LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.04 (01) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 04 December 2005 * Volume 01
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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.03 (01) [E]

greetings all,

> From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org> Subject: LL-L "Grammar"
> 2005.12.01 (12) [E]

> I don't think there's any evidence that people actually think
> generatively when they use language, unless they've been trained to
> do this and build sentences from words and rules in the way many
> people are taught to speak (or fail to speak, more like!) a foreign
> language. You might compare the performance of learners who learn to
> generate sentences from rules and vocabulary with those who just
> learn phrases and stuff until they find they can use them, and then
> decide whether language in practice is generative or exemplary.

Ah-ha! I think we might be coming at this in slightly different angles.
I don't really see us running through some sort of mental algorithm
'now, i need a sentence to express "....". Right, I need rule 1: S
-->NP, VP. etc, etc. but those sort of rules do seem to be a good way to
describe the way that language is structured, which is all that syntax
means. Of course language learning is exemplary, in that you hear people
(dear ol' mama)  speaking to you, you start to make sense of the
gobbledygook by context and by 'recognising' an  order/sytem in what is
said to you. Syntax tries to make the order explicit and it tries to
make it easy to talk about the structure that exemplars display.Your
exemplars still have to be chosen in order to illustrate the rules of
the language in a logical and progressive manner. You can't just throw
random stuff at learners and hope. To return to Pidgin languages, I
suppose that another way of saying that they are close to universal
grammar is to say that they need smaller sets of exemplar sentences to
learn them than 'standard' (non-Pidgin) languages and that the rules
illustrated by those exemplars tend also to appear in the exemplars of
non-Pidgin languages. I was told that it was possible to learn enough
Pidgin English in Papua New Guinea in 3 months to get employment in the
civil service, while standard english of similar grade would take a
couple of years.

> I would agree that learners find generative grammars useful in
> accelerating their learning by short-cutting some of their problems
> but too much dependence on genrative rules leads to failure in
> language learning and I think this is an indication that it's not
> really a good description of how languages _work_, just a record of
> the more predictable aspects of a language at some point in time.

Learn a language via a generative grammar? what now? no, noo, nooo...
You'll have me eating food as raw proteins and carbohydrates next!
Anyway, I thought most language teaching is still done via 'traditional'
grammar and example sentences/everyday scenes? And the best tool is
practice.

Yours, Paul Tatum.

----------

From: "Ian Pollock" <ispollock at shaw.ca>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar"

> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.29 (04) [A/E]
>
> but we can create/generate new sentences we have never heard before,
> that there isn't a template for. And if you pursue the template analogy
> more, I think you end up with rules (and vice versa). After all the
> sentence template
> 'noun phrase followed by verb phrase' is not much different from the
> rule 'a sentence is composed of a noun phrase followed by a verb
> phrase'.

While I've been busy, Sandy Fleming said a lot of things I agree with
generally. I'll respond to a few things anyway.

The fact that we can generate new sentences never struck me as much of
a surprise. Even with a huge, but limited number of templates, you can
still use any lexical *material* in them you please.
Maybe you're right that labelling "tendencies" does lead to thinking
about rules, at least provisional ones. Trouble is, I don't think
they're based on lexical categories like noun, verb, so much as a
pretty unmeasurable general similarity to the original phrase. Usually
any one of their slots can be filled with something else.

> Well, IMO you have found a new rule 'long time no NP'. Because language
> has rules, we can use it creatively by breaking the rules - we are not
> bound by them like some legal system, the rules merely describe how we
> use language. And for describing how we use language, transformational
> grammar (and its descendants like LFG and GPSG) have been very
> fruitful.

But the new phrase I heard isn't "long time no NP" - it was actually
"long time no AP". That's what I mean by rules being inappropriate. I
think trying to apply the numberless syntactic rules to language is
like trying to map an amoeba. Language is too squirmy to fit into our
boxes.
As far as the phenomena that syntax claims to study are concerned, a
more profitable concept might be something like prototypicality.

