I would revise Bruce's line of reasoning as follows:
1. Something about the world leads me to believe that stuttering is a
natural condition.
2. Therefore, it should be the case that a lot of people stutter.
3. In reality, the number of people who stutter is small; my expectation
is not the case.
4. Therefore, I am surprised.
Semantic relations involved here are experiencer (surprised person) and
source of surprise (counterintutitive fact that few people actually
stutter). The counterintuitiveness of the fact lies in items 1 and 2 above.
An interesting point is the motivation for choosing the particular
structure "more people don't stutter" over the alternative "so few
people stutter". Both "more people don't" and "so few people stutter"
imply the comparison between expectation and reality. I don't have any
guesses as to what the motivation might be.
As to Craig's comment, I agree that it's odd that subjects of verbs are
not called complements. In Cognitive Grammar, subjects are clearly
complements, because the semantic structure of any verb includes a slot
for its subject; the subject is one of the terms in the relation that
the verb designates (in other words, it is one of the arguments of the
predicate the verb names). It is the only argument in the case of many
intransitive verbs, such as 'sleep'. Perhaps there is a subtlety in the
definition of complements that keeps subjects out and that I am not
aware of.
My image analogy for verbs and their complements is puzzle pieces: A
verb is a puzzle piece with one or more 'female' slots. The complements
are puzzle pieces with a 'male' part that can fit into one of the verb's
'female' slots. The complements may, in turn have female slots for their
own complements--e.g., prepositions or adjectives such as 'proud' which
can take complements. In the end, this model is a little too
linear--it's not too good at modeling what is usually called
'hierarchical' structure (which I prefer to view as 'complementary' structure).
Another model for the sample utterance comes from mental space theory
(Gilles Fauconnier's work). Mental spaces are imaginary mini-worlds that
we set up in our mind as we think; they are portrayed in the language we
use. Everything we utter codes one or more mental spaces. In this case,
you have a mental space in which stuttering is natural, therefore many
people stutter. You have another mental space which reflects the
utterer's apprehension of reality: The number of stutterers is small.
These two spaces conflict, hence the surprise. Mental spaces are claimed
to have some kind of conceptual (psychological) reality; it's not just a
formal model.
Mental space theory has been used to model many instances of
counterfactuals, metonymy, and much more. Fauconnier's foundational work
is called Mental Spaces and was published in 1985. The intent of the
book was to solve several stubborn problems of formal semantics, such as counterfactuals.
There has been a good deal of work using this framework for all sorts of
applications, from everyday language to literature. The current version
of the model is called conceptual blending theory. Fauconnier and
another scholar, Mark Turner, lay it out in a recent book for the
general reader called "The way we think". Very cool book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Associate Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-2596
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] • Home page: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
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