Bob,

When someone replies to "Ya eat yet?" with "Yeah I did," the fact that
the reply has tense-marking does not, in and of itself, establish that
tense-marking was present but elided in the question. That's certainly
*an* explanation, but not the only one. Take the following exchange:

Cletus:	I want to read up on an ancient civilization, and I can't decide
which 			one.
Bocephus:	How about the Romans?
Cletus:	Nah, they were just obnoxious.

The past tense in the last sentence isn't triggered by any tense in a
previous sentence; instead, it's triggered by the speakers' knowledge of
context. Quick replies and tag questions do, of course, replicate the
initial auxiliary (if there is one) and the tense marking, but that
doesn't *have* to be a result of a kind of syntactic copying operation;
unless sentence-creation is entirely divorced from semantics, speakers
will always have access to context. The "subject + first aux" combo
bears a particularly heavy functional load in English, since we use it
to manipulate the status of utterances as exchanges (I'm badly
paraphrasing Halliday here); if I'm going to question one of your
assertions, the standard techniques all involve using a subject plus an
appropriate auxiliary. But that's a statement about how speakers use
"S+Aux" combos in English discourse, not about ellipsis, or the
boundaries of sentences. If we hear footsteps in the hall, and I look up
and say, "Bob, isn't it?" I'm not necessarily *thinking* "That's Bob in
the hallway, isn't it?" Instead, in the right context, "Bob" counts as
an assertion, and the *kind* of assertion (existence, ability etc.)
determines the tag. 

Also, with tag questions, I *think* you can cases in which the domain
being "tagged" is clearly a clause, but not an independent one (if this
one seems like a stretch, I do have some cases in which a quick reply
like "No he's not" works with a subordinate clause):

We're cancelling the play because the lead actor is sick, isn't he?

Now, I don't mind the idea that clauses are a de facto basic unit in
grammar -- that's bound into that notion of "enough language given the
context" -- but there's a major difference between "clause" and
"sentence." Tags and quick contradictions seem to target clauses that
make foregrounded assertions -- they don't work at all, for example,
with restrictive relative clauses. If the "natural domain" for such
phenomena is something like "foregrounded clause with accompanying fully
backgrounded clauses," we certainly have something interesting, but it's
not a sentence in the traditional sense. It's not even a T-unit,
although I realize that definition sounds like that for T-units (the
difference is in the role of contradictable dependent clauses). And it
positions the domain of tags and contradictions relative to their
discourse function.


One last point: Intuitive judgments of grammaticality do not simply
access one's grammatical competence -- they're heavily influenced by a
number of factors. One of the reasons corpus work is so important is
that one *can't* simply accept grammaticality judgments as immune from
social conventions. Quite a number of my students have no problem
telling me that certain sentences are ungrammatical that in fact occur
in formal writing quite frequently ("Seldom had he seen that") -- to
them, it's ungrammatical because they haven't encountered the pattern
before. That's not a dialect issue, that's a familiarity issue -- but
they're JUST as confident about their judgment as any linguist creating
an example set (and this isn't a situation where you can ascribe their
"misjudgment" to performance, since that would be to create another
circular argument). There are quite a number of language groups whose
speakers become quite baffled when linguists ask them to make
grammaticality judgments about their own language -- the idea of such a
judgment is itself a cultural artifact. The move from "I don't like it"
to "It's wrong" is an easy one, and there's a long, and problematic,
history of people adding the additional step of "It's wrong because it
violates <natural order> / <God's Will> / <human nature>." Whenever we
say "Sentence X is ungrammatical," we *should* worry about whether we're
saying the equivalent of "Rice is digestible by most humans," or
instead, "It's a mistake to wear white shoes after Labor Day" (if
there's a Universal Fashion Faculty, I'm deficient, and don't have
access to it). 


And a post-final note: We still have no decent grammatical holiday.
X-Bar-mas? Clausekkah?


Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence? and the
importanceofthecompetence-performance distinction

It might very well be the case that Bill is right when he writes the
following:

*******
I have trouble accepting "sentenceness" as something that pre-exists our
definitions as a kind of fundamental category, at least in the way we've
traditionally defined sentences.
*******
If the definition of a sentence depends on whether we can begin the
string with a capital letter and end it with a period, 
then Bill is definitely right.

However, the data I cited didn't require that definition.   I proposed
that one cannot describe how tag questions are formed, how yes-no
questions are formed, or the properties of certain kinds of pronouns
without the category of a sentence/clause.  I can be wrong, but I notice
that Bill does not provide an explanation for my examples.  Herb agreed
with the point I made with those examples. And, I note that tag
questions and yes-no questions are really common in the oral language.

Because I find the performance-competence distinction useful.  I need to
comment on the second problem Bill identifies.  


The other [problem] is the effect of using a single pair of opposing
terms like
"competence vs. performance." Setting up a binary opposition encourages
people to think that anything that is not A is by necessity B, with some
of the consequences that Herb has already mentioned. There's one sense
of "performance" in which the term encompasses speaker "goofs": slips of
the tongue, false starts, the occasional fit of coughing interrupting an
utterance and the like. But once we make a definition of sentence,
anything that diverges from that definition then becomes a "goof" in a
way that it wasn't before. Saying that slips of the tongue don't
necessarily fall within the purview of your theory is a very different
matter than saying that "ya eat yet?" doesn't, but having only the one
pair of terms leads us to group both as "performance" (or to rescue the
second via an ellipsis argument). A construct of the theory
("sentencehood") becomes the basis on which data is judged *relevant* to
arguments about whether the construct itself is valid. Once that
happens, you don't have a theory anymore; you have a faith (and it's a
really boring, nerdy one, without even a decent holiday attached).   

****
1) Theories change over time.  Herb correctly showed that what is part
of competence and what is performance have changed over time.  I don't
understand why that is a problem.

2) The issue of "goofs" is interesting here.  I can't tell whether Bill
is suggesting that we need a theory of grammar that explains every
utterance a speaker of the language makes.  I know of no grammar that
attempts a grammar that does that. 

His example "ya eat yet" is interesting. Sounds OK to me.  I'm sure I
have uttered it.  Do we have any intuitions about it?  (Intuitions are a
way to tap into competence.)  What is the possible response to that
question?  (It is redundant to do this with a negative response.) 

a) Ya, I did
b) Ya, I do.

(b) is completely unacceptable to me.  I prefer (a).    If your
judgments are the same as mine,  why might that be the case?  Notice
"did" is a past tense form and there is no past tense form in the
question.

3) "Relevant" data are part of any theory.  A theory is valued to the
degree it can provide an explanation for the greatest amount of data.
If data are presented that the theory should explain and it doesn't,
then the inadequacy of the theory is revealed and people attempt to
construct a better theory.  

I return to tag questions, yes-no questions, and properties of certain
pronouns.   The construct "sentence/clause" is crucial, I think, to
describe these constructs. That is not faith. I could be wrong, but I
have never read a description of them that don't use the concept of
sentence.  

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri 

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