The Myth of G

Tony A. Wright twright at INTERSATX.NET
Fri Mar 12 04:45:52 UTC 1999


At 10:11 PM 3/11/99 -0500, H Stephen Straight wrote:

>Although Greg Thomson and Carl Mills (10 Mar
>1999) have already responded to it insightfully and correctly, Tony Wright's
>retort, in which parts of speech and agreement and clitics prove the
existence
>of a body of rules or other such propositional stores mediating between the
>analysis of input and the creation of output,

Whoa!  I said all that?  I didn't mean to.

Also, I didn't intend my question to be a retort at all, nor did I intend
to prove anything, but simply to ask an honest question.  To me, the
systematic relationships which have always been obvious between linguistic
elements, or the predictable behavior of linguistic elements like clitics,
etc., is real.  I call it grammar.   Whatever types of  underlying factors
are responsible for this (a specific language endowment or general
cognitive capacities, or something else),  I think that there are regular
linguistic patterns that can be observed.  Is this what is controversial,
or just the practice of calling it grammar?

Now I read people saying that we need to lay the notion of 'grammar' to
rest.  After reading this discussion, I'm still not sure what's wrong with
calling it 'grammar,' or what people are proposing as an alternative that
could not also be called 'grammar.'   Isn't this rather like soap
commercials on TV that tell you "Don't use soap, use (insert  brand name
soap)."

--Tony Wright



More information about the Funknet mailing list