Sentences have structure. Logical propositions have formal internal
relationships. Thoughts are pretty much non-definable. The sense the
Dickinson's "zero at the bone" captures is a thought, but one that bears
no relation to a proposition or a sentence, and one that probably could
have been expressed so vividly only by a genius of her caliber. Craig's
sense of "move in a series of moves" works a lot better, although then
we're faced with defining "move", perhaps less daunting but still
knotty.
Actually, with respect to the content of a New Public Grammar, or of a
K12 Language Arts grammar curriculum, I can think of few better starting
points than what Craig lays out below. It fleshes out the catch phrase
I tossed out a year or so ago, "Grammar that's useful and true." If we
make sure that what we are teaching is useful in talking about texts
students read or write and make sure that it bears some reasonable
resemblance to what students know and observe, we'll get rid of a lot of
junk, including terminology, and we'll force ourselves to think about
this with some clearer goals.
Like Joanna, I'm leery even of associating the logical proposition with
the complete thought. "Green house" in her sentences is a logical
proposition. The fact that it doesn't have a finite verb is a result of
the particular move she had to make with that sentence. Actually, I
know of languages, like Korean and Yoruba, where there's no significant
difference between a verb and an adjective, which would mean that
"complete thought" would mean rather different things in Korean and
Yoruba than in English, even though the logical propositions would be
the same. This is at best a reduction to the absurd of the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis.
Herb
Subject: Re: Each sentence contains a thought
The only reason" complete thought" was ever coined is to help
students avoid sentence fragments (which now show up in the work of many
fine writers.) We use this misleading notion because we somehow believe
that students can't understand what we really want, at least one
independent clause within a sentence unit. This requires, as Ed has
been pointing out, an understanding of the role of finite verbs and some
sense of subordination. (Finite verbs are necessary, but not always
sufficient.)
The problem with "complete thought" is that it purports to be about
the rhetoric of the sentence (and not a constraint on form.)
I combat the misinformation with the following, which has become my
FIRST way into grammar for my writing classes.
1) A sentence is not a complete thought. It is a move in a series of
related moves.
2) Sentence boundaries are very flexible.
3) Sentences vary widely in the amount of information they contain.
4) Sentences vary widely in the way that information is organized.
5) Sentences occur within the context of other sentences.
6) Sentences occur within the context of a writer's evolving purposes.
Students have been encouraged not to repeat themselves. Taken in tandem
with the "complete thought" notion, they believe their job is to present
fifty or sixty "complete thoughts" in a 1,000 word essay. (And they
often write that way, beginning with sentences that avoid getting to the
point in order to avoid running out of things to say.) Effective
writers, on the other hand, tend to think in terms of saying one (or a
few things) and using the fifty or sixty sentences to carry that out.
If you look closely at professional and student work--and I do exactly
that with my students, the most recent being a paragraph from Stephen
Crane's "The Open Boat"--you see an enormous carryover of meaning in the
best writing, including a willingness to reassert key ideas and keep the
same topic in focus over long stretches of text. They tend to have more
longer sentences than a typical student writer, but more short sentences
as well. They tend to put the most important information in key places,
especially at the end of intonation units and a the end of the clause.
Student work can often be radically improved when viewed through this
more rhetorical lens. Believe it or not, they tend to buy into it, pay
attention, and put it to work. The aim is in helping them achieve their
own purposes, offering them tools, helping them put their own language
to work.
It would be nice to put complete thought forever to rest, but we
can't do so if we want to insist on eliminating fragments but are afraid
to develop a sufficient base of understanding for that to truly happen.
If it feels like a "complete thought" to a student and feels like
that to a reader, are we willing to accept that? Every time?
Craig
Johanna Rubba wrote:
> As a few others have noted, "thought" is way to broad a term to name
> much of anything about a sentence. "Complete thought" is not any
better.
>
> It would be better to say that a _clause_ (or an independent clause)
> expresses a proposition, as Bruce notes. A proposition in logic is a
> statement that predicates something of an entity: "The sky is blue"
> predicates, or attributes, blueness to the sky. The logical formula is
> f(x), meaning "f is predicated of x".
>
> It might look like this corresponds closely to the subject/predicate
> division in grammar, but it doesn't, once you move on from
> linking-verb sentence patterns. But when you get to transitive and
> other kinds of verbs, it doesn't line up so well:
>
> eat(child, cupcake) would be the formula for "The child is eating a
> cupcake."
>
> I think I have this right.
>
> Ed also raises the question of what looks like propositions inside of
> propositions:
>
> "He lives in a green house."
>
>
> Noun phrases with adjectives can be viewed as compressions of
> propositions, as can nominalized clauses such as the subject of
>
> _The corporation's outsourcing of customer service calls_ has led to
> complaints.
>
> There was once a theory of syntax that proposed that, indeed, even
> noun phrases with adjectival modifiers were derived from "deep"
> clauses; the theory was called generative semantics. As you can
> imagine, the derivation of quite ordinary sentences grew quite
> cumbersome.
>
> In any case, the logical-proposition idea is a good one, because it
> shows the crucial role of the main verb. It is the verb that
> determines the sentence pattern (linking, transitive, and so on).
>
> People concerned with correctness want sentences to "express a
> complete thought". A much better criteria for valid sentencehood (that
> is, the quality of being able to "stand alone") are (a) presence of a
> finite (present- or past-marked) verb and (b) the item is not a
> modifier or complement in a larger sentence (e.g., a relative
> [adjective] or adverb clause).
>
> For relatively short sentences, there are two pretty good tests.
> (1) Can the sentence appear in the blank in the following?
> "I am convinced that ____."
> (2) Can you add a tag to the sentence?
> "The hurricane wrought devastation across large areas of the Gulf
> coast, _didn't it_?"
>
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
>
> Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
> Linguistics Minor Advisor
> English Department
> California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
> E-mail: [log in to unmask]
> Tel.: 805.756.2184
> Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
> Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
> URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
>
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