Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on November 06, 2006 04:16 AM
Your linguistic education seems to have had some fundamental deficiencies.
In pragmatic grammar (as opposed to case grammar), the subject of a transitive verb is the agent that performs some act upon the patient or direct object of the verb. Dog [agent] bites [verb] man [patient].
Except when it's not so, right? To put it technically, one of the fundamental insights of grammatical theory is distinguishing the concepts of (a) the semantic role played by a participant in the situation described by a clause (agent, experiencer, recipient, etc.) from (b) the grammatical function that an argument to the clause's verb fills (subject, direct object, oblique object, etc.). This is because the relationship between these two aspects of grammatical organization is far from being one-to-one ("The garden swarms with bees," anybody?), is in fact variable across languages even in pretty drastic ways (syntactic ergativity à la Australian aboriginal languages like Djirbal), and can get really damn complicated (as in split ergativity, one of the hottest areas of research).
And this of couse pales with the fact that you invoke your linguistics education to somehow justify your issuance of usage prescriptions, and to propose what amounts to typical layperson superstition about language use (that by reforming language use, somehow, people's non-linguistic actions will magically improve). Nice, huh?
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on November 06, 2006 04:16 AMYour linguistic education seems to have had some fundamental deficiencies.
In pragmatic grammar (as opposed to case grammar), the subject of a transitive verb is the agent that performs some act upon the patient or direct object of the verb. Dog [agent] bites [verb] man [patient].
Except when it's not so, right? To put it technically, one of the fundamental insights of grammatical theory is distinguishing the concepts of (a) the semantic role played by a participant in the situation described by a clause (agent, experiencer, recipient, etc.) from (b) the grammatical function that an argument to the clause's verb fills (subject, direct object, oblique object, etc.). This is because the relationship between these two aspects of grammatical organization is far from being one-to-one ("The garden swarms with bees," anybody?), is in fact variable across languages even in pretty drastic ways (syntactic ergativity à la Australian aboriginal languages like Djirbal), and can get really damn complicated (as in split ergativity, one of the hottest areas of research).
And this of couse pales with the fact that you invoke your linguistics education to somehow justify your issuance of usage prescriptions, and to propose what amounts to typical layperson superstition about language use (that by reforming language use, somehow, people's non-linguistic actions will magically improve). Nice, huh?
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