Berkeley Linguistics Society, vol. 13 (1987), 139-157
Emergent Grammar
Paul Hopper
'Fragments are the only forms I trust.'
- Donald Barthelme, See the Moon?
'Essence is expressed by grammar.'
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 371
1. Emergent Grammar
As explorations in 'functional grammar' accumulate in volume and significance,
it has become a standard tactic of supporters of sentence syntax to claim
that the very study of discourse is an unreasonable agenda so long as any
problems remain outstanding from the study of sentence level syntax. This
claim sometimes takes the form of challenges to functional grammar to find
discourse correlates of specific syntactic phenomena (stated always, of
course, in sentence terms). For example, we find Jerry Morgan asking the
question how such well-known phenomena as Ross' constraints on variables
could conceivably be explained in discourse terms (Morgan 1981). Indeed,
how could the 'extraposition' of the relative clause in such ordinary everyday
sentences as:
ever be accounted for if the structure of every sentence in the language
had to have a functional explanation?
The same theme of the arbitrariness of the match between syntax and function
is struck by other linguists who have confronted discourse linguistics from
the perspective of sentence grammar; we can cite here Newmeyer's pronouncement
of a so-called 'functionalist fallacy' (Newmeyer 1983), the position that
the lamination between structure and function will come unglued with the
slightest bubble of failure-that it takes only one syntactic fact which
is not susceptible of a functional explanation to bring down the whole precarious
palace of functionalism. Sadock (1984) has endorsed the notion of a Functionalist
Fallacy.
There are, it seems to me, both superficial and more profound responses
to this argument. The simple one is to note that since both sentence grammarians
and discourse linguists agree that their work is not done, it is highly
premature to speak of any 'syntactic facts' which are independent of function,
just as in the absence of a complete theory of functionalism it is premature
to claim that all structures have functional counterparts. It might also
be legitimately claimed that so-called syntactic facts which do not appear
at first sight to have a functional explanation may indeed have one if they
are studied seriously, that is, in real discourses. Thus in the particular
example presented by Morgan, it could be argued that extraposition of relative
clauses is indeed triggered by something in discourse, probably involving
the relative salience of the main vs. the subordinate clause: extraposition
always seems to mean that the discourse importance of the relative clause
outranks that of the main clause; indeed it is the very absence of this
skewing which perhaps accounts for something I always notice when I try
this sentence out on people - that it is judged to be a very bizarre way
to say what the sentence is apparently trying to say.
Critics of 'radical pragmatics', and 'functional grammar', assume that they
and those they oppose share a common view of language, that there is a pairing
of autonomous (i.e., decontextualized) grammatical forms with 'functions'
(whatever they might be in the abstract), and that the only point of disagreement
is whether these forms might be eventually derivable from 'functions' or
whether the forms must be described independently of 'functions'. I find
a certain irony in such a use of the terms 'function' and 'functionalism',
since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined
level of 'sentences' seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist.
Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental
problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption
of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented
when we speak.
It is an assumption which is very deeply entrenched in our field, and indeed
is virtually an official dogma. Consider the following. A year or so ago,
the President of the LSA, Victoria Fromkin, was asked by the editors of
the Chronicle of Higher Education to submit a brief state-of-the-art report
on linguistics, to be featured in a two-page spread of similar reports by
representatives of other disciplines. Here is part of what Fromkin wrote:
A whole world of unarticulated philosophical and other assumptions underlies
this statement. It is a world whose traces are glimpsed through terminological
windows such as 'access', 'mental', 'representation', 'language system',
and 'cognitive system'. And that is only the intellectual aspect of the
statement, for we must not forget that it is simultaneously a political
statement also, a public inscription by the President of the Linguistic
Society of the boundaries and objectives of the field of linguistics. But
I am concerned more with the basic scenario, the one which provides for
a logically prior - perhaps eventually even biologically prior - linguistic
system which is simultaneously present for all speakers and hearers, and
which is a pre-requisite for the actual use of language. It is, in other
words, the scenario that when we speak we refer to an abstract, mentally
represented rule system, and that we in some sense 'use' already available
abstract structures and schemata.
