I couldn’t agree with you more. I believe that the CG linguists
would also agree. They think to have a framework that allows the distinction
to be made and the continuum you point out to be splayed out into various colors.
Bruce
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English
Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 9:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Correct?
Bruce,
If I want a problem to go away or want my refrigerator to fill up,
then I don't expect the problem or the refrigerator to do anything. But that
only becomes a problem when we want to define the construction in a narrow way.
If the construction builds from the ground up, then we need to expect these
anomalies in the same way we expect word meanings to grow and change.
Is wanting X to Y the same as expecting X to Y? How about
encouraging? discouraging? Helping? Ordering? Making? The more abstract the
classification pattern, the further it drifts from the real world of meaning.
Each of these verbs uses these constructions in unique ways. The
patterns build from use, not independently of it.
Craig
Bruce Despain wrote:
Your pattern, “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying
that it’s Y who will be doing the Z-ing?” looks like what might be described in
a constructional grammar (CG). These folks are averse to describing
the relationships of constructions as built up of other constructions.
They like to contrast the usage construction meaning vs. the grammatical
construction meaning.
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English
Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Correct?
Dear All:
I suspect that one of the reasons that many modern grammars use
what seem to be simplistic structural pattern definitions (e.g. [S V DO INF]
for both “We wanted him to be hired” and “We wanted him to go home”) is that
the differences among those sentences are differences in what the various
participants are doing – the relationships among them – and we don’t really
have a theoretically agnostic way of talking about that. The minute a term like
“underlying subject” is used, the description is locked into a particular
model.
This is true of all descriptions, of course (simply by
using a label like “infinitive,” I’ve committed to a kind of model), but cases
like these bring up major points of contention among current models. Almost
everyone who works on English is happy with the term “infinitive,” but there is
nowhere near the same level of consensus about the idea that infinitives
are really, truly, made out of full sentences, etc. I have a knee-jerk reaction
the minute I see a phrase like “underlying subject,” and I’m sure I use phrases
that others on the list would have an immediate negative reaction to as well.
One way authors of grammar books can try to dodge the entire issue is
simply to omit any references to this type of material at all, and thus we end
up with [S V DO INF].
Older grammars, like the ones Herb mentions, did something that
I think we can still do: we can all agree that there are different patterns of
relationships among the participants, even if we don’t agree on why
those differences exist. To some extent, the differences among the patterns can
be “anchored” by relating them to native-speaker reactions to questions about
implications of the structure (e.g. “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying
that it’s Y who will be doing the Z-ing?”). In other words, we can adopt
ways to probe for differences that there will be wide consensus on, even if
there is no such consensus on what the differences mean for a theory of
linguistic structure (this is what I’m trying to get at with the term “theoretically
agnostic”).
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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