At 14:00 10.03.1999 -0000, Judith Diamondstone wrote:
>
>I have one question for Max. You wrote:
> I leaned it against the wall
>
>Does it sound sensible to you, making use of Plato's insight, that
>there are two 'parts of speech' - participants and processes; the
>participants may be "onema" OR complements, while the processes are rhema
It seems (I have not read Plato concerning the present problem) that Plato
refers to what nowadays is called
theme-rheme
or
topic-comment
and used to be called (and still is in some grammars)
subject-predicate.
The thing is that this partitioning of sentences has nothing to do with
grammar, it is a communication aspect (or a rhetoric one) we are referring
to here.
Unfortunately, terms like subject and predicate are also used in
grammatical descriptions and thus things easily get muddled. When I was a
young teacher, the German (mother-tongue) grammar book I was supposed to
use still had the rule that a sentence consists of two parts, namely
subject and predicate. Of course, problems came up when the book set about
explaining 'objects'. The authors solved the problem by defining
'predicate' as what I call 'verbal part' (eg. wrote or should have been
being repaired) on page X, and on page Y they said the predicate is
everything apart from the subject. And I was supposed to explain this to
twelve-year-olds, who, at that age, still use their brains as God willed
them to use the human brain, namely on the basis of normal human logic.
(Later they learn not to trust their thinking any longer, but parrot what
the teacher says he wants to see in tests.)
This and other absurdities in the textbooks I had to use (German and
English) made me wonder if grammar really need be that incomprehensible and
contrary to human logic. And I found you are free to analyse language in
the same way (i.e. without taking grammar books seriously) that you are
free to analyse a poem (without taking interpretations of other people too
seriously) - the latter I had learned at university.
Back to
I leaned it against the wall
Participant and process does not suffice to describe this sentence, I
think. The doer (I) is a participant, all right, but so is the recipient
(it). And I am not sure the wall should be left out here as a participant,
sort of.
From a communicative point of view, I'd say, we have the topic (I) and we
learn something about that topic, namely that it changes the situation in a
given way (which is referred to by 'leaned it against the wall', the comment).
From a grammatical (structural) point of view, we have this sentence
structure: S VP O A(direction).
From a different grammatical point of view that considers the sememes of
the sentence parts, we can say that the subject 'I' refers to the doer of
the activity, the verbal part 'leaned' refers to the activity for which 'I'
is responsible, the object 'it' refers to the recipient of the activity,
and the adverbial 'against the wall' refers to the direction that 'it'
takes while being acted upon. - Note that the subject (to mention just one
sentence part) does not invariably denote the doer, it is the context that
tells us here; the subject as such is neutral in this respect, sometimes
it refers to something which is responsible for the activity, sometimes it
does not (The book sells well), sometimes it refers to the recipient (The
car crashed into the wall; the driver was hurt).
When we take into account the sememes of the individual words, the analysis
ist again a different one.
And it is different when we analyse the sound stream when the sentence is
produced by a speaker.
All these (and there are more) are not analyses by different linguistic
models (or should not be regarded as such), but they depend on what we want
to find out about a sentence and what aspect of the sentence we are dealing
with. Grammar is not just the analysis of the structure of the language
sign, but it comprises all the aspects of a sign (there six of them). And
in addition it must describe how we use the sign (e.g. in communication,
but there are many other uses). If grammar is restricted to the structural
aspect alone, it is useless for the purposes which are constantly being
discussed on this list, in particular writing and reading (and, which is
what I am interested in, the teaching of foreign languages).
Sorry, now it's me who has been rambling on and on ...
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Burkhard Leuschner - Paedagogische Hochschule Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany
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