Edmond,
   Usage based models tend to emphasize "pattern" over "rule." We
generalize these patterns. Usefulness makes them frequent. Frequency
makes them familiar. But flexibility is absolutely required for
sensitivity to context. We have to say things in new ways precisely
because we have new things to say.>
   Breaking a pattern is very different from breaking a rule. Something
can be new without being wrong.
   When you wrote "may" I immediately thought "may-sayer" as echo to
"nay-sayer."
   Charles Simic once said "The dream of every cliche is to enter a great
poem." It becomes a cliche by virtue of its poetic force, but loses it
from becoming habitual. We breathe back the life. Without poets, and we
are all poets, the language dies.
   If grammar gets reduced to correctness, it will always be a drag on
writing.
   But grammar is at work when writing works well and we can share our
pleasure and our wonder.

Craig

I'm not a linguist, Herb, but a philosopher, so I am learning from you.
> You
> acknowledge that words can be moved about as regards function, but you say
> that there are 'strict conditions'.  Yet the conditions are not so strict
> since anyone, given sufficient purpose and imagination, can wangle them
> into
> another slot.  Take 'may':  "I wouldn't rely on him -- he's just a may."
> But of course we still sense the oddity, so we remain aware of the
> customary
> use in the game as it is played at this historical juncture.
>
> The feel of words belonging primarily to one function surely comes from
> the
> fact that these are the habitual usages within the 'rules' at this time.
> Your 'seethe/sodden' example nicely shows how the sense of word-class can
> be
> obvious and active at one time and be wholly abandoned at another -- the
> usage of a word within the 'rules' has changed -- what started as an odd
> 'one-off' got picked up by others and became general (or, with 'sodden',
> perhaps it was that the verb use just faded out).  I must concede that we
> can abstract from these changes and note about the game that there are
> slots
> apart from what fills them at any time:  thus surely we can distinguish
> verb
> from noun in the abstract sense, in the relative placing of these slots in
> syntax, but, as your example, well shows, we have to hold back from saying
> that some word now used as a verb is intrinsically and eternally a 'verb'
> or
> a 'noun' -- 'sodden' isn't a 'verb' anymore.
>
> Edmond
>
>
> Dr. Edmond Wright
> 3 Boathouse Court
> Trafalgar Road
> Cambridge
> CB4 1DU
> England
>
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