esoteric and highly formalized rules

[PAMELA PRICE KLEBAUM]

This has a lot to do with the real world.  My rea of interest is children
as witnesses, and the syntactic issues that make the understanding of
questions/utterances problematic, resulting in a communication problem.
Strong crossover, weak crossover, passive, all these things matter.  As
for charts, prose, they all reflect rules.

        PPK


On Fri, 18 Apr 1997, Sydney M Lamb wrote:

>
> Pamela Price Klebaum writes,
> > . . .  How can you
> > describe how to form a question out of "The man who is calling is
> > yelling" without formalized rules?
> >
>
> Ans: In any number of ways: charts, diagrams, ordinary prose.  But the
> more important question is: What does such an exercise have to do with
> language as it is used by real people?, or as it is learned by children?,
> or as it is represented in people's minds?  In people's ordinary use of
> language they do not form sentences by deriving them from other
> sentences (eg.  questions from statements).  Outputs of the linguistic
> system come from the linguistic system, not from other outputs.
>
> (By the way, has any real human being ever actually said "the man who is
> caling is yelling"?.)
>
> Cheers,
>       Syd
>