The assumption, in other words, is that 'grammar' (in the sense of the rules,
constraints, and categories of the language attributed to the speaker) must
be an object apart from the speaker and separated from the uses which the
speaker may make of it. That kind of grammar is conventionally understood
to consist of sets of rules which operate on fixed categories like nouns
and verbs, specify the forms of additive categories like those of case,
tense, transitivity, etc., and restrict the possible orders in which words
can occur in a sentence. Discourse, the actual use of language, is held
to be in some sense an 'implementation' of these structures, or the way
in which the abstract mental system possessed in its entirety by the speaker
is realized in particular utterances.
Discourse linguistics has itself not always been immune to this kind of
thinking. Here, too, one frequently encounters the same assumption of a
dualistic structure in discourse, the notion that structure pre-exists discourse
and that discourse is mimetically related to a logically prior abstract
organization, formulated this time in terms of paragraphs, episodes, events,
and other such macro-units. The problems of sentence grammar are not really
alleviated by treating discourses as units manifesting a consistent internal
structure, in other words effectively as extra-long sentences. We are still
plagued by the problem of the ill-ness of fit between form and function.
However consistently it can be predicted that a certain particle or aspectual
form will function in a particular role in the discourse, it is rare that
the reverse is the case-that a particular form is restricted to a single
specifiable discourse role. To cut a very long story short, and thereby
probably caricature the dilemma, some way out of the vicious circle of form-to-function-to-form
is needed.
This is, then, roughly the context in which the term Emergent Grammar is
being proposed. The term 'emergent' itself I take from an essay by the cultural
anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original
context of 'culture' to that of 'grammar'. Clifford remarks that 'Culture
is temporal, emergent, and disputed' (Clifford 1986:19). I believe the same
is true of grammar, which like speech itself must be viewed as a real-time,
social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred,
always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since
I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make
about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection
of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class,
age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against
someone else's interests, and therefore disputed.
The notion of Emergent Grammar is meant to suggest that structure, or regularity,
comes out of discourse and is shaped by discourse as much as it shapes discourse
in an on-going process. Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre-requisite
for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both
speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates but are negotiable
in face-to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers'
past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context,
including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments
may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a
grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented, but
always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance.
The notion of emergence is a pregnant one. It is not intended to be a standard
sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question of 'how' the grammar
came to be the way it 'is', but instead it takes the adjective emergent
seriously as a continual movement towards structure, a postponement or 'deferral'
of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable,
and in fact as epiphenomenal, that is at least as much an effect as a cause.
The assumption of Emergent Grammar imposes on the linguist a rather radically
different view of the data base for linguistics. Although isolated, made-up
clauses and sentences will have their uses, and indeed are often indispensable
short-cuts to the study of grammar, the sources of these forms will have
to be understood in a different way from that of the fabula of abstract
rules and native speaker intuitions which have become part of our dogma.
The linguist's task is in fact to study the whole range of repetition in
discourse, and in doing so to seek out those regularities which promise
interest as incipient sub-systems.
Structure, then, in this view is not an overarching set of abstract principles,
but more a question of a spreading of systematicity from individual words,
phrases, and small sets. I will illustrate what I mean by considering the
example of the English indefinite article a/an. If we consider the history
of this form, we find that from Indo-European times a cognate form has meant
the simple numeral 'one', singularity. This was still a common meaning of
án in Old English. It is seen in such examples (from Bosworth and
Toller 1898, sub án) as:
It is also commonly used to introduce a new participant into a discourse:
Its use as a general indefinite article does not appear until later, so
that in Old English án is not found in such contexts as:
To take just these three functions of the predecessor of a/an in Old English,
we find in modern English not a uniform, over-all weakening of the meaning,
but rather a situation in which the weakened meanings and the older stronger
meanings exist side-by side. Thus we find, among other uses, the indefinite
sense of a non-specific, classifying article:
But the specific, new-mention sense is also found:
Although these senses - specific and non-specific - have usually been taken
as exhaustively dividing up the domain of the indefinite article, in fact
several other uses also exist, such as 'one and the same':
and even 'one':
-where, by the way, British English would require 'one dollar'. It is significant
that these meanings of 'one' and 'the same' are not replicable outside of
the contexts - and in some cases the specific wording - of these formulas.
