ORCHID LAND PUBLICATIONS
© 1996-2003, 2005, 2007 by Orchid Land Publications
(updated 20070908, most recently 20090609)
CLICK FOR BASICS OF ENGLISH USAGE: VERBS & PRONOUNS
See also (click link): "Can you think grammatically?"
READERS WHO ARE NEW TO THIS WEBSITE MAY WISH
TO PERUSE
L92 AND THEN L45 AS A WAY OF
INTRODUCING THEMSELVES
TO MATERIALS ON OTHER PAGES
If you
have a question, please post it to
Orchid Land Publications, HCR1 Box 5740,
Kea'au, HI 96749 USA; or email it:
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What is the difference between
linguists and those who know Good English is a matter of structural PRINCIPLES, and should be discussed in those terms; it is not about how YOU use it or FEEL about it, let alone how grammar is spoken of in grammar books by writers who do not understand the character of English grammar speak of it |
CLICK HERE FOR WEBPAGE OF TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN
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Some of the items listed here as available from Orchid Land Publications or as projected in the series of publications on general linguistics and on English grammar are offered as paperbacks. Some are to be offered on CD-ROM, which can be downloaded and printed out chapter by chapter. (The search program of your word processor functions better than any index; but one can make one's own index with the appropriate program as one reads along on the computer.) |
|
PLEASE NOTE that the publications that can be downloaded from this site are free; see those in the index. You are requested to keep the copyright notice on anything downloaded. If you wish to distribute any item, say for university classroom use, please do so through the CCC by clicking on the following icon:
While the foregoing agency should be resorted to for reproducing and/or distributing materials copyrighted by Orchid Land Publications, no permission is needed for fair-use quotations under prevailing copyright laws or for printing out cost-free online articles from this website for private reading. For in-Church distributions other than items appearing on opR138.html, permission should be sought directly from directly from Orchid Land Publications. |
|
In response to requests about how to cite pages on this site, the following is suggested: http://orlapubs.org/ORLAPUBS-L/L81.html (updated 20020000). |
|
FOR THE APPROACH TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR It is clear that English grammar comes from that of the ruling classes of Norman England, while the sounds and the few inflections came from the speech of the Anglo-Saxon underclasses─a typical development at the birth of a new language. The productive morphological formatives came mostly from the Old French of the Normans, though a few Anglo-Saxon formatives are productive and compete with Romance-derived forma-tives. Thus, A-S -ness competes with -ity and other nominalizers of Romance provenance, whereas other A-S formatives like -en in soften are not productive;-ize, -ify, and other Romance-derived formatives (-ize is ultimately from Greek) are still productive (in this examples) causative formatives. |
SMALL BOOK IN PREPARATION WITH A WHOLLY NEW
CONCEPT
OF ENGLISH GRAMMAR (TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON):
RETHINKING
CASE AND TENSE IN ENGLISH GRAMMAR
FREE ONLINE BOOKLETS
These will take a while to come up!
ONLINE ESSAYS
|
Do you know that there is a difference─of goals and of most of
the current analytical methods─in linguistics and in scientific (i.e.
explanatory-predictive) grammar? N. Chomsky, the originator of
truly scientific linguistics has from the outset worked toward understanding
the universal (innate) language faculty in the human brain─its
evolution and analysis for language and cognition. Linguistics has
accordingly evolved to become one of the main branches of cognitive science
(the name of the department in many universities where linguistics is
researched). Idio-lectal data from many languages are used by Chomsky;
language variation and variation within a language have often seemed of
little interest to Chomskians, some of whom seem seem to have deduced from
Chomsky's entirely valid assumption that language is in the brain (not
"out there" in society or geography) is a premise that precludes
studying variation (say of English) in the brain. A virtual, invariant
English or "my dialect" has sufficed for many researchers.
