[This one is primarily theory-wrangling, with little direct application to pedagogy]

 

Ed,

 

I probably wasn’t very clear in that initial statement. What I meant was that quite a number of theories would hold that a given non-ambiguous sentence has exactly one correct structure; syntactic argumentation in those theories thus takes the form of a discussion about which possible structure is the correct one. For example, given a basic transitive sentence skeleton like [S V O], there are at least two possible groupings:

 

1.                   (S V) O

2.                   S (V O)

 

In what I’ll call “monostructural” theories, practitioners take as a given that they have to pick one of those two (this is in part driven by some initial assumptions in how to “count” simplicity in a theory). Each has benefits – the first one provides a very convenient domain for talking about subject/verb agreement, while the second accounts much better for the observation that knowing the kind of verb you have lets you predict the kind of object, or whether there will be an object or not, better than it lets you make predications about the subject (and besides, it fits the traditional subject/predicate distinction). In all the monostructural approaches I’m aware of, practitioners pick the second; the price, of course, is having to go to some extra lengths to deal with subject/verb agreement.

 

“Multistructural” theories would allow for *both* 1 and 2 to be potentially “correct” simultaneously, so the question of “which one is correct?” isn’t really relevant. This kind of approach can (but doesn’t have to be) motivated by a different way of counting simplicity.  

 

Both mono- and multistructural theories can be deployed in “God’s Truth” and “Hocus Pocus” forms – in the first case, the practitioner claims that the underlying reality of human language is such that sentences really do/don’t have single structural descriptions (whether we know what they are or not); in the second, the practitioner claims that there is no way of knowing for sure, but that assuming that they do/don’t have single structural descriptions is useful for practical reasons. A position of “agnostic humility” (which I happen to regard as quite healthy!) is possible in all four combinations of the two distinctions.

 

Bill Spruiell

 

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University