Re: off topic: Gramm[a!]r Question

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

They certainly are far more than conventions* (if by "conventions" we
mean something more interesting than "could have been otherwise"), but
Quirk, et al have a much better account of this than poor Whorf ever
did.
 Post-Chomsky we have developed a much better theoretical machinery
for the description of grammar (and for these purposes we can stick to
syntax and non-lexical semantics; morphology and phonetics being
another issue) that is much better at revealing and predicting
structure. Our intuitive (and uniform) judgments about the right and
wrongness of the various examples don't arise from being taught those
examples or related ones; they are the outcomes of built-in rules which
have as remote consequences those judgments. That is, some pretty low
level rules determine lots of arbitrary looking surface grammar. Which
is to say, that perceiving and ordering the world has very little to do
with it.
 There's a pretty nice pop introduction to modern linguistics (i.e.,
not prescriptive grammar rules) by Mark Baker, called The Atoms of
Language. Jazzier, and slightly obnoxious but well-informed, are
Pinker's earlier books: The Language Instinct and Words and Rules.
*Conventions. Sometimes by "conventional" people mean something that
one can change to something else that is equally good. Of course, for
that sense of convention there's the question of who "one" is and what
the parameters of "good" are. Could *we* let red mean go and green
mean stop? Could we let limegreen mean stop and chartreuse mean go?
There are conventions for which side of the road to drive on (the
choices being left, right and everyone makes their own choice); I don't
recommend an individual change in convention.
 Sound-meaning correlations in language are conventional, but, like
stop lights, some choices are better than others; sounds that take a
hour are poor candidates for common words. And, at the level of
phonemes, our menu of choices is wired; as are the basic choices of
basic syntax. Turns out you can't just make up a language.


David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103
On May 24, 2005, at 12:01 AM, Carl Distefano wrote:
> Surely these rules are more than conventions, but reflect engrained
> ways of perceiving and "ordering" the world. When I was in school,
> the required reading on this theme was "Language, Thought, and
> Reality", by Benjamin Whorf.