No subject

[A. Katz]

    I agree with the general purport and spirit of Wally Chafe's
remarks, but I'd like to comment on the context of this specific
debate.
    It is undoubtedly true that the sentence is not the be all and end
all of language, and there are many other aspects to explore that are
perhaps much more interesting. There are even speakers who make very
scant use of this particular linguistic unit. But sentences do have
communicative reality, and every once in a while it's a good idea to
remind ourselves of this rather basic fact. With all the revisionism
of recent years, there are actually new linguists coming into the
field who may believe that sentences are a totally arbitrary unit
devised by formalists to confound us.
    The sentence is a classic concept, and along with other ancient
artifacts, it may not be very fashionable at the moment.  I'd like to
draw an analogy from poetry. The modernist movement has left behind
metrical form and eschews rhyme. Many readers are encouraged to assume
that what distinguishes poetry from prose is how the words are
arranged on a page -- just as many laymen are led to believe that you
know a sentence is over when you get to the period.
    The fallacy in such a position was brought home to me one day as
a child when in the middle of a novel, which was written in prose, I
suddenly stumbled onto a poem embedded into a paragraph. There was
nothing in the way the thing was typeset or arranged on the page to
indicate that it wasn't just another chunk of prose. There were no
line breaks, just sentences ending in periods, followed by more
sentences ending in periods -- but the thing scanned and rhymed and I
was amazed, because it cried out to me: "I'm a poem!"
    I felt the meter; I could have told you where the line breaks
should have gone -- and I suddenly realized that how it looks on the
page has nothing to do with whether it's poetry or prose.
    The overwhelming reality of the sentence as a unit was brought
home to me when I started teaching beginning language courses. I saw
firsthand how without a basic understanding of the language, students
could not recognize sentence boundaries. And without the sentence
boundaries, they could not decipher the propositional value of an
utterance, even when they recognized all the words.
    But what happens when people actually speak? When you go out into
the field and record what people are really doing, isn't that when
the scales fall from your eyes and you realize that sentences are just
an illusion?
   Some speakers slur their speech so badly that even word boundaries
are very hard to make out. Some never finish a sentence, but let it
trail off, leaving it up to their interlocutor to complete the
utterance. There are those with conflicting prosodic and grammatical
cues as to where the sentence ends. And yes, some informants when
asked to relate a story will give you a laundry list, instead.
   So what?
   Whoever said we all had to be equally good at it? Well, maybe
Chomsky, with his notions of absolute native speaker competence. But
there's no functionalist principle to suggest absolute equality of
facility with language. Ngoni Chipere apparently has experimental data
to show that native speakers do not necessarily out-perform foreigners
in deciphering complex novel sentences. And if language use is related
to generalized processing ability, there's no reason to suppose that
they should.
   Fieldworkers know that not every native speaker informant is
equally good. And the informants can tell you that themselves. They
recognize who is a more eloquent speaker among them or a better
storyteller.
   That, I think, is the ultimate measure of the reality of any
linguistic unit: not whether every speaker makes use of it, but
whether other speakers find it easier to understand those who do.
There are normal, healthy, intelligent people in every community who
are nevertheless incapable of completing a sentence. They get along
fine, because there's a lot more to human communication than
propositional value coded on the sentence level. But other speakers
invariably find it much easier to understand those who enunciate
clearly, produce complete sentences and use prosodic cues to mark
sentence breaks.
   I fully agree that we don't have to confine our inquiry as
linguists to the sentence level and that there are many discourse
related issues that are far more interesting. I think that we should
also agree that it's okay to talk about sentences some of the time.
They have as much reality as any other unit.

                         --Aya Katz

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Dr. Aya Katz, 3918 Oak, Brookfield, Illinois 60513-2019 (708) 387-7596
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