The Chomskian program is minimalist in the sense of getting rid of rules, or
rather of subsuming them under--and predicting them with--principles of
the brain and of language and parameter settings. (An interested reader
can find a short summary in Science [published by the Association for
the Advancement of Science; vol. 298/no. 5598 of 20021102], pp. 1569-1579.) A CRUCIAL CONCEPT IN SOME APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE The concept of what is unmarked (default) or marked (not default) is both conceptualized on the basis of linguistic change and, conversely, makes predictions. The fundamental principles are: m → u / u & u → m / m where m is "marked"; u is "unmarked; the arrow means "changes into" or "becomes"; and what follows the slash represents the environment. A doubly marked environment reverse the direction of the arrow, but this re-reverses in a triply marked environment--one marked with respect to three factors. (Sometimes a logical curl is used for "not," so that ~ m ≡ u & ~ u ≡ m.) When we observe so-called neutralizations of lexical differences--the loss of the distinction between trash or litter and garbage in favor of the latter--the change of the former to the latter indicates that the latter is in some way less marked. (In classical languages, this kind of example is called pars pro toto; cf. referring to the number of "heads" of cattle tat someone has.) The principle can be overridden by "higher-level" considerations. The change of lie ("place") to lay does not seem to make a grammar better until one considers that lie also means "tell an untruth". This semantic interference combines with the formal oddity of changing lie to lay−−attested by the replacement of lay by laid, as in "I was so tired that I laid down for a couple of hours to catch up on lost sleep"−−leads to the more regular patter of lay : laid. Normally, a past form (more marked than the default infinitive) would dominate, but the factors just mention created a marked situation in which the directionality of change seems to get reversed. Actually, in a marked situation what is marked and what is unmarked get reversed in the sense that the change remains one in which the principle of what is more marked becomes less marked is maintained. Neutralizations of lexical items can also be illustrated in the reduction of woman to lady (i.e. replacing the difference between woman and lady with lady except in expressions like scrub woman) or of die with pass away--which (unlike the merger of human being with man) is more marked in terms of bulk alone!) because of social reasons. A taboo that marks a form may cause a change, as when cock is replaced by rooster--except in peacock. The common replacing of lie by lay is puzzling because the latter is more marked; a semantic interference from the other sense of lie may be operative. The use of good in place of the adverb well (as in They worked good and hard (there is no comparable difference, as expected by the theory, with marked badly occurs for grammatical reasons; The way irregular comparatives like better are replaced by superlatives like best reduces an irregularity (see below on markering) and makes the grammar more systematic (less irregular), but also indicates that the superlative is less marked than a comparative; cf. how some languages that have a (marked) subjunctive mode use it for comparatives but not for superlatives. Since plurality includes two as well as three, four, etc., the dual, ternal, and quartal numbers of the grammatical forms of nouns (and adjectives) some languages are increasingly marked and increasingly rare. The frequent replacement of whether by if shows that the latter is the less marked, seeing that the clauses begun by the former, an indirect question, and that begun by the latter (an assumption) are equally marked. Markedness should not be confused with markering--say, an inflection--though what is more marked is often more markered. Details must be left to be read in the reference above. |
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WHAT IS A GRAMMAR? The narrower import of the term has reference to syntax, the way words are put together in grammatical structures (normally represented by a tree with branches and sub-branches). I also includes how certain inflections match and indeed signal the structure. Grammar is not a list of rules (named for rules in Classical grammar that do not apply to English) but it is seeing how the dots are systematically connected. CLICK
HERE FOR THE NOTION OF CORRECTNESS |
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CLICK HERE FOR MEDIA GOOPHASMS SPEAKERS ON THE MEDIA WOULD BE WELL-ADVISED TO Algć is "aljee"―not "algee" or "aljay," let alone "algay"! When will we overcome using criteria and other plural forms as singulars? |
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THE TEMPORAL
BACKSHIFT FOR UNREALITY IS DEAD For "If it had happened that way yesterday," we hear"If it would've happened that way yesterday"; and for "I wish it had been so," we hear "I wish it would've been so." For some, forms of the exochronous
modality like arrives and finds I'll wait till she arrives. but also : It's important that it begins on time. where older speakers would say begin or should begin. Partly overlapping the foregoing is the
death of
THE PRESENT-ANTERIOR AND THE PAST-ANTERIOR MODALITIES One even hears "He did it up till
now" for has done; cf. "If she did it" for had
done; did is On the other hand, the complex
correct uses of yall (and yall's) as the
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You cannot understand grammar unless you know how to build it up
from its four building blocks. (See the button above for Eighteen
weekly lessons, &c.) |
|
Notice: Special fonts are used on some of these pages. Such pages are printed in .pdf format; they can be read by downloading the free Adobe Acrobat reader, which can be done by clicking on the icon when the relevant page is accessed. |
The
Angstomatic Linguist
by Mary Beth Clark
ALREADY PUBLISHED OR
FORTHCOMING SOON
|
Order through a bookstore. No credit cards are accepted for orders sent direction to Orchid Land Publications. Booksellers receive a 15% discoun. |
Linguistic series
ISBN 1-881309-02-9
|
Variation in the data: can linguistics ever become a science? 1992,
263 pages, $35.00, including book postage. |
|
This volume offers an extensive critique of the minilectal (synchronic-idiolectal) paradigm and also of Labovian variation analysis─which, incidentally, has little to do with variation theory─which is exponded in this volume. CLICK HERE FOR TABLE OF CONTENTS. |
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Available from the Oxford University Press is Essays on time-based linguistic analysis, 1992 423 pp. (Click the icon for the OUP Website.) |
|
What is time-based linguistic analysis? 1. The data are analysed in terms of the
grammar without regard to their distributions in space or society. That
grammar is ideolectal obvi-ously does not square with real language--the
presumed object of anal-ysis. This approach agrees with Chomsky that grammars are mental and internalized--not
"out there"--but disagrees with the ideolectal approach. A Glossary of terms used in this framework is found on pp. 369- 378) of the above book. |
|
Other books by the same author include:
Grundzüge der englischen Phonetologie: I. Allgemeine Systematik (with K. Maroldt; Technische Universităt Berlin [Deutschland])
English phonetic transcription (Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas at Arlington, 1985)
xxxxxxxxxx
and other volumes published by Georgetown University Press, the Center for Applied Linguistcs, Karoma Press, etc. See the Bibliography at the end of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis, for a list four and a half pages long of articles, booklets, and books by the author.
