G., ed.,
Experience forms: Their cultural and individual place and function,
World anthropology, The Hague: Mouton)

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Jon Aske -- Jon.Aske at salem.mass.edu -- aske at earthlink.net
Department of Foreign Languages, Salem State College
Salem, Massachusetts 01970 - http://home.earthlink.net/~aske/
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If this is coffee, please bring some tea; but it this is tea, please
bring me some coffee. --Abraham Lincoln.