Linda,
My computer has been balking, so I apologize for not replying to your
earlier post. I'll try to catch up here.
I was actually replying to Herb's early response to Cynthia, in which
he said we should shy away from "parts of speech" explanations because
students aren't aware of them enough to follow the explanation, and
edge toward levels of formality. I'm sure I wasn't overly clear. Herb
of course is right in his observbations about what people are likely to
know, but then I thought about how we may enable this sort of ignorance
by giving people what they think grammar is all about, rules for use
that don't trouble them with understanding. I don't mean to imply
criticism to any of us, especailly Herb, who has been an advocate of
public grammar as long as I have known him, just an observation about
how we get caught up in the "you don't need to know about language"
syndrome of the times. We try to be helpful, but become complicit.
Halliday has some neat observations about the reciprocal nature of
mental processes. When something scares us, we can feel active and
passsive at the same time. "I am scared of it. It frightens me." "I
admire Ghandi. He impresses me." I think the notion of agency shifts
when we move to emotions and thoughts. It's not as cut and dried as it
is in a mechanical process. When w elove someone, we are both agent and
patient.
I worry that "level of formality" is just a substitute for "correct" or
"incorrect", with some slight mitigation.
This is partly a response to Johanna's post. When we say "wasted" on
the witness stand, we are not just using taboo words, but insulting our
audience by using words than may not be "shared". It violates some sort
of maxim of communication. Academics do it on the other end of the
spectrum, using technical terms that shut out much of the public, but
not at the expense of the speaker.
It's interesting that "scared" is an official adjective in the two
dictionaries I consulted. That would be a neat assignment for a class,
looking through a dictionary to discover which participles have been
granted full adjective status and which kind of hang on as verbs in
adjectival roles. How would a dictionary maker decide?
"Scare" is a noun as well. We need to find ways to make "parts of
speech" explorations much more interesting and flexible.
At what point does "level of formality" become a euphemism for
"incorrect"?
Sorry to mix a number of comments in a single post.
Craig
>
Great data, R Michael Medley!
>
> And I would say that it supports my point more than not. I'm sorry if I
> was
> not clear (but these are very involved issues, aren't they? Fun to talk
> about
> though.)
>
> I wasn't really relying on introspection to make an argument about data
> here; I was simply generating sentences that might illustrate my point
> about
> lexical semantic structure: that we inform our usage of particular verbs
> with our
> own understanding of what they mean and how they work. In particular, our
> understanding of the meanings of some verbs includes a stronger notion of
> agency. And this is why some grammatical constructions seem odd with some
> verbs
> and acceptable with others.
>
> Certainly, numerous contexts can be generated to use verbs in all sorts
> of
> ways, as your data shows precisely. But I was trying to explain the
> question
> from the instructor about how and why certain grammatical structures
> might be
> 'preferred' , especially in writing.
>
> When we say that a photo scares us, we do not mean that the photo stood
> up
> and took the initiative to attempt to frighten us. We mean that we
> viewed a
> photo and that viewing caused some sort of reaction in us. But the photo
> did
> nothing. And the photo did not change. The photo does not act at all.
>
> When we say a person scared us, we typically understand that a person
> actually DID something to INTENTIONALLY scare us. While action,
> intention, and
> control are not part of every event of 'scaring by a person', the
> potential is
> there. It is NOT there in the 'scaring by a photo' event.
>
> This difference in the type of scaring events plays out in the grammatical
> structures we use with verbs.
> I hope this makes my point more clearly.
>
> And your data was quite entertaining!
>
> Linda Di Desidero
>
>
> (If you are interested in event semantics, I wouldn't turn to Chomsky,
> but I
> would recommend people like Beth Levin and a ton of others I could give
> you
> off-list if you like.)
>
>
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