The following booklets are for grammar-teachers, showing how English can be better analysed if one abandons the idea (shown to be false in Ch. 10 of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis) that English is Germanic─a lineal descendent of Anglo-Saxon. The booklets can be order (no credit cards please!) from Orchid Land Publications:
Why more English instruction won't mean
better grammar. (Also
available from the US Department of Education's ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading
and Communication Skills, 2805 E. Tenth ST., Suite 150, Bloomington, IN
47408: ED 347 533 (42 pp.)
|
CLICK HERE for just about all you need to know
about English verb modalities. Note that English does not have modes
and tenses−let
alone a "present tense"−but an array of modalities: conditional, causative, passive, and so on |
How grammars of English have missed the
boat. Currently being
revised, the first version of this booklet is available on
this website. A sample of what is in this
by now old booklet:
|
Consider the difference between in and into in: --I put my money in my safe, but she put hers
into stocks and bonds. In typical examples, into signals an ontological or situational change—something very different from the change of place found in Germanic usage but not entirely lacking in affinities with French dans and en. |
|
But not in every one of the four classes of into-usage; see my Essays on time-based linguistic analysis, pp. 185-6. A non-motion example is look in (a place) vs. look into (a matter). Consider why Germans speaking English say “involve into” as well as “evolve into”—and English distinctions between fit in and fit into, fall in [a hole] and fall [into error], and the like. The difference between divide in half and divide into two parts is unexplained. |
Also available on this website is "How
grammars of English have miscued," originally published in the Lehmann
Festschrift edited by E. Polomé, reproduced her in a revised
version with the publisher's permission.
Various other booklets are planned, including a short
grammar of Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu.
Long in preparation is a large phonetics book titled Southern States phonetics.
Hits on this website from 1998.11.22
till 20050525
|
333,722 |
READERS
WHO ARE NEW TO THIS WEBSITE MAY
WISH TO PERUSE L92 AND THEN L45
AS A
WAY OF INTRODUCING THEMSELVES
TO MATERIALS ON OTHER PAGES
FREE ONLINE BOOKLETS
These will take a while to
come up!
|
Some of the items listed here as available from Orchid Land Publications or as projected in the series of publications on general linguistics and on English grammar are offered as paperbacks. Some are to be offered on CD-ROM, which can be downloaded and printed out chapter by chapter. (The search program of your word processor functions better than any index; but one can make one's own index with the appropriate program as one reads along on the computer.) |
|
PLEASE NOTE that the publications that can be downloaded from this site are free; see those in the index. You are requested to keep the copyright notice on anything downloaded. If you wish to distribute any item, say for university classroom use, please do so through the CCC by clicking on the following icon:
While the foregoing agency should be resorted to for reproducing and/or distributing materials copyrighted by Orchid Land Publications, no permission is needed for fair-use quotations under prevailing copyright laws or for printing out cost-free online articles from this website for private reading. For in-Church distributions other than items appearing on opR138.html, permission should be sought directly from directly from Orchid Land Publications. |
|
In response to requests about how to cite pages on this site, the following is suggested: http://orlapubs.org/ORLAPUBS-L/L81.html (updated 20020000). |
|
FOR THE APPROACH TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR It is clear that English grammar comes from that of the ruling classes of Norman England, while the sounds and the few inflections came from the speech of the Anglo-Saxon underclasses─a typical development at the birth of a new language. The productive morphological formatives came mostly from the Old French of the Normans, though a few Anglo-Saxon formatives are productive and compete with Romance-derived forma-tives. Thus, A-S -ness competes with -ity and other nominalizers of Romance provenance, whereas other A-S formatives like -en in soften are not productive;-ize, -ify, and other Romance-derived formatives (-ize is ultimately from Greek) are still productive (in this examples) causative formatives. |
ONLINE ESSAYS
|
Do you know that there is a difference─of goals and of most of
the current analytical methods─in linguistics and in scientific (i.e.
