Three points:
(1) I don't think it's quite accurate to say that modern linguistics comes
from traditional grammar. Its real beginnings were in 'philology', or
historical linguistics of the 19th century. Of course, philology owed a
great deal to traditional grammar, but philology heralded a divergence of
paths between linguistics and traditional grammar. I would say that since
the early 20th century they have been essentially different disciplines,
with different methods and goals.
(2) I was reconsidering my claim that ling. is not harder than other
sciences when I read the posting suggesting it might actually be easier. I
think there is an important way that it is difficult for people, which
manifests in my classes (some students never really seem to 'get it' -- to
understand what the mission of linguistics is). Most knowledge of language
is deeply subconscious. It seems especially difficult to get people to
stand outside of language and look at it scientifically, especially since
you have to use language itself to talk about the data. I have noticed
that a lot of students have genuine difficutly accessing their intuitions
about language; this may be a product of poor teaching technique on my
part, but I don't think that's entirely the problem.
I think this difficulty would be remedied if training began in the 'lower'
schools, but that remains to be seen. Certainly, most linguists I know
were also very good at trad. grammar, meaning perhaps that the 'look at
language' stance that forced on them at the least helped cultivate an
already-present ability to do so.
(3) As to the 'activeness' of 'enjoy' -- I have to emphasize that
specialists in semantics are working on ways of deciding what the
components of meaning are, and how they blend to make concepts that are
then the meanings of words. Feeling secure about explanations that are
gotten in this enterprise can only come from looking very carefully at the
entire verbal (and other) systems of the language in question, as well as
looking for support for those explanations in many languages of the
world. We can't just speculate on how 'active' a verb seems to us, and
rely on that as an explanation of how we can interpret 'enjoy' as an
active verb. What needs to be done is to try to pick apart what it means
for a verb to be an 'action' verb by examining how verbs act in a large
number of languages, as well as how the English system breaks down
overall. As I wrote in a previous posting, verbs _do_ break down into
coherent categories in most languages, and may behave differently in the
grammar because of this.
The reason I emphasize this point is that there seems to be a general
belief abroad among the population that you can explain stuff about
language by just thinking about it and coming up with something off the
top of your head. My students do this in their papers all the time. That's
not how science works. You need to be able to generalize, and you need
support from the real world.
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Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184 E-mail: [log in to unmask] ~
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