Thus discourses like the following seem anomalous:
Evidently the meanings represented by the English 'indefinite article' are
not unified under one hyper-abstract function. Instead, an open ended set
of small sub-systems has come into being, and the membership of new occurrences
of forms with the indefinite article is not specifiable in advance, but
is impromptu and negotiab1e. Even participants in the conversation may not
know whether a specific new mention or a non-specific indefinite is intended
until this has been worked out in the verbal interaction. Moreover, these
subsystems are either innovating and spreading out from an earlier more
restricted usage, or are contracting and being abandoned from an earlier
wider use. We see this most clearly in the obviously traditioned, formulaic
diction of proverbs like 'birds of a feather', where 'a feather' retains
not only the older sense of 'one and the same', but also the singular noun
'feather' in the sense of plumage. The spread of the newer, indefinite-nonspecific
function of a/an was described in Hopper and Martin 1987.
The point about the retention of archaisms in proverbial language has of
course often been made. But it has less often been noted that proverbial
language is only an extreme case of repetition in discourse, at the other
end of which are the morphological and syntactic repetitions some of which
are called grammar; this point is made cogently by Lambrecht 1984. In other
words, real live discourse abounds in all sorts of repetitions which have
nothing to do with grammar as this is usually understood: for instance,
idioms, proverbs, clichés, formulas, specialist phrases, transitions,
openings, closures, favored clause types, and so on. There is no consistent
level at which these regularities are statable. They are not necessarily
'sentences', or 'clauses', with recurrent internal structure, but they are
often used holistically. Their boundaries may or may not coincide with the
constituent boundaries of our grammatical descriptions: subject and predicate,
noun phrase, prepositional phrase. Moreover, what is a formulaic expression
in one context may not be in another; again, see Lambrecht 1980.
It has been noted before that to a very considerable extent everyday language
is built up out of combinations of such prefabricated parts. Language is,
in other words, to be viewed as a kind of pastiche, pasted together in an
improvised way out of ready-made elements. Language is thus to be treated,
in Wittgenstein's words, 'from outside' (cf. Wittgenstein 1958: para. 120)
- not as governed by internalized mentally represented rules, but by pre-existent
material with which discourses can be devised; cf. Staten 1984: 85-86, Smith
1978: 61-62 et pass. Evidently an entirely parallel way of viewing language
is to be attributed to Jacques Derrida with his metaphor of language as
'graft': new speech acts are 'grafted onto' old ones and of course serve
in turn as the stock onto which further new speech acts are crafted (cf.
Culler 1982: 134-135). Becker's idea of 'prior texts' (e.g., Becker 1979:
244-245) is also crucial here: previous actual utterances form the basis
of new utterances. Similar observations have been made by Bolinger, by Andrew
Pawley, and others. It is this pre-patterned, pre-fabricated aspect of speech
which accounts best for the characteristic of language for which no dualistic,
double-tiered theory can provide an intuitively satisfying explanation:
in natural discourse we compose and speak simultaneously (Smith 1978: 60).
There is no room - no need - for mediation by mental structures. It is in
this sense that, as Bolinger has pointed out (Bolinger 1976), speaking is
more similar to remembering procedures and things than it is to following
rules. It is a question of possessing a repertoire of strategies for building
discourses and reaching into memory in order to improvise and assemble them.
Grammar is now not to be seen as the only, or even the major, source of
regularity, but instead grammar is what results when formulas are re-arranged,
or dismantled and re-assembled, in different ways.
