LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.09 (01) [E]

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09 December 2005 * Volume 01
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From: heather rendall <HeatherRendall at compuserve.com>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.08 (01) [E]

Message text written by INTERNET:lowlands-l at LOWLANDS-L.NET
>This takes us back to the "cake eats girl" incident:

"Cake girl eat."
"Girl cake eat."

both mean the same thing, thanks to a bit of common sense or cultural
agreement. But I said the verb has to come after the object. This is
because the verb "eat" varies in BSL according to what's eaten: a piece
of cake, a slice of pizza, a potato crisp, dinner with fork and knife,
they're all held in different ways. And just as I can't tell what the
man's curved hand was before he signs "full moon", I can't tell what the
girl's hand is supposed to be holding until the sign for "cake", "pizza"
or whatever, has been made, so the verb must come after the object!<

This is wonderful! And your whole message enthralling! BSL continues to
fascinate as a vivid and dramatic and seemingly ever innovative method of
communicating thought.

I use a similar argument with children who baulk at the thought of French
adjectives coming after the noun.

I ask them which is more logical as a thought process

A large, red, expensive .................................(sorry I died
before I got to the end of the sentence . What did you end up with as a
mental picture?

A car, large, red ............................. ( I died before I got to
the end of the sentence but at least you knew what I was talking about even
if you had a cheap run-about in mind rather than a Porsche or Ferrari!

Heather

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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.05 (05) [E]

Hello all

Heather wrote:
> Not surprisingly! 
> Because you are mixing/muddling prepositional phrases with propositional
> verbs
> 
> he looked .. where? up the street
> 
> cannot be compared with
> 
> He looked up .... what? ... a word   where? in a dictionary
> 
> This is the problem when you look at surface similarities - or homonyms

yes I was trying to say that you cant explain the difference without 
resorting to a syntactical analysis - just presenting exemplars doesn't 
explain what is going on. If you give exemplars, then some of your 
exemplars are going to look like each other 'on the surface', but have 
different constructions 'underneath', but that's syntax, which we were 
proposing to do away with.

Paul Tatum

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.05 (05) [E]

> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.08 (01) [E]
>
> Sandy Fleming wrote:
>
>> That's why English and BSL are very different, and likely to remain so!
>>
> Hi Sandy, an illuminating piece, aural language is so much more 
> linear! We have to plod one thing out after another, like all the 
> thoughts have to single file out of the mouth. The little I've 
> observed of signed conversations, they have always seemed to be much 
> more 'simultaneous' than spoken language, both people signing at the 
> same time more often. (Unless I only ever see arguments? :-))

You might have been watching arguments! But usually the listener's 
remarks are of the form "Interesting... really? That's right... I'm 
surprised... really? Wow... wow... my jaw's on the floor... can I just 
interrupt there? No, no, listen..."

Sandy Fleming
http://bsltext.org/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cochlear_my_eye/

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.08 (01) [E]

> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (01) [E]
>
> Hello all,
>
> Sandy Fleming wrote:
>
>> "George sat on a chair."
>> "Little Miss Muffet is a wimp."
>> "She sat criying her eyes out."
>> "Show me the box and wrappiing."
>
>
>> "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."
>
>
> But how do you get from the exemplars to "Little Miss Muffet sat on a
> tuffet, eating her curds and whey."? It seems obvious to you because you
> already know the language.

You've experienced it for yourself, as anyone who has ever been a child 
has. When you say it "seems obvious" and "you know the language" what 
this means is that, in your childhood, you accomplished this feat. You 
can't deny that it happens.

> It would be a lot less obvious if the
> examples were in an unknown language. "She sat crying her eyes out"
> employs a construction that does not exist in German, and mechanical
> translation would not be right. (Witness the famous manuals 'translated'
> from Japanese).

But it's completely obvious to Germans and Japanese respectively.

When you say mechanical translation would not be right, this shows the 
weakness of the grammatical approach. Machine translation presently uses 
grammatical approaches, sometimes traditional, sometimes less 
conventional like Link Grammars, but grammars nevertheless. In the 
future machine translation may be done by neural nets or other AI-style 
advances, in which case we may see that mechanical translation is about 
as good as human translation (or better, whatever that might mean!), the 
only bad thing about it before was that we tried to do it using grammar!

