Johanna, this was very interesting reading. Thank you. But may I press one
point a little more? I have a feeling that Fillmore's case grammar
encourages it. In these two sentences:

i We are going fishing
ii We are going to London

there is the sense that we `are going' somewhere. So an adverbial function
of `fishing' and `to London' is operative: both the gerund and the proper
noun reveal where `we are going'. But, especially of `to London', it is
against the grain to say that it is an adverb, probably because of its
proper-noun form, which is quintessentially nounal. (For me, there is more
comfort in the term `locative noun'.) All the same, we are stuck with
instances of nouns modifying verbs and, at least on that count, functioning
as adverbs.That is why I should like to invite you to look at the
possibility that a structure in which there is a locative noun is markedly
different from, say:

iii `We are hitting Mary',

where the subject-object relationship is clear and `are hitting' is
necessarily a verb.

The perspective I put to you is that we do not have a verb at all in i and
ii: There is no relationship of activity between subject and object as there
is in iii. (The subject `we' does not perform an act of `are going' upon
either `fishing' or `to London'). Instead, the subject's activity in each
instant is denoted by a copular verb of which the noun-complement `fishing'
specifies the direction/location/place.

I should love to have your opinion.

Sophie

----- Original Message -----
From: Johanna Rubba <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 7:01 AM
Subject: Re: go fishing


> To explicate my meaning about semantics, syntax, and culture a bit, for
> Bob and others (Martha, see below for some Constr. Grammar references):
>
> The cultural part of 'go fishing', 'einkaufen gehen' or 'faire des
> courses' is that certain activities have been categorized together as,
> roughly, routine leisure activities or routine maintenance duties (such
> as going shopping). This meaning of 'routine leisure activity' has
> become conventionally associated with the verb 'go' in English and
> German, but 'faire' in French. Either verb is a likely candidate, since
> 'faire' is a very general verb for acting, and 'go' is a very general
> verb for an initial movement towards another purpose (such as engaging
> in a routine activity). While we couldn't predict that French would
> choose 'faire' and other languages 'go' for such constructions, we can
> see after the fact that the choices make semantic sense. It would be
> unlikely, for instance, that 'smile' or 'chase' would appear in such
> constructions, since their meanings are both more specific and not
> terribly relevant to or compatible with the 'Xing' verb.
>
> In other words, a cultural category--a type of activity--has become part
> of the semantics of a syntactic construction. The cultural category
> might be the same in all three languages, hence the same 'feeling' Bob
> reports (though not being a native of either French or German culture,
> it would be hard to claim that he is necessarily fully in possession of
> the 'feelings' of natives of these cultures).
>
> Language works by conventionalizing the association between a meaning
> and a form. Sometimes it's single words that express the conventional
> meaning, sometimes it's a more-complex syntactic construction.
>
> I know that seeing the sense of a construction after the fact is not
> terribly appreciated in some formal theories of language, but it is seen
> as quite reasonable in functional/cognitive theories. This is one area
> of difference between these different schools of linguistic thought.
>
> In response to Sophie, yes, it has to be the whole construction. The
> point of my post was that sometimes we understand a construction better
> by NOT trying to make it compositional (a sum of the meaning of its
> parts). Sure, we lose comfort, predictability, and order when we
> 'condemn' the power of syntactic templates, but the nature of language
> is to not permit such comfort, order, and predictability (infinitive
> intentionally split). It might be perfectly fine to say that, in 'go
> Xing' the word 'go' (which is not a copula in any sense of the word as I
> understand it) is followed by a gerund, but then we must go on to note
> that not all verbs appear in the X slot,  or at least that a certain
> meaning is conveyed by the construction AS A WHOLE.
>
> I attended a presentation at a Cognitive Linguistics conference a week
> or so ago which gave me a blast of insight about the history of the
> analysis of language. Most analysts of language, including both modern
> linguists and traditional grammarians, approached language in the same
> way. They experienced language in wholes--utterances, texts. They tried
> to reduce the wholes to parts; they arrived at a set of parts that they
> then considered the 'atoms' of language, such as parts of speech. They
> then tried to explain language by coming up with syntactic rules to put
> the parts back together again. But of course, they were trapped by the
> set of parts they had come up with in the first place. The whole history
> of grammar and linguistics has been attempts to come up with the right
> set of atoms and the right set of rules for putting them together. The
> insight of this presentation, given by Bill Croft of the U. of
> Manchester, is that we should not try to reduce the wholes too far in
> the first place, but we should look at a language as a set of
> constructions, each of which has certain syntactic properties and
> expresses certain conventionalized meanings, such as passive
> constructions or reflexive constructions, etc. We then study such
> constructions across languages and come up with observations about their
> properties (Croft is a typologist; typologists specialize in looking at
> what large numbers of languages have or don't have in common).
>
> Croft has a book called 'Radical Construction Grammar' which sets out
> his ideas (Oxford U press, 2000 or 2001). A book on non-radical
> Construction Grammar theory is 'A construction grammar approach to
> argument structure' by Adele Goldberg, U of Chicago Press, 1997.
> Articles on construction grammar would be found with author names such
> as Adele Goldberg and Charles Fillmore.
>
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Johanna Rubba   Associate Professor, Linguistics
> English Department, California Polytechnic State University
> One Grand Avenue  . San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
> Tel. (805)-756-2184  .  Fax: (805)-756-6374 . Dept. Phone.  756-2596
> . E-mail: [log in to unmask] .  Home page:
http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
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