We should always be careful when our theoretical commitments blind us in our analysis.
There are couple of examples of this happening in Craig's last post.

In the following, the apparent disdain for "rules" obscures the fact that if there was no such thing as "rules," then exceptions would not be noticed.

Craig writes:
That may be the mark of a true grammarian, someone who loves the exceptions more than the rules. What the exceptions do is bring us back to the "ground" of language. I think rules are sometimes used to keep us from having to deal with real meaning in all its rich (messy?) splendor.

****
How do we know what an exception is if we don't have a sense of rules?  

The following reveals the confusion is not in "rules," but how a particular "rule" is explained in some grammar books.  Notice in the following, the analysis appeals to a rule: "It routinely stands for whole process."   

   I think the confusion here comes from expecting a pronoun to stand in for a noun.
   Think about these pairs.  "I did the dishes and they were hard." (In this case, the dishes were probably especially dirty.)  "I did the dishes, and it was hard." (In this case, the act of doing it was difficult, maybe because my arthritis was acting up.)
  "It" routinely stands in for whole processes. Whole processes are routinely nominalized and routinely named by nouns. This is because different functions are involved, one being naming/representing the world, the other being the production of discourse and of text. Choice depends on what we want to bring into mutual attention, and the flexibility in the language gives us flexibility in our choices. It's not form driven, but function driven.

*****
Of course, "it" can make reference to an entity, too.  NO grammar can account for how we interpret "it" as the process of doing the dishes.  In the sentence above, it would be difficult to get an interpretation of the sentence with "it" referring to an entity.  However, to explain that fact  requires a theory of interpretation.  I find Relevance Theory, the neo-Grician proposal by Sperber and Wilson, useful.  And, that Relevance Theory says nothing about actual grammatical form.

I would just make one final observation: If there were no "rules" in language, communication would be next to impossible. That fact is the foundation of language.

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri 

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