> And how come you can't say "Cry her eyes out" or
> "Her eyes out is a wimp".
> Both are allowed by your exemplars.

Nobody's saying that examples are learned in isolation from meaning.

To take Heather's example of cows with crumpled horns and maidens all 
forlorn, I did know what these things were because I learned "The House 
that Jack Built" from a picture book!

When you take a grammatical approach, you do assign a generalised 
meaning to words by marking some as nouns, some as verbs and so on. But 
I wouldn't be terribly enlightened if the teacher tried to explain to me 
that "a maiden all forlorn" was a noun phrase followed by an adjective 
phrase and so on.

Relating grammar to the real world is very difficult - yes it can be 
done through semantic theory, but that's difficult. But humans do it all 
very easily without either.

> is a result of whatever goes on inside that grey matter, and syntax
> tries to describe that structure, and it allows the "equivalent"
> structures of different languages to be compared and contrasted.
>
OK, we're thinking along the same lines there, just coming at it from 
different directions or something.

Yes, an understanding of syntax structure and more generally grammar 
allows us to do things with languages that you can't otherwise. But you 
can't use grammar to really generate language in normal usage. A person 
may speak a language to a very high degree of proficiency, and generally 
does, without generating it by (to choose one syntactic theory) creating 
a deep structure and then applying surface transformations.

Even when a language-learners' book takes a very grammatical approach, 
it always supports its grammatical explanations with many examples or, 
in the worst case scenario that still gives a usable book, tells the 
students that they have to continually drill themselves with examples 
generated from the grammar. But the more the student depends on pure 
grammar, the lower the ceiling to his possible language competency. His 
success as a speaker of the language still depends on familiarising 
himself with large numbers of examples and paying attention to their 
meaning (semantics, not syntax).

> Sorry this is a really bad example for you :-) Programming languages are
> defined syntactically, using context-free phrase-structure grammars.

Au contraire, the example becomes more pertinent! The reason for having 
context-free phrase structure grammars in programming languages is a 
concession to the fact that it has to be read by a machine. It holds no 
advantages for the end-users (ie programmers programming in the language).

> Both programmers must obey the syntax otherwise the compiler will not
> understand the program.

Which means that syntax isn't of any great concern. Well, it was in the 
old days when to compile a program we actually had to post it off to 
Bracknell on paper tape by overnight express and get it back the next 
day with a long list of our syntax errors as spotted by the compiler! 
But these days the compiler will tell you about your syntax errors in 
two seconds flat, so it doesn't really matter to get it right the first 
time. Programming these days is all about semantics and structure and so 
called "patterns". I think most programmers now learn syntax by example 
rather than railroad diagrams and suchlike.

We _can_ make programming languages flexible and complex, we'd just 
rather not! Or if we'd rather, there's always Perl  :)

> Modern syntax is complicated mainly because human languages are
> complicated, not because grammarians like to appear clever by imposing
> complexity upon simplicity.
>
I don't think modern syntactic theory is that complicated, at least not 
any given theory, as opposed to studying and comparing different 
syntactic theories.

I would say that modern grammarians have done an amazing job of imposing 
simplicity on complexity, and that's what's clever about it.

>> phonology, semantics, morphology, interfaces and so on. They're all very
>> different sets of rules but closely interconnected (for example, the
>> more morphology in a language, the less syntax and vice versa, as a
>> rule).
>
> I don't think that this is necessarily the case. Latin or Russian have
> as much syntax as Chinese. They are connected in that morphology
> expresses syntactical relationships. Less morphology tends to mean
> stricter word order, because word order can be used in lieu of
> morphology to express those syntactic relationships. Not necessarily the
> other way round, since some inflected languages have strict word order
>
I think the tendencies are all we can talk about here as far as syntax 
goes though - in inflected languages with flexible word order there are 
generally semantic implications to changes of word order.

>> It is important not to confuse a description of a thing with the way the
>> thing works. Remember the problems we used to have in physics when we
>> thought space was flat?
>
> I'm not quite that old :-)

Oh, I remember having to learn Newtonian Physics before anybody told me 
anything about General Relativity! I did wonder what was wrong with 
Mercury's orbit, though  :)

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

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