Looking at language this way involves a serious adjustment for the linguist,
since we have developed the habit of seeing utterances in terms of a fixed
framework of rules, and especially because we have been raised on the doctrine
of the free generability of sentences, and the privileging of novelty over
prior texts. Indeed, novelty is a prized virtue in our society altogether,
and we have many ways, some more subtle than others, of censuring perceived
repetitions of others' behavior and an enormous vocabulary dealing with
repetition (copying, imitation). Yet when one examines actual specimens
of speech from the formulaic point of view the effect is a striking one,
perhaps even a memorable one, in that it is then extremely difficult to
revert to the old rule-governed syntactic view of discourse. Consider the
following example from spoken English, just one of many examples from the
Carterette and Jones corpus:
Even a cursory study of such passages reveals several different layers of
regularity. The formulas are easily isolated. Note just a few of them:
-the last with its institutional and authoritarian subtext. It would in
fact be difficult or impossible to draw the line between a formulaic and
a non-formulaic expression; Moreover, there are single words which could
themselves be said to constitute formulas in this context, such as 'disturbed',
'normal'. The stops and starts coincide with the boundaries of formulas,
which are presented and modified or withdrawn or capitalized upon in an
obvious interactional negotiation. Early in the paragraph, for example,
the speaker clearly is about to say 'the normal retarded child', but some
way into the phrase realizes that for the uninitiated in this context it
clashes with another formula, 'the normal child', and launches into a second
try, 'the average retarded child', which also - once said - appears incongruous
(cf. 'the average child'), and finally is forced to abandon the search for
an appropriate formula and move into a more specific level of discourse
in which the properties encapsulated in the adjective 'normal' are made
explicit:
It might be suggested that in this particular passage a sort of second hand
'health care professional' jargon is manifest, in which mannerisms peculiar
to a particular set of experts intrude. (We might note, for example, the
pervasive 'will/won't' in place of the present tense, right out of the H.C.P.'s
manual!) Yet it would be difficult to find a passage about which some analogous
remark might not be made. The point is that all discourse is in some sense
specialist discourse, moulded to the speaker's personality (i.e., personal
history), the situation, and the topic. It is precisely the point about
Emergent Grammar that such 'heteroglossic' (Bakhtin 1981:281) aspects of
language necessarily become integral parts of the linguistic description,
and are not set aside as a separate agenda irrelevant to the linguistic
code and its structure.
Some of these phrases are incongruous when considered from a structural-grammar
perspective. Consider the phrase beginning 'You take a...', which would
have to be analyzed as a subject-verb construction. Its actual function
in the monologue is quite different from what one might predict of such
a phrase on structural grounds. It is not a report ascribing an action of
taking to a second person subject. It has in fact only one function, expressed
holistically: to present a new hypothetical case into the discourse context.
But this function cannot be readily integrated into a homogeneous grammatical
system whose postulates obtain only at the level of isolated sentences and
which starts with the perspective of a solitary ideal speaker.
The systematicity which linguists have come to expect in language exists,
of course, but in a more complex way. The linguistic system is now not to
be seen as something complete and homogeneous, in which 'exceptional' phenomena
must be set aside as inconvenient irregularities, but as a growing together
of disparate forms. This convergence takes place through lateral associations
of real utterances. Similarities spread outwards from individual formulas,
in ways that are motivated by a variety of factors, such as:
(i) phonological similarity (rhyme, assonance): he's likely to -> he's
liable to
(ii) contextual similarity: I persuaded him to -> I convinced him to,
and other kinds of resonance. They do not, however, merge into the kind
of uniform grammar which would lead one to posit a uniform mental representation
to subtend them.
2. Preferred Clauses
2.1 What I've been saying up to now has had the purpose of recontextualizing
the notion of grammar-not to abolish it, but rather to suspend it with a
view to isolating those regularities in discourse which we will agree to
call emergent grammatical regu1arities. But as we have seen, the doctrine
of Emergent Grammar assigns an entirely different status to grammar from
what might be called A Priori Grammar:
(1) Regularity in discourse is of many different kinds, and is, since there
is continually movement between one kind and another, moreover dynamic,
not static in nature. Consequently no principled line can be drawn between
the emergent regularities designated to be 'grammatical' and other regularities
deemed to be 'rhetorical', 'formulaic', etc.
