Craig,
I would agree that cognitive metaphors and literary metaphors represent different regions on a continuum of metaphor, just as "have" ranges from being a fully lexical verb meaning "possess, own" to being completely grammaticalized to the degree that many native speakers can no longer distinguish between "have" and "of" in certain environments, as we have all seen in the writing of our students, and occasionally in our own unedited writing. We've had a fair number of doctoral dissertations on metaphor in our program, working in at least a half dozen different languages (English, Korean, Bulgarian, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, etc.), and literature colleagues who have looked at them have been both intrigued and puzzled by how linguists deal with metaphor. They recognize that we're dealing with something they're familiar with and work with in a different way, but they are surprised when they recognize "I have your back" or "I stand behind you" as metaphors. In their work they're interested in identifying metaphors and describing how a writer uses them. In our work we're interested in defining what metaphors are and the role they play at a much deeper level in creating meaning, in shaping thought, and in organizing cognition. I wouldn't argue that we're dealing with different things but rather that we have different methods and goals for looking at these things, which also lead us to differ in what we consider data, or whether we thing we're considering data at all.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: 2009-04-14 18:43
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Exhibit #104, Jespersen's Modern English Grammar
Herb,
In many ways, I think you're right. For a writing teacher to define the
passive as "not vigorous enough" is to substitute a rationale for a
concept. (Avoid the passive because it is not vigorous enough.
Therefore, all sentences not vigorous enough can be thought of as
passive.) The same sort of half thought goes into defining a run-on as
a sentence that rambles on. It is a deep misunderstanding. I would say
the same is true of redundancy. It's easy to find examples of
dysfunctional redundancy, but a terrible mistake to follow that with a
statement that redundancy (or repetition) weakens writing.
The kind of examples I gave ("I have been in touch with Fred", "I have
your back", "I stand behind you" and so on) are metaphors in the usual
literary sense, but just not brought into focus as readily as metaphor
that takes a bit more work to "interpret." The language itself is
"literary". A good writer simply uses the resources available to all of
us in our everyday language lives.
But I think you and I are making the same point by emphasizing
different aspects of it. The two worlds are separate, to the great
detriment of both. Part of that comes from misunderstanding the
terminology. Part of it comes from being comfortable with an untested
view of language. If a study of grammar doesn't carry over to reading
and writing, then there is something missing in that study of grammar.
>
Craig,
>
> I think linguists and writing teachers have trouble communicating in part
> because we're divided by a common language. We use similar terminology
> but with different ideas of what those terms mean or how deeply we
> understand them or how much they matter. As the Pullum review of Strunk
> and White that Bill pointed us to shows, "passive" means something to
> writing teachers that it doesn't meant to grammarians and linguists. To a
> writing teacher a passive sentence is a sentence that doesn't express
> action clearly or vigorously enough. Passive has nothing to do with
> syntactic structure. Similarly, when linguists talk about metaphor, we're
> talking about ways of organizing meaning, not simply powerful, perhaps
> artistic expressing by reference to something else. It's easy to think
> that because we're using the same words we're talking about the same
> things, but all too often we aren't.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: 2009-04-14 12:28
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Exhibit #104, Jespersen's Modern English Grammar
>
> Herb,
> This is the type of concern that should animate many more of our
> conversations.
> I believe that writing teachers do a fair amount of harm when they tell
> students not to repeat themselves. Without an overlap of meaning,
> language is incoherent. Repetition is the glue that holds writing
> together. I would go so far as to say that redundancy has been built
> into language at the higher levels as well. It creates unity and
> emphasis. By calling attention to the occassional places where it isn't
> funtional, teachers often make a blanket rule that ignores the highly
> functional role of repetition. They get away with it in part because
> their focus is on meaning, not on the form/meaning relationship, and
> they tend to notice sentence level realities only when they feel like
> errors. They lack a full understanding of how language works when
> language is working well. They don't understand that "the nuts and
> bolts" of language are the nuts and bolts of meaning.
> I would make a similar point about metaphor. The cognitive linguists
> are showing us ways in which metaphor is at the heart of everyday
> language and everyday thought and forms the basis for the most abstract
> levels of our thinking. Metaphor is not simply a "literary element." It
> is at the core of our communal being in the world. "I have your back."