> The reason the verb is said to be invisible (or deleted) is becuse in
> past and future tenses the verb is represented by a word.(This present
> tense deletion of 'to be' happens in many languages, eg Hebrew 'gadol
> ha-ish' lit. 'great the-man', whereas in past tense: hayah ha-ish gadol
> 'was the-man great'). Since the verb is there in past/future, isn't the
> verb there in present tense sentences also? There are other indications
> that the verb is there really but invisible - in some languages the
> verb
> 'to be' appears when the present tense sentence is subordinated or
> nominalised. (I can claim without blushing that the sentence 'I know
> the
> man who I saw yesterday.' contains(!) a deleted pronoun.)

I don't claim to know anything about Hebrew at all, so I really can't
address that example. But your last one I have to disagree with you on.
I assume you mean that the sentence looks like this: "I know the man
who I saw (him) yesterday". There's nothing wrong with that way of
visualizing it, I believe that Arabic even has the pronoun in that
position. But I strongly doubt that English does. The way I see it,
"who" is acting as the object of "saw" in that case. But even who can
be deleted. I don't think that that means there is more structure than
there appears. Everything works by convention. An English speaker knows
what stands in what relation to what without any "hidden" cues. Just
like on a chatroom when I was young they always asked a formula "ASL"
(age/sex/location) and somebody would say "19, m, Kansas" or whatever,
you can organize information in your brain in many different ways. It's
just a set formula and people produce it without ever thinking about
whether every verb has an object or not.
I would analyze that sentence by simply understanding what it means and
how it is formed for other material.

-Ian

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.03 (05) [E]

> Heather, Paul, Sandy and All,
>
> This topic of "right" v. "wrong" English has been running for centuries...

Let's admit it, people - don't we all have this feeling of "help, my
language is being hijacked by morons"?? I certainly do. And unfortunately,
those aren't only unfeeling and/or uneducated people who don't give a damn
about the beauty of the language, but, in the case of the new and certainly
not improved German spelling, also those theoretically in charge of
preserving the language, who are butchering it instead ("rau" versus "rauh"
no longer looks rough at all!).

What I hate the most in German right now (and this is definitely not the new
spelling, just some very thoughtless and/or very confused people who maybe
think that anything goes after the spelling "reform", or who spend too much
time trying to read and understand business and technical English), is the
trend towards splitting nouns and just writing the components one after
another: "Erdnuss Butter Kekse", "Computer Technologie", "Weihnachts Baum
Kerzen", "Marketing Bereich" - as a translator, I come across this kind of
carnage all the time, and I always want to print it out and make the author
eat it.

Honestly, people who do bad things to my language make me feel violated,
just like someone had secretly come to my house and redecorated my living
room in a tacky fashion, and switched the contents of my kitchen drawers.

I know, this is just the emotional side of the discussion (as in: if you
have no idea what the heck you are doing, then keep your grubby paws off my
beloved language!), but as usual, I am getting the feeling that nobody's
going to say it if I don't...

Gabriele Kahn

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.03 (05) [E]

> From: Paul Finlow-Bates <wolf_thunder51 at yahoo.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.03 (01) [E]
>
> Heather, Paul, Sandy and All,
>
> This topic of "right" v. "wrong" English has been running for
> centuries, and probably will for many more

To me this current debate isn't about English but about the form of
argument used on the list.

Is it all right to dismiss Low Saxon because it's like spitting in the
street? No it isn't.
Is it all right to dismiss Cockney rhyming slang because it's like
spitting in the street? No it isn't.
Is it all right to dismiss American spelling because it's like spitting
in the street? No it isn't.
Is it all right to dismiss writing sentences starting with "And" and
"But" because it's like spitting in the street? No it isn't.
Is it all right to dismiss writing "would of" because it's like spitting
in the street? No it isn't.

This is why I want to encourage people to develop a proper argument
against what they want to speak out against. Or admit that they don't
have one!

It is all right to say that you're not going to bring up your children
writing "would of", but this is only an expression of intent, it doesn't
add anything towards the argument against "would of".

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/ 

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