Bill,
   I would go a step further. It seems to me the primary questions we come back to on list are questions about "correctness" and questions about classification. (I don't mean this as a criticism of this thread or of John's thoughtful inquiry.)
   We have two long-standing traditions (prescriptive grammar and formal, structural grammar) that have dominated U.S. grammar for several decades. We don't stop to ask whether we should be looking at alternative models, or even whether alternative models are already available.
   Of course, the dictionary makers have long ago assumed that each word is unique in its meanings. We understand that vocabulary grows dynamically out of use, and we are used to encyclopedic descriptions, which we understand as somewhat limited and partial and as a snapshot of a moving reality. Grammar, on the other hand, we treat as a set of fixed forms. We don't see it as organic, dynamic,  linked to use, or linked to human cognition.
   When classifying sentences becomes an end in itself,  it pulls us away from  the living world of language. Disagreeing about classification categories doesn't change that.
   The idea of bringing it back to native speaker reactions might be a step in the right direction. The idea would be to look at classifications as flexible and rough and not expect individual verbs to fit neatly into a handful of categories. We could also ask the enterprise to bring us back into the heart of meaning, not away from it.
   What, after all, do we mean by "wanting"? Is there a grammar that comes with it?
   If I say "I want to be home" does that mean "I want myself to be home" in a kind of shorthand? Does all wanting imply change? Does it differ from other kinds of expressions/understandings that involve change?
   In a cognitive (or usage based) grammar,  this kind of exploration is natural. The classifications are not formal abstractions in the same old way, but patterns that arise out of shared cognition and out of use.

Craig

Spruiell, William C wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite"> 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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