> "Our hopes are rising." "I have been in touch with Fred."
> Largely structural and formal approaches to grammar may feed into that
> disconnect. I don't want to say that they can't be made relevant, but
> that their relevance has not yet been well established. In the mind of
> the typical writing teacher, grammar is what we need to deal with
> occassional problems or errors.
>
> Craig>
>
>
> Craig,
>>
>> I appreciate your comments on the importance of redundancy in linguistic
>> structure. What I have found interesting when I've talked about
>> redundancy in my linguistics classes is the difference between what
>> linguists mean by it and what writing teachers mean. To writing
>> teachers,
>> redundancy is unnecessary reinforcement or repetition of content. For
>> rhetorical and stylistic purposes it's necessary to draw a line between
>> necessary (linguist) redundancy and superfluous (rhetorical) redundancy.
>> Linguistic redundancy of the sort you discuss and Langacker covers is
>> generally below the level of awareness of most language users, partly
>> because it's so intimately embedded in the grammar. This distinction
>> between what linguists mean by redundancy and what writing teachers mean
>> by it parallels another difference that I've occasionally discussed with
>> my colleagues in literature. They generally can't see why we get
>> excited
>> over what they think of as the uninteresting nuts and bolts of language,
>> and we generally do not pay much attention to symbol, metaphor,
>> onomatopoeia and other devices they analyze with care. Certainly there
>> are areas of overlap, like studying the sound structure of poetry,
>> rhyme,
>> meter, assonance, and we bring different terminology and concepts to
>> bear
>> on these areas that can frequently result in a lively synergy. I've had
>> fascinating discussions with a colleague who is a poet and has a
>> profound
>> understanding of how sound works in poetry. But more often we're
>> divided
>> by a common vocabulary, as in the linguist's use of "metaphor" compared
>> to
>> the literary critic's use of the word.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
>> Sent: 2009-04-13 09:00
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Exhibit #104, Jespersen's Modern English Grammar
>>
>> Herb,
>> Thanks much for passing this on. It is, as Dick noted, a pleasure to
>> read a thoughtful view. Several times over the last few months I have
>> felt sadness that the issue of past perfect couldn't be vetted in our
>> usual ways without so much static coming in. It's an important issue
>> and there are interesting side issues that link with it.
>> One point I hesitate to make because of potential static is that
>> grammatical redundancy is a natural part of all languages. Here's
>> Langacher's view of it, but one we could probably find from any serious
>> grammarian: "Redundancy is not to be disparaged, for in one way or
>> another every language makes extensive use of it. By providing the
>> listener with extra clues, it helps ensure that a partially degraded
>> message can still be understood. It allows the speaker to either
>> emphasize a certain notion through repetition or to portray it from
>> multiple perspectives" (Cognitive Grammar 2008, p. 188).
>> Even in a simple sentence like "Sally often expresses her opinion",
>> we
>> have reundant features. It's probably clear to all of us that Sally is
>> singular and female, that the opinions she often expresses are "hers"
>> (the default expectation) and not someone else's. But we are so used to
>> those features that they seem natural to us. In fact, the non-redundant
>> version ("Sally often express opinion") seems unnatural.
>> Any explanation of the past perfect (or pluperfect) would need to
>> account for those instances when other features (time-orienting
>> conjunctions or our own sense of the nature of the underlying
>> processes, such as the fact that you don't usually tell about something
>> before it happens) make the past perfect a somewhat redundant feature.
>> Though it's hard to call one feature redundant when other features
>> could be easily charged. Redundancy, as Langacher says, is not to be
>> disparaged. The different "clues" are working together toward a
>> cohesive purpose. The fact that meaning might be clear without all of
>> them wouldn't make any of them wrong.
>> Jesperson could never have anticipated the kind of objections
>> recently
>> raised on list to very normal past perfect uses. But I think his
>> observations cover it very well.
>>
>> Craig
>>
>> I sent Brad as an attachment a copy of Jespersen's Chapter 6 of his
>> third
>>> Syntax volume of A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. He
>>> excerpted it pretty minimally below, and I thought the full text might
>>> be
>>> interesting to some on the list as a nuanced treatment of the
>>> pluperfect.
