Bob, When someone replies to "Ya eat yet?" with "Yeah I did," the fact that the reply has tense-marking does not, in and of itself, establish that tense-marking was present but elided in the question. That's certainly *an* explanation, but not the only one. Take the following exchange: Cletus: I want to read up on an ancient civilization, and I can't decide which one. Bocephus: How about the Romans? Cletus: Nah, they were just obnoxious. The past tense in the last sentence isn't triggered by any tense in a previous sentence; instead, it's triggered by the speakers' knowledge of context. Quick replies and tag questions do, of course, replicate the initial auxiliary (if there is one) and the tense marking, but that doesn't *have* to be a result of a kind of syntactic copying operation; unless sentence-creation is entirely divorced from semantics, speakers will always have access to context. The "subject + first aux" combo bears a particularly heavy functional load in English, since we use it to manipulate the status of utterances as exchanges (I'm badly paraphrasing Halliday here); if I'm going to question one of your assertions, the standard techniques all involve using a subject plus an appropriate auxiliary. But that's a statement about how speakers use "S+Aux" combos in English discourse, not about ellipsis, or the boundaries of sentences. If we hear footsteps in the hall, and I look up and say, "Bob, isn't it?" I'm not necessarily *thinking* "That's Bob in the hallway, isn't it?" Instead, in the right context, "Bob" counts as an assertion, and the *kind* of assertion (existence, ability etc.) determines the tag. Also, with tag questions, I *think* you can cases in which the domain being "tagged" is clearly a clause, but not an independent one (if this one seems like a stretch, I do have some cases in which a quick reply like "No he's not" works with a subordinate clause): We're cancelling the play because the lead actor is sick, isn't he? Now, I don't mind the idea that clauses are a de facto basic unit in grammar -- that's bound into that notion of "enough language given the context" -- but there's a major difference between "clause" and "sentence." Tags and quick contradictions seem to target clauses that make foregrounded assertions -- they don't work at all, for example, with restrictive relative clauses. If the "natural domain" for such phenomena is something like "foregrounded clause with accompanying fully backgrounded clauses," we certainly have something interesting, but it's not a sentence in the traditional sense. It's not even a T-unit, although I realize that definition sounds like that for T-units (the difference is in the role of contradictable dependent clauses). And it positions the domain of tags and contradictions relative to their discourse function. One last point: Intuitive judgments of grammaticality do not simply access one's grammatical competence -- they're heavily influenced by a number of factors. One of the reasons corpus work is so important is that one *can't* simply accept grammaticality judgments as immune from social conventions. Quite a number of my students have no problem telling me that certain sentences are ungrammatical that in fact occur in formal writing quite frequently ("Seldom had he seen that") -- to them, it's ungrammatical because they haven't encountered the pattern before. That's not a dialect issue, that's a familiarity issue -- but they're JUST as confident about their judgment as any linguist creating an example set (and this isn't a situation where you can ascribe their "misjudgment" to performance, since that would be to create another circular argument). There are quite a number of language groups whose speakers become quite baffled when linguists ask them to make grammaticality judgments about their own language -- the idea of such a judgment is itself a cultural artifact. The move from "I don't like it" to "It's wrong" is an easy one, and there's a long, and problematic, history of people adding the additional step of "It's wrong because it violates <natural order> / <God's Will> / <human nature>." Whenever we say "Sentence X is ungrammatical," we *should* worry about whether we're saying the equivalent of "Rice is digestible by most humans," or instead, "It's a mistake to wear white shoes after Labor Day" (if there's a Universal Fashion Faculty, I'm deficient, and don't have access to it). And a post-final note: We still have no decent grammatical holiday. X-Bar-mas? Clausekkah? Bill Spruiell Dept. of English Central Michigan University -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2008 12:52 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence? and the importanceofthecompetence-performance distinction It might very well be the case that Bill is right when he writes the following: ******* I have trouble accepting "sentenceness" as something that pre-exists our definitions as a kind of fundamental category, at least in the way we've traditionally defined sentences. ******* If the definition of a sentence depends on whether we can begin the string with a capital letter and end it with a period, then Bill is definitely right. However, the data I cited didn't require that definition. I proposed that one cannot describe how tag questions are formed, how yes-no questions are formed, or the properties of certain kinds of pronouns without the category of a sentence/clause. I can be wrong, but I notice that Bill does not provide an explanation for my examples. Herb agreed with the point I made with those examples. And, I note that tag questions and yes-no questions are really common in the oral language. Because I find the performance-competence distinction useful. I need to comment on the second problem Bill identifies. The other [problem] is the effect of using a single pair of opposing terms like "competence vs. performance." Setting up a binary opposition encourages people to think that anything that is not A is by necessity B, with some of the consequences that Herb has already mentioned. There's one sense of "performance" in which the term encompasses speaker "goofs": slips of the tongue, false starts, the occasional fit of coughing interrupting an utterance and the like. But once we make a definition of sentence, anything that diverges from that definition then becomes a "goof" in a way that it wasn't before. Saying that slips of the tongue don't necessarily fall within the purview of your theory is a very different matter than saying that "ya eat yet?" doesn't, but having only the one pair of terms leads us to group both as "performance" (or to rescue the second via an ellipsis argument). A construct of the theory ("sentencehood") becomes the basis on which data is judged *relevant* to arguments about whether the construct itself is valid. Once that happens, you don't have a theory anymore; you have a faith (and it's a really boring, nerdy one, without even a decent holiday attached). **** 1) Theories change over time. Herb correctly showed that what is part of competence and what is performance have changed over time. I don't understand why that is a problem. 2) The issue of "goofs" is interesting here. I can't tell whether Bill is suggesting that we need a theory of grammar that explains every utterance a speaker of the language makes. I know of no grammar that attempts a grammar that does that. His example "ya eat yet" is interesting. Sounds OK to me. I'm sure I have uttered it. Do we have any intuitions about it? (Intuitions are a way to tap into competence.) What is the possible response to that question? (It is redundant to do this with a negative response.) a) Ya, I did b) Ya, I do. (b) is completely unacceptable to me. I prefer (a). If your judgments are the same as mine, why might that be the case? Notice "did" is a past tense form and there is no past tense form in the question. 3) "Relevant" data are part of any theory. A theory is valued to the degree it can provide an explanation for the greatest amount of data. If data are presented that the theory should explain and it doesn't, then the inadequacy of the theory is revealed and people attempt to construct a better theory. I return to tag questions, yes-no questions, and properties of certain pronouns. The construct "sentence/clause" is crucial, I think, to describe these constructs. That is not faith. I could be wrong, but I have never read a description of them that don't use the concept of sentence. Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/