Dcik:
> And:
> Bingo - you've hit the nail on the head. So how do we gather data against
> this kind of background? If we could present a really well-founded
> data-set, then it would be a break-through to demonstrate that WG can
> reflect all the details and subtleties.

I've been thinking about how to get the data. For large numbers of
informants, say 150, I'd have to ask mainly first year undergrads,
but there's too great a risk that they'd be either too prescriptive
or too permissive, depending on the sort of instructions they're
given. Consequently it seems better to rely on a detailed study of
the idiolects of a few individuals. What do you think?

--And.



Dick


At 15:31 30/01/2001 +0000, you wrote:
>Jasp:
>> >   The problem is, is the amount of debt she's now in.
>> FWIW, my corpus research yielded no examples like the first (which is of
>> course not the same as saying it can't be done).
>
>The problem one faces with constructions is that while everyone agrees on
>the core cases that are familiar from usage, people disagree on noncore
>instances of the construction. For instance, everyone agrees that "Into
>the room ran a dog" is okay, but people diagree about whether "Into the
>room had run a dog" is. My take on this is as follows.
>
>We analyse grammatical constructions (a) inductively and (b) conservatively
>(in a pinkerian sense of being disinclined to infer grammars that generate
>structures we have not encountered in usage). This means firstly that we
>can analyse the same data differently, and secondly that we can analyses
>the data in broadly similar ways but relatively more or less conservatively
>(i.e. we disagree on how many special restrictions there are on the
onstruction). I don't know of any definite examples of fundamentally
>different analyses, but a hypothetical example would be be-inversion
>("Equally courageous was Sophy"), which on the basis of only that data
>could be analysed either as aux-inversion or as verb-inversion (I think in
>fact everyone would agree it's verb inversion). An example of different
>degrees of restriction is whether locative inversion is restricted to
>tensed verbs (though perhaps different answers to this could lead to quite
>profoundly different analyses of even the core cases). (I tend to find
that compared to other linguists, my judgements reveal a less restricted,
less conservative analysis.)
>
>This is complicated when
>
>(i) The construction is rare, e.g.
>
>     High fly her hopes.
>     August a syntactician she may be, but ...
>
>(ii) It is genuinely dialectal, e.g.
>
>    That's stupid, is that.
>
>(iii) It is new, e.g.
>
>     I'm so going to get drunk.
>
>(iv) It is confined to a spoken register, and so confined to usage full of
>performance error.
>
>With the constructions we've been discussing, these problems are
>quite acute. It seems especially mistaken here to adopt the usual
>fiction that there is a uniform English that judgements from different
>speakers are informing us about. That fiction works only for the
>core about which speakers agree in their judgements. We have
>to deal with the periphery on an idiolect-by-idiolect basis.
>
>Needless to say, because WG has no metatheory about what is
>a possible grammar and because the isa-hierarchy is so good
>at representing different degrees of specialness and exceptionality,
>WG is especially useful in representing this idiolectal variation
>involving different degrees of conservatism.
>
>--And.
>
>

Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm