Bruce,
It certainly ends up producing something like the same kind of classification system that some construction grammars might produce – but not necessarily for the same reason. A construction grammar (if I understand them correctly) would essentially say, “These two constructions are different, and the their difference inheres in the constructions themselves”; it’s as if the construction, in some ways, is like a very complex version of a lexical item. I happen to like that idea, but I know a lot of other linguists wouldn’t. I’m trying to aim for something more like, “These constructions are different, and for our current purposes, the fact that they’re different is more important than getting in an argument about where the difference comes from .” To use some dated, but still useful terms, construction grammar operates as a kind of “god’s truth” theory; I’m just sticking to “hocus-pocus.”
The problem, of course, is that the means by which we validate the claim that two constructions are different may themselves lock us into a theoretical framework that’s under contention. As an extreme example, if I said that two otherwise-identical constructions were different in that one of them has a gap and the other has a zero-element, I’d be persuasive only to people who agreed with me about the proposed gap and zero-element. The strategy I’m toying with (“If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying that it’s Y who will be doing the Z-ing?”) uses questions to check for consensus among speakers, and then uses that consensus to validate the distinctions (unlike what happens with the typical use of grammaticality judgments, I wouldn’t argue that the consensus necessarily represents “what is actually true”; instead, it’s just to achieve a workable compromise description. It’s the hocus-pocus position again).
As another example, consider this pair that tends to come up with some regularity on the list (well, not the Athelwulf part, but still….):
Athelwulf is easy to please.
Athelwulf is eager to please.
Both of these can be described as having the structure [S BE ADJ INF] – but in the first one, the expectation is that other people are the ones who please Athelwulf, while in the second, it’s Athelwulf who’s pleasing others. There are different ways of accounting for this difference, and each of them locks the analyst into a particular theoretical position. Regardless of that variation, though, I think pretty much all native English-speakers would agree that the expectations, as described above, are different. We can thus productively (I think) talk about an “easy-to pattern” and an “eager-to pattern” without necessarily adopting any particular statement about why they’re different – just that they are different (again, I think a construction grammar would say they’re different because they’re different constructions, rather than that they’re different but we don’t really care why right now).
And, of course, this is in practice very little different from what traditional grammarians have done; the only change is that the methodology is foregrounded, since it’s the methodology that’s designed to foster a “politically viable” compromise.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2008 9:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Correct?
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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