Gregg (and all),
  The article I referred to below and emphatically recommend is "Cognitive Processes in Grammaticalization" , author Joan Bybee, in The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, volume 2. editor Michael Tomasello. Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.
   As I stated earlier, she does a nice job of using "am going to" as a case study of grammaticalization. (Think of the difference between "I am going to London" and "I am going to shop"). She also discusses the expansion of "to" as infinitive marker from Old English to the present. The fact that we have some verbs that take infinitive without "to" (make and help would be examples) is because they became entrenched before "to" expanded.
   We originally designated "purpose" in an infinitive in part with a suffix: "thanne wolde he maken hem to drynken".  (Bybee's example). Eventually, the infinitive marker was lost.
   The article summarizes very thoughtful positions on what grammaticalization teaches us about the nature of language. Here are two that I find compelling: "Grammar is not a static, closed, or self-contained system, but is highly susceptible to change and highly affected by language use."  And "Many of the very basic mechanisms that constitute the process of grammaticalization are cognitive processes that are not necessarily restricted to language."
   These new understandings of language/grammar have serious implications for HOW grammar should be taught. I would add that it has implications for the question of WHETHER grammar should be taught. The anti-grammar folk tend to base their arguments on theories of language that are being thoughtfully challenged.

Craig
  

Craig Hancock wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite"> Gregg,
   If you think of "have to" as a paraphrastic version of "must" , then it gives us the advantage (along with be supposed to and be able to and be going to) of combining a modal notion with tense. "I had to do it." "I was supposed to do it." "I was able to do it." "I have to do it." "I am supposed to do it." "I was going to do it." "I am going to do it." and so on.)  Because they are useful forms, it's easy to see why they have evolved as common patterns. They are a very good argument for grammar itself as in flux and responsive to functional pressures.  I have seen a very good  description of the history of "am going to", but it's at home. I'll track it down.
   Goldberg's "Constructions at Work" is first rate and very recent (2006).
   Construction grammar is a strand of cognitive linguistics. I highly recommend Langacker's "Cognitive Grammar: a Basic Introduction (Oxford, 2008). He is probably the most seminal figure in the field.

Craig
  

Gregg Heacock wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">Herbert,
I raised a question about the possible evolution of usage for "have" as in "I have to do this."  Might this have developed from "I have this to do"?  Do you believe Beth Levin's book would cover this?  I went to Amazon to check out her work.  This led me to other works you or others may be able to comment upon: 
Argument Realization (Research Surveys in Linguistics)by Beth Levin, 
Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language by Adele Goldberg, 
Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure (Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series) by Adele E. Goldberg
All of these sound interesting.  I am curious to know what you or others have to say of these works.
Much obliged,
Gregg
On Dec 3, 2008, at 11:18 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:

From a lexical semantic and syntactic point of view, let me once again recommend Beth Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations (Chicago 1993) as the most detailed published analysis I know of of how meaning and form work together to classify verbs in useful ways.  Of course, her overall classification, with about 330 classes, might be a bit much for an undergrad grammar class, but as a reference work and as an introduction to the subtlety and power of the concepts, it's a great piece of scholarship to have on your shelf.  And she is pretty much neutral when it comes to theory, at least in this book.  You don't have to be a linguist to read it.

Herb

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 3, 2008 11:52 AM
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
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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