2) Because grammar is always emergent but never present, it could be said
that it never exists as such, but is always coming into being. There is,
in other words, no 'grammar' but only 'grammaticization'- movements toward
structure which are often characterizable in typical ways. It goes without
saying that many phenomena which we would agree to call grammatical are
relatively stable and uniform. That is not in dispute. The point again is
that any decision to limit the domain of grammar to just those phenomena
which are relatively fixed and stable seems arbitrary.
(3) The major descriptive project of Emergent Grammar is to identify recurrent
strategies for building discourses - strategies which have intra-linguistic
or inter-linguistic generality (or both) and which move toward grammaticalization
along parallel lines.
In studying discourse with a view to describing emergent regularities, it
is therefore most useful to begin by establishing frequently occurring,
relatively stable clause types. A useful concept here is that of the 'figure',
suggested by Pete Becker. A figure is a phrase or clause which is highly
standardized in its format and which permits substitution in a few restricted
places. It has a rudimentary internal structure, but it is much closer to
a formula than to freely generated 'sentences'. To the extent that discourse
is not prefabricated, it consists for the most part of assemblages of a
small number of such figures. Knud Lambrecht's notion of a 'Preferred Clause
Unit' seems to be quite similar, only Becker's concept of a 'figure' permits
a number of such types of clause unit to be reckoned with. Consider the
following examples from Old English (Plummer 1899):
Here, a handy way of building up a discourse, such as a narrative, is to
construct it by means of a verb-initial clause, usually preceded by a temporal
adverb such as a 'then'; this clause typically elaborates a setting for
an action, and may contain a number of lexical nouns introducing circumstances
and participants:
It is followed by a succession of verb-final clauses, in which lexical NP's
are minimally represented. These verb final clauses are built up of a particle
such as ond 'and', one or more initial pronouns unrestricted as to case,
perhaps a lexical noun or adverb, and then the verb:
It is not a question of an invariant hyperform from which different clauses
are derived by processes of deletion and movement. Instead it seems that
constructions spread outwards from a small nucleus and in turn form new
nuclei (something like the metastasis of malignant cells, to co-opt a metaphor
of Bolinger's), and the resultant array of clauses are in 'family resemblance'
relationships to one another. Among the features of the figure is a tendency
to avoid phrasing which would lead to multiple lexical noun participants
in the same figure. So in (2), the multiple agents 'they', 'his alderman
Osric', 'his thane Wiferth' and 'the men' are distributed over several phrases,
and only one of them (hie 'they') is retained in the figure. Lambrecht's
work on Spoken French (e.g., Lambrecht, 1987) shows how a large part of
its grammar is invested in strategies for preserving the external form of
what he calls the Preferred Clause Unit.
3 The Malay Ergative: An Emergent Construction.
I will conclude by considering some consequences of emergent grammar for
morphology. A major postulate, or working hypothesis, of Emergent Grammar
is that the more useful a construction is, the more it will tend to become
structuralized, in the sense of achieving cross-textual consistency, and
serving as a basis for variation and extension. An elementary example of
this is 'Watkins' Law' (Watkins 1962: 93-96; Collinge 1985: 239-240). Calvert
Watkins has noted that the third person singular of a paradigm forms the
basis for new paradigms. The particular interest of Watkins' observation
is his point that there are asymmetries among the persons, which in fact
play quite different roles in discourse, having eventual consequences for
the development of paradigms.
In written Malay texts (those used in this study were Abdullah 1932, Abdullah
1928, both written in the 1840's), a highly frequent and favored clause
type consists of a transitive verb with an enclitic ergative pronoun, followed
by a simple lexical patient. This clause type is found in numerous types
of context; the following exemplify narrative (3), and procedural (4) discourse;
the verb + clitic complex is italicized:
The characteristic particles lalu and maka are closely comparable to the
ond of Old English; the verb has a prefix di-, which serves as an agreement
prefix with third person agents, and usually an enclitic -nya meaning 'he,
they (ergative)', giving a transitive clause beginning with di-V-nya 'he,
they V'ed (it)'. Discourses may now be constructed by stringing together
these transitive clauses, together with a few other quite easily characterizable
types, substituting new nouns and verbs as needed, but generally keeping
the basic shape of the figure intact.