>>> The text follows. This is scanned OCR text that I have edited to
>>> correct
>>> OCR errors and formatted to be close to the original.
>>>
>>> Herb
>>>
>>>
>>> The Pluperfect
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.1. The pluperfect (Lat. plusquamperfectum) is the tense-phrase formed
>>> by
>>> help of the preterit of the
>>>
>>> auxiliary had (more rarely was, cf. ch. III) and the second participle.
>>> The Joint Committee recommends the term Past Perfect, which I cannot
>>> use
>>> in this book, as I use the word "past" exclusively for the time
>>> relation
>>> and not for a grammatical tense.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The pluperfect primarily serves to denote before-past time or a
>>> retrospective past-two things which stand in the same relation to each
>>> other as the preterit and the perfect, but which cannot easily be kept
>>> apart. "His wife left him (last year)", and "his wife has left him"
>>> both
>>> become "his wife had left. him" when projected into the past.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.2. The relation between two successive incidents in the past, X and
>>> Y,
>>> e. g. my seeing him (X) and his
>>>
>>> seeing me (Y), may be graphically represented thus
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ----------X----------Y-----------(now).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Linguistically they may be expressed by means of two preterits:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I saw him (first), and then he saw me-or, combined,
>>>
>>> I saw him before he saw me.
>>>
>>> But if we use the pluperfect:
>>>
>>> I had seen him before he saw me.
>>>
>>> I saw him before he had seen me.
>>>
>>> He saw me after I had seen him.
>>>
>>> He did not see me till I had seen him--the two incidents are
>>> grammatically
>>> connected by means of the tenses.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.3. The pluperfect is used both in main sentences and in subordinate
>>> clauses; the conjunctions chiefly used are when, after, before, till.
>>> A
>>> few examples of this tense from Stevenson's T may here suffice:
>>>
>>> 5 Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself
>>> sleepy l 7 At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that
>>> identical big box of his . . . and the thought had been mingled in my
>>> nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But, by this time
>>> we
>>> had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song l 84
>>> before
>>> I
>>> had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the
>>> world.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.4. In clauses beginning with after, we have already seen that the
>>> simple
>>> preterit often means the same thing as the pluperfect (5.6); I shall
>>> here
>>> give a few examples of the latter tense, which must be considered the
>>> normal tense: Ch T 4.1170 so after that he longe hadde hir compleyned
>>> ,
>>> .
>>> . He gan tho teris wypen of ful dreye l More U 28 After that we had
>>> once
>>> or twise mette . . . they for a certayne space tooke their leaue of vs
>>> I
>>> Di P 327 Now, said Wardle, after a substantial lunch . . . had been
>>> done
>>> ample justice to l ib 341 within ten minutes after he had received the
>>> assurance that the thing was impossible, he was conducted into the
>>> outer
>>> office | Bennett Cd 204 And after they had chatted a little . . . he
>>> offered to display Machin House to Mr. Myson.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On clauses with since see 5.8(3).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> After when the simple preterit can sometimes be used, though the two
>>> events mentioned follow one after the other, and the preterit is thus
>>> equivalent to a pluperfect: When he came back from India, he was made
>>> a
>>> member of Parliament I When he got the letter, he burned it without
>>> looking at it.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> But this is not always possible; the pluperfect is required in: When he
>>> had read the letter, he burned it I When he had finished writing that
>>> book, he took a long rest.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> We may say either: "As soon as he discovered them, he ran away", and
>>> "As
>>> soon as he had discovered them, he ran away".