explanatory-predictive) grammar? N. Chomsky, the originator of
truly scientific linguistics has from the outset worked toward understanding
the universal (innate) language faculty in the human brain─its
evolution and analysis for language and cognition. Linguistics has
accordingly evolved to become one of the main branches of cognitive science
(the name of the department in many universities where linguistics is
researched). Idio-lectal data from many languages are used by Chomsky;
language variation and variation within a language have often seemed of
little interest to Chomskians, some of whom seem seem to have deduced from
Chomsky's entirely valid assumption that language is in the brain (not
"out there" in society or geography) is a premise that precludes
studying variation (say of English) in the brain. A virtual, invariant
English or "my dialect" has sufficed for many researchers.
The Chomskian program is minimalist in the sense of getting rid of rules, or
rather of subsuming them under--and predicting them with--principles of
the brain and of language and parameter settings. (An interested reader
can find a short summary in Science [published by the Association for
the Advancement of Science; vol. 298/no. 5598 of 20021102], pp. 1569-1579.) |
|
WHAT IS A GRAMMAR The narrower import of the term has reference to syntax, the way words are put together in grammatical structures (normally represented by a tree with branches and sub-branches). I also includes how certain inflections match and indeed signal the structure. CLICK HERE FOR THE CORRECT USE THE TERM DIALECT |
This LINK
will take you to a worthwhile site
concerned with avoiding common mistakes
|
You cannot understand grammar unless you know how to build it up
from its four building blocks. (See the button above for Eighteen
weekly lessons, &c.) |
The
Angstomatic Linguist
by Mary Beth Clark
ALREADY PUBLISHED OR
FORTHCOMING SOON
|
Order through a bookstore. No credit cards are accepted for orders sent direction to Orchid Land Publications. Booksellers receive a 15% discoun. |
Linguistic series
ISBN 1-881309-02-9
|
Variation
in the data: can linguistics ever become a science? |
|
This volume offers an extensive critique of the minilectal (synchronic-idiolectal) paradigm and also of Labovian variation analysis─which, incidentally, has little to do with variation theory─which is exponded in this volume. CLICK HERE FOR TABLE OF CONTENTS. |
|
|
Available from the Oxford University Press is 423 pp. (Click the icon for the OUP Website.) |
|
What is time-based linguistic analysis? 1. The data are analysed in terms of the
grammar without regard to their distributions in space or society. That
grammar is ideolectal obvi-ously does not square with real language--the
presumed object of anal-ysis. This approach agrees with Chomsky that grammars are mental and internalized--not
"out there"--but disagrees with the ideolectal approach. A Glossary of terms used in this framework is found on pp. 369- 378) of the above book. |
|
Other books by the same author include:
Grundzüge der englischen Phonetologie: I. Allgemeine Systematik (with K. Maroldt; Technische Universităt Berlin [Deutschland])
English phonetic transcription (Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas at Arlington, 1992)
and other volumes published by Georgetown University Press, the Center for Applied Linguistcs, Karoma Press, etc. See the Bibliography at the end of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis, for a list four and a half pages long of articles, booklets, and books by the author.
The following booklets are for grammar-teachers, showing how English can be better analysed if one abandons the idea (shown to be false in Ch. 10 of Essays on time-based linguistic analysis) that English is Germanic─a lineal descendent of Anglo-Saxon. The booklets can be order (no credit cards please!) from Orchid Land Publications:
Why more English instruction won't mean better grammar. (Also available from the US Department of Education's ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 2805 E. Tenth ST., Suite 150, Bloomington, IN 47408: ED 347 533 (42 pp.)
How grammars of English have missed the boat. Currently being revised, the first version of this booklet is available on this website.
Also available on
this website is "How grammars of English have miscued,"
originally published in the Lehmann Festschrift edited by E. Polomé, reproduced her in a revised version with the publisher's
permission.
Various other booklets are planned, including a short
grammar of Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu.
Long in preparation is a large phonetics book titled Southern States phonetics.
Hits on this website from 1998.11.22
till 20050525
|
333,722 |