The argument structure of these figures is along the lines of Du Bois' Preferred
Argument Structure (Du Bois 1986). Agents are generally continuous as topics,
and are either zeroed or represented simply by the enclitic nya. Lexical
nouns are for the most part non-agents, such as patients, indirect objects,
and obliques of various kinds. If there is a lexical agent, this has a preposition
oleh, 'by'. But it will be noticed that lexical agents are relatively few
and far between; some examples of them are:
In example (5), there are two lexical nouns, an agent oleh ikan itu 'by
the fish', and an absolutive, tangan nya 'her hand', and the verb is di-kebaskan
'shock, jolt [her]'. In example (6), the agentive phrase is oleh buaya 'by
a crocodile', and the patient is zero, being continued from the previous
clause; the verb is di-sembar 'snap [it] up'. Transitive agents which are
lexical nouns, such as buaya 'crocodile' in (6) above, take the preposition
oleh provided they are specific participants in the discourse. 'Specific'
usually means definite in the sense of having been referred to previously
in the discourse; but the noun may be new, as here, and its individuation
then depends on subsequent mentions in the discourse. Lexical agents which
are neither old nor subsequently mentioned - i.e., which do not qualify
as specific participants in the discourse - do not take oleh, as in:
where harimau 'tiger' is the lexical agent of di-makan 'eat (transitive)'.
These 'indefinite, non-specific' nouns, then, behave like agentive pronouns
in lacking the preposition and being placed immediately adjacent to the
verb stem.
Now the presence of an ergative preposition before a lexical agent is explained
by the Preferred Argument Structure. Lexical agents, being highly marked
in discourse terms, must receive a special indicator, in this case the agentive
preposition oleh. But indefinite-nonspecific lexical agents like harimau
'tiger' in (8) should not be exempt from case marking. On the contrary,
they are if anything even more highly marked as agents than definite specific
lexical agents. I return to this point in (iii) below.
Although most transitive agents are placed immediately after the verb in
the preferred clause unit, the lexical transitive agent may also appear
outside the clause, in very much the same way that we saw in Old English
that 'extra' NP's are placed outside the nuclear clause. Thus in the next
example the ergative agent is placed outside the clause in front of the
verb:
There are numerous examples of this 'extraposition' of the ergative; it
is especially found when a single lexical agent is shared by several subsequent
clauses, as here. The ergative phrase then has a domain which extends over
a number of clauses, and in fact has features of an independent clause in
its own right.
Now I want to suggest that this is exactly what is happening- that the prepositional
(lexical) ergative is emerging out of a 'serial verb' construction which
sometimes re-appears in its original clausal form, in much the same way
that the English indefinite article sometimes appears in contexts where
its earlier specific sense is reflected. My reasons for saying this are
the following:
(i) That the 'preposition' oleh is verbal in origin is indisputable. Compound
forms of the verb still exist: beroleh 'to obtain', oleh-oleh 'something
brought back as a gift', and the modal boleh 'be able, be allowed to'. They
suggest a meaning like 'acquire, achieve, manage, accomplish' which seems
well within the typology of grammaticization of ergative prepositions out
of verbs.
(ii) The possible independence of the agentive clause from the action clause
is seen nicely in the next example (10), in which the verb is in the meng-
prefixed form rather than the di- form ('passive') otherwise invariably
found with the ergative:
The sense that the argument 'Grandpre' is shared between two clauses in
a serial fashion is striking.
(iii) As previously noted, the agent of the ergative with oleh is always
definite or specific. In other words, the lexical agent with oleh retains
characteristics of a topic/agent, and no doubt reflects an original definiteness
constraint on agent/topics. By contrast, lexical agents which are non-specific
were never appropriate topics of oleh, while non-lexical (i.e., pronominal)
agents were always cliticized to the main verb.
