LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.05 (06) [E]

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   L O W L A N D S - L * 05 December 2005 * Volume 06
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From: "Ian Pollock" <ispollock at shaw.ca>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar"

> From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.05 (01) [E]
>
> hello everybody
> I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm harping on about this subject.

Not at all, it's interesting!

> "Of problem-the course can the gibberish am come, understand listeners
> you not plus."

Enjoyed that sentence thoroughly!

> Except these are not English sentences and so don't qualify as new 
> sentences. And they are not english sentences because they do not 
> follow the rules of english sentence construction. They use English 
> words, spelling and punctuation, but they do not use English syntax. 
> It would be difficult to criticise their correctness using an exemplar 
> based approach, while it very easy to say why they are not English if 
> you allow syntactical analysis.

Perhaps our opinions differ because our goals do? I personally don't 
have any use for proving what isn't English in everyday life - I'd much 
rather talk about what is English and try to describe how it works in 
human terms.

Maybe you do need syntax to work with computational linguistics, to 
give complex explanations of why utterances are wrong, etc., but that 
stuff, to be brutally honest, interests me personally about as much as 
the colour of my duodenum.

> But we do, probably the majority of sentences we utter each day are 
> new sentences that we have never heard or spoken before. Each language 
> has an infinite number of sentences.

True, I can make up, say, "pinkish-orangy bedbugs are dancing in my 
borscht" and have a pretty good deal of confidence that nobody's ever 
said it before. I don't think it's all that surprising. It can be 
constructed from a basic unit of "someone dances somewhere" without any 
great difficulty.

> The nursery rhyme 'this is the house that jack built' is one sentence 
> that is potentially infinite, as is 'there was an old woman who 
> swallowed a fly'. Start with any simple sentence 'Blue begonias sit in 
> chilly chambers'. A new sentence can be created simply by adding an 
> 'and-clause' 'Blue begonias sit in chilly chambers and brown bears bug 
> bitter barnacles' and that sentence can be extended by adding another 
> 'and-clause' ('Blue begonias sit in chilly chambers and brown bears 
> bug bitter barnacles and donald duck dances dizzily on day-glow dados' 
> any one?) and so on ad infinitum. You need an infinite number of 
> exemplars to exemplify an infinite number of sentences, but you can 
> describe an infinite number of sentences with just a finite set of 
> rules, in this case just one: a sentence can be composed of a sentence 
> joined to another sentence by the word 'and'.

This seems to me to all depend on the nature and meaning of the word 
"and". Yes, I'm sure it's possible to keep talking in one sentence ad 
infinitum using "and" or "that", but, not to be frivolous, who cares? 
Nobody actually does (I think... I hope).

> There again, if exemplar based language analysis works and you can 
> ditch syntax, then I would go ahead and write your books now before 
> someone steals your ideas!

But the ideas aren't new. Memorization of exemplars has been used in 
language learning for as long as people have been chinwagging. I have a 
feeling that they describe child first language learning pretty well, 
too (see the Verb Island hypothesis). I find it's the best way to learn 
foreign languages myself.

> Yes I also think it is acting as the object of 'saw' - when it has the 
> form 'whom'. When the link has the form 'who', then it seems to me to 
> be acting more as a uninflected particle, but you are free to 
> disagree.

I do. "Whom" is very uncommon now and tends to be said at all only for 
reasons of euphony, not grammar.

> But by saying 'object' you are talking grammar and using the 
> vocabulary of syntax. You can't get away from grammar. The moment you 
> start thinking about how words are grouped together in a sentence, 
> then you are thinking in terms of syntax, because that is all that 
> syntax means in the end: 'the study of sentence structure'.

When I argued for a dismissal of syntax in general, I did not mean that 
we oughtn't to talk about objects and subjects, adjectives and verbs. 
These are all useful and meaningful categories, although they have 
their limits like everything else. But once we get to "higher" levels 
of organization, I think syntax studies tend to degenerate into 
figments of the syntactician's imagination, replete with invisible 
beings and magical fairies. That's all I wanted to say, perhaps I took 
too hard a line.

Cheers!
-Ian "ssdkjfls" Pollock.

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