flemmings | (no subject)

My father had a theory, based on personal experience, that all clockmakers go mad, or at least intensely strange. My papyrology professor said that all papyrologists go mad, or at least intensely strange, and this may or may not happen before they go blind. In both cases I assume the strangeness (and in papyrologists, the blindness) comes from constant attention to tiny finicky details. After reading this article on the passive, I wonder if the same isn't true of grammarians.

Don't get me wrong. It's a useful article. It's just not phrased in layman's language, the sort that might convince people that 'he is running' is in fact *not* a passive. Maybe I'm just fuzzy today, but when I sat down for a nice exposition on the passive and was at once presented with "English has a contrast between kinds of clause in which one kind has the standard mapping between grammatical subject and semantic role and the other switches those roles around," my mind went on stall. I shall keep it bookmarked in case my brain unstalls at some point, but I'm not sanguine.

Otherwise, a fast romp through FMA 17-21 (In English; it would not have been a fast romp in Japanese) leaves me, yes, jonesing for more. Library has 23&24. Were it not windy and snow squalling outside, and were my knees and shoulder not yelling at me for walking home over the ice floes yesterday (the bitty steps needed to negotiate corrugated ice lead to a lot of twinge twinge stab stab), I'd go buy 22 and get the next two volumes from Spadina. Patience, patience. My love affair with Olivier Armstrong can wait till next week.

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That has been, generally, my experience of linguistics: you start out with something fairly straightforward, and then figure out that it breaks where there's an edge case, and you keep refining and refining your theory to deal with the edge cases until you arrive at something unbelievably complex. (Half of the study of English syntax is getting a theory to account for why you can say "He promised her to pick the flowers" and "He ordered her to pick the flowers" and in each case the person who picks the flowers is different.)

I can only figure out "the standard mapping between grammatical subject and semantic role" because I already know what it's supposed to mean.

What I don't know about linguistics would fill a very long shelf. Does it try to account for the vagaries of languages as they're spoken, or for Language with a capital L? Though actually, both cases strike me as an attempt to mold water into a coherent form...

I think the basic project of Chomsky-style linguistics requires that you account for both: they're trying to explain language as a human universal (and quite possibly a one that has a neurological basis), so a theory falls down if there's even one language or one dialect that doesn't do what you would predict.

And there's enough cases where languages don't fit comfortably into the theory that it calls into question whether or not there really IS a "universal grammar," but what's so interesting is how much of language does fit into a coherent form despite the weird edge cases. (Going to McGill I was basically only exposed to the pro-Chomsky side of things, so I'm not particularly qualified to talk here.)