[this is my last posting till March 18, as I'm out of town starting now]

Hmmm.... Burkhard Leuschner writes that "The purpose of science is to
>distinguish between things, not to put them all in the same box.,"

and that

>... Of course, if a linguistic model puts these problems in a
>wastepaper basket called 'performance' ... But then it forgoes the
>description of the lifeblood of language. A linguistic model that does not
>deal with the content side and not with the usage side of language, is
>irrelevant as far as the  school classroom is concerned, in particular the
>foreign language classroom.

and

>Ok, once Tesniere had created the valence model, others jumped on the
>waggon (or maybe were already there).


Clearly, given some of the tone here, I have stepped on some toes and
aggravated at least him, and hence maybe others.


Regarding the valence model, actually, I haven't worked with Tesniere's
material, instead, I was referring to the typical kind of
predicate/argument structure that one finds in philosophic logic, and in
lexical semantics.

NOTE: this does not mean that i have pragmatic wastebaskets by my side. Or
that I lack concern with  how language is actually used by the person on
the street, or wherever.. Or that I confuse logic with language. THOSE are
two different things.

My own training is in lexical semantics. I did a dissertation on the
"Lexical Entry of the English verb 'Understand'" and followed that up a few
years later with a lot of work on the syntax and semantics of verbs of
searching and analyzing ("Beyond 'try to find': The syntax and Semantics of
'search' and 'anayze'" -- CLS 1995, and "Will the real search verbs please
stand up?" CLS '96).

To give you an example of some of where I'm coming from on this, I found
there that verbs of searching and analyzing, perhaps surprisingly, shared a
pretty great commonality of meaning -- what put me on to it was their
similarity of syntactic structure.

NP1 V NP2 for NP3  -- Jami searched the woods for deer.

NP1 V NP2 for NP3  -- Jami analyzed the document for flaws.

        (notice that in both cases -- in some sense, the thing to which
        NP2 refers contains the thing to which NP3 refers --
        woods may contain deer; document may contain flaws)


Without going into the details of the semantics, the perception is that the
similarity of the "argument structure" here, points to a similarity of
meaning -- in each case, someone is attempting to ascertain a particular
relationship between the thing denoted by NP2 and NP3.

Have you all seen BETH LEVIN'S book, "English Verb Classes and
Alternations: A Preliminary Investigation?" -- there, she does this huge
classification of seemingly thousands of English verbs by the types of such
patterns they fall in.

ALL OF WHICH is to say, is this is the context I was referring to when I
mentioned 'valence' work.

Now would I teach this stuff to school kids? NOPE. Not clearly relevant to
them. Not relevant to them like this. And I wouldn't teach it in a college
grammar class either.  But the insight that we do have a syntax, that is
often correlated with MEANING is indeed central as a clue in figuring what
is going out in our language.


>The 'traditional' distinction between sentence parts should not be chucked
>out without thinking twice, they have bearing on semantic and pragmatic
>problems.

I completely agree. about not chucking things without thinking twice.

>Of course, if a linguistic model puts these problems in a
>wastepaper basket called 'performance' ... But then it forgoes the
>description of the lifeblood of language.


here's to the lifeblood of language.


>A linguistic model that does not
>deal with the content side and not with the usage side of language, is
>irrelevant as far as the  school classroom is concerned, in particular the
>foreign language classroom.

As you can see, I've been speaking to the content side in looking at how
the meaning of the verbs is reflected in their argument structure.


>BTW, while Rebecca is concerned about the terms 'subject'..., I am
>concerned about 'transitive' and 'intransitive' - the valence model does
>away with these terms. Instead of having two main groups of verbs (object
>or no object), in the valence model we have seven, which are of equal
>importance - which is much nearer to the 'truth'.

I've got to run to catch a plane, so I won't be able to respond to this
last point now, or to respond to any other threads in this conversation.

more in a week,
:)
rebecca


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Rebecca S. Wheeler, Ph.D.       [log in to unmask]
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Department of English           office phone:     (801) 626-6009
Weber State University          office fax:       (801) 626-7760
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