Re: genes and language (Homer, Richard Dawkins)

From: Peter T. Daniels (grammatim_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 01/01/05 

Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 13:37:41 GMT

Franz Gnaedinger wrote:

> Reply to Peter T. Daniels, my line of research
> -
> I am indepted to Pater Rupert Ruhstaller OSB
> who gave me private lessons in linguistics
> when I was a teenager. He told me that the
> rules of language as established by linguists
> are constantly broken by speakers. How come?
> Those rules are too narrow, which is why the
> speakers are breaking them, whereas they are
> always true to language itself. I follow this
> line of research. Speakers will always break
> the rules of language as I learned them in
> school and find them in books, while they are
> true to the basic aim and purpose of language
> as I formulated it in 1974/75: trying to get
> the help and understanding of those on whom
> we depend in one way or another. It is my firm
> belief that reformulating the laws of language
> from this basis will result in better rules
> than the ones we have today. As the study of
> bacteria is sheding new light on human biology.

The good Father made the same mistake as my teacher, Robert A. Hall, Jr.
(though the latter's was presumably willful): confusing the prescriptive
"rules" of "grammar books" with the descriptive "rules" arrived at by
observation and analysis by linguists in the tradition of Boas, Kroeber,
Sapir, and Bloomfield -- the tradition in which Chomsky developed his
"transformational rules," a technique that was given up about a decade
after it had been introduced, as more general principles were
discovered. 

-- 
Peter T. Daniels                       grammatim@att.net

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