LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.01 (12) [E]

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01 December 2005 * Volume 12
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From: Ian Pollock <ispollock at shaw.ca>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.01 (02) [E]

> The Of Have Debate.

Wow, you lot are getting wound up about this. Orthography is pretty
pale gruel to fight over, isn't it? Clearly, we virtually all say
(wU:d at v) or something along those lines. So "would of" is in fact more
accurate in terms of pronunciation.

BUT English is standardized in a certain way, and if you take the time
to learn all the ridiculous spellings, you might as well make the
effort to learn this little inconsistency as well. Besides, what's
wrong with "would've"?

In my humble opinion, this wouldn't be much of an issue at all if
people didn't see it as some sort of class divide. It really isn't. The
people who make this mistake and the ones who don't are divided almost
evenly among economic backgrounds. In any case, snobbery is not
something worth showing off. If you can't help being a snob, you should
at least hide it.

I always disliked the idea of English orthography reform because it
seems like a phonemic system would take away some sort of "quaint"
quality that our current cacamania has. On the other hand, maybe when
people start drawing social lines in the sand around two spellings,
it's high time to slash, burn, and start again. Not that they won't
find new rallying points.

-Ian

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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.29 (04) [A/E]

Ian Pollock wrote:

>> From: "Sandy Fleming" <sandy at scotstext.org>
>> Subject: "Language varieties" 2005.11.23 (01) [E]
>
>
>> An obvious problem with this is that there's no reason to assume that
>> there is any such thing as a universal grammar.

> I'm not convinced (to say the least) of universal grammar or deep
> structure. Chomsky types seem to think of the human brain as having
> language already hard wired in some mysterious way, just waiting for a
> lexicon and phonological and syntactic rules from the environment to
> "fill in the gaps". My experience in language learning, however, has
> led me to believe that language is not some discrete, computer-like
> programming, but rather works on the basis of whole memorized phrases
> serving as templates. This is not exactly a rule system, it is merely a
> system of precedents.
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. 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'.

> But the phrase "Long time no see", rumoured to be a
> calque from Mandarin ~{:C>C2;<{~} (hao3 jiu3 bu2 jian4 - very long no
> see), is
> in great currency, at least where I live. I have a friend who seems to
> say it every time I see him. Surprisingly, nobody realizes anymore that
> this expression is odd. It has been taken completely into our language
> and now seems totally correct. On the basis of this expression, then, I
> once heard somebody say "long time no drunk". I think there are many
> permutations that one could now make of this phrase. And yet it
> violates the so-called rules of English. Generative grammarians will
> call it an exception, a set phrase. Unfortunately, in my opinion, their
> theories are now almost nothing but exceptions, because they fail to
> realize that the whole of language IS a bunch of set phrases. It's like
> a large floodplain.

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.

> For
> this reason I don't think that syntax is worth studying at all. It
> simply is not a profitable concept to apply to language.

I agree that it's not the be-all and end-all of language study, but I think

> But what is most absurd about the generativist approach, I find, is its
> practitioners' willingness to conjure up "invisible" order when a
> language happens to disobey the rules. As many of you doubtless know,
> Russian and a couple of other Slavonic languages have no conjugations
> of the verb "to be" in the present tense (except very occasionally in
> literary style). So, for example, ~{'3'Q'^~} ~{'d'm~}
> ~{'c'S'`']'`'i'n~}! (sam ty
> svoloch)
> means "You're a pig yourself", with the structure "self + thou +
> swine". No "are". This is the way the East Slavonic languages work.
> Period. But I once heard a generativist say without even blushing that
> it is an "invisible" verb, and that its phonemic form was simple
> silence. How would the IPA for that work? /   : / ?!

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.

> You can't have theories like universal grammar without sacrificing a
> lot of data to make them work.
the idea of universal grammar grew out of transformational syntax, and
is probably one of Chomsky's more controversial theories. I think it's a
bit 'iffy' myself.

> And even then they don't really explain
> much of anything at all worth knowing. Sorry if this sounds too much
> like a rant.
But syntax seems to describe/explain a whole lot of stuff!

----------

From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.11.30 (13) [E]

Hello all,

Gary Taylor wrote:

> From: Gary Taylor <gary_taylor_98 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: LL-L Grammar

> Oh and I say 'Me and John'/'John and me' too, however
> I don't spit in the streets.

The only reason we say 'John and I' in the first instance is because
_Latin_ grammars (or rather Latin-taught schoolmasters) say that this is
correct. When discussing Pidgins, Ron suggested that the objective
pronoun was more 'marked' - in some ways the objective pronouns are the
unmarked default pronouns. The reasons for drawing this conclusion are
usually given as:
(i) used not only as objects to verbs, but also as 'objects' to
prepositions.
(ii) used to answer questions: 'who did this?' 'me' (I tried to always
answer this in the negative as a child, desparately, but was never
believed).
(iii) used for subject when in a compound phrase as Gary quotes above.
(iv) some languages, such as French, develop stressed (i.e. 'marked')
forms of object pronouns (moi ~ me) but are less likely to develop
stressed forms of the subject pronouns, the argument being that subject
pronouns are already marked.

Yours, Paul Tatum

P.S. Ron, I forgot to say thanks for passing on the SAMPA link. Thanks.

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Grammar

Paul (above):

> P.S. Ron, I forgot to say thanks for passing on the SAMPA link. Thanks.

Oh, you're sure welcome, Paul.  And may I take this opportunity to thank you 
for your part in the exchanges.  It's great to have you on the List.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron 

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