(iv) When the ergative agent is separated from the action clause, the action
clause usually also has the clitic agentive -nya, that is, the agent is
referred to twice, as in example (9). This is exactly the same as when an
agent is introduced in a previous sepa-rate clause and referred to again.
This is of course an example of grammaticization of the classical kind which
has often been noticed in the literature. What I have wanted to stress here
is the need to understand not only the formal process but the way in which
that formal process emerges from a discourse context, in other words, is
anchored in particu-lar, concrete utterances. It is this 'prior textuality'
of the construction which explains why it has retained properties of a separate,
external clause. What we see emerging, then, is a new strategy for permitting
a lexical agent to be incorporated into a nuclear clause under certain contextual
conditions, presumably in-volving differences of topic continuity.
4. Conclusion
I conclude this paper with some syllogisms, extrapolated from the first
couple of pages of Radford's textbook on transformational syntax. References,
with emphasis as in the original, are to Radford 1981:
"What is a grammar of a language? Chomsky gives an essentially mentalist
answer to this question: for him a grammar is a model (=systematic description)
of those linguistic abilities of the native speaker of a language which
enable him to speak and un-derstand this language fluently. ... Thus a grammar
of a language is a model of the linguistic competence of the fluent native
speaker of the language." (p. 2)
"...in the case of a sentence such as:
it is the native speaker's grammatical competence (his knowledge of the
grammar of his language) which tells him that he cannot be interpreted as
referring to the same person as John in (1)." (p. 3)
Some Syllogisms
[1A] A grammar of a language is a model of the linguistic competence of
the fluent native speaker of the language.
[1B] A model is a systematic description.
THEREFORE:
[1C] A grammar of a language is a systematic description of the linguistic
competence of the fluent native speaker of the language.
[2A] Grammatical competence is the native speaker's knowledge of the grammar
of his language.
[2B] (= [1C]) A grammar of a language is a systematic description of the
linguistic competence of the fluent native speaker of the language.
THEREFORE:
[2C] Grammatical competence is the native speaker's knowledge of a systematic
description of the linguistic competence of the fluent native speaker of
the language.
[3A] "...in the case of a sentence such as:
(1) He thinks that John is wrong
it is the native speaker's grammatical competence (his knowledge of the
grammar of his language) which tells him that he cannot be interpreted as
referring to the same person as John in (1)." (p. 3)
[3B] = [2C] Grammatical competence is the native speaker's knowledge of
a systematic description of the linguistic competence of the fluent native
speaker of the language.
THEREFORE:
[3C] ... in the case of a sentence such as:
(1) He thinks that John is wrong
it is the native speaker's knowledge of a systematic description of the
linguistic competence of a fluent native speaker of the language which tells
him that he cannot be interpreted as referring to the same person as John
in (1).
It will be seen that 'grammar' begins life on page 2 in its theoretically
correct style, as a 'model' of the native speaker's 'linguistic competence'.
But notice that by page 3, 'grammar' is suddenly no longer a linguist's
construct, a formal characterization of the abilities presumed to underlie
the speaker's behavior, but the knowledge itself. It has gone from a linguist's
theory to something the speaker possesses. One would not blame Radford,
were it not that formal grammarians are quick to castigate discourse linguists
for alleged 'confusion' over the notion of 'grammar', and often accuse them
of not understanding this supposedly elementary concept.
There is no question that 'grammar' is an infuriatingly elusive notion,
and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what 'grammar' is in
the sense of being able to give an abstract definition of it, but quite
another to apply that definition consistently in practice. This asymmetry
suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate,
relative to the observer, to those involved in the speech situation, and
to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also
that we need to question the supposition of a mentally represented set of
rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I
quoted earlier, that speakers possess an abstract linguistic system ready
and waiting to be drawn upon - 'accessed'! - in case they should ever need
to speak.
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Footnotes