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In the following two quotations, the use of the pluperfect in the
>>> when-clauses, where the simple preterit would have been normal, seems
>>> to
>>> have been induced by the pluperfect in the main sentence: Hardy R 374
>>> when
>>> his mind had been weaker his heart had led him to speak out I Rose
>>> Macaulay P 8 When they had been little they had watched each other's
>>> plates with hostile eyes.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.5. We may have two successive pluperfects as in Thompson H Spencer 34
>>> as
>>> two and a half years had
>>>
>>> elapsed since he had made any money, Spencer returned to London.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> (This, transposed into the present time, would be: two and a half
>>> years
>>> have elapsed since he made any money).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.6. Note the use for past time in Stevenson T 152 "I had soon told my
>>> story" = I told my story, and that
>>>
>>> did not take long: the speaker anticipates the time when the incident
>>> he
>>> is relating is already finished. Similarly in Rose Macaulay P 133 A
>>> little
>>> later, when she had revived, we had had tea together, and I had put a
>>> few
>>> questions to her I Maugham Painted V. 240 she left the room. In a
>>> moment
>>> Sister St. Joseph came in. She was come to say good-bye. [Or this is
>>> probably represented speech: she said she was come] I James RH 18 In
>>> the
>>> evening, as he was smoking his cigar on the verandah, a light quick
>>> step
>>> pressed the gravel of the gardenˇpath, and in a moment a young man,
>>> rising
>>> before them, had
>>>
>>> made his bow to Cecilia. Cf. 3.3(7).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 6.7. The pluperfect had hoped does not always refer to the before-past
>>> time, but often is temporally the same as the preterit hoped, only it
>>> implies that the (past) hope was not fulfilled; "We had hoped he would
>>> recover" (but he did not). If we say "We hoped he would recover" we
>>> leave
>>> the question open whether he recovered or not. Cf. the use of the
>>> perfect
>>> infinitive after hoped and thought, below 10.7.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Sh Ado V. 4.114 I had well hop'd thou wouldst haue denied Beatrice [but
>>> in
>>> the same sense Hml V. 1.267 I hop'd thou should'st haue bin my Hamlets
>>> wife: I thought thy bride-bed to haue deckt (sweet maid) And not t'haue
>>> strew'd thy graue] ] Collins W 72 I had hoped that all painful subjects
>>> of
>>> conversation were exhausted between us | id M 331 I had hoped to hear
>>> that
>>> things were all smooth and pleasant again.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This had hoped may be followed by the perfect infinitive (cf. 10.7):
>>> Lamb
>>> R 37 I had hoped to have seen
>>>
>>> you at our house | Collins M 182 I had hoped to have recompensed your
>>> services, and to have parted with you without Miss Verinder's name
>>> having
>>> been openly mentioned between us [ Swinb Ii 108 I had hoped to have
>>> seen
>>> you and Clara pull together.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Cp. the pluperfect in speaking indefinitely of the past: I hadn't
>>> expected
>>> that.
>>>
>>> Cf. the use of could have hoped instead of the impossible had could
>>> hope
>>> (si j'avais pu espérer) in Di D 170 If I could have hoped that
>>> Steerforth
>>> was there, I would have lurked about until he came out alone.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Brad Johnston
>>> Sent: 2009-04-11 15:09
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: Exhibit #104, Jespersen's Modern English Grammar
>>>
>>> This is for everyone's eyes except Herb. He's in the penalty box,
>>> pending
>>> his release of his definition.
>>>
>>> A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, c.1932.
>>> by Otto Jespersen (1860 - 1943)
>>>
>>> Part IV, Syntax, Third Volume, pp. 81-84.
>>>
>>> 6.4 The pluperfect is used both in main sentences and in subordinate
>>> clauses; the conjunctions chiefly used are: when, after, before, till.
>>> A
>>> few examples of this tense from Stevenson's T may here suffice:
>>>
>>> ~ examples
>>>
>>> After when, the simple preterit can sometimes be used, though the two
>>> events mentioned follow one after the other, and the preterit is thus
>>> equivalent to a pluperfect.
>>>
>>> ~ examples
>>>
>>> In the following quotation, the use of the pluperfect in the
>>> when-clause,
>>> where the simple preterit would have been normal, seems to have been
>>> induced by the pluperfect in the main sentence.
>>>
>>> When they had been little they had watched each other's plates with
>>> hostile eyes.
>>>
>>> (Shades of Huddleston's, "When Arthur had been a boy he had used to
>>> play
>>> football". One might wonder who copied from whom. Get the
>>> knuckle-rapper.)
>>>
>>> This is Exhibit #104 to my assertion that there is at least one past
>>> perfect error on any grammar website or in any grammar textbook you can
>>> name. Challenges are welcome, encouraged, and appreciated.
>>>
>>> .brad.11apr09.
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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