And:
>Take "How are you?" or "How are you doing" as fixed expressions.
>Even if they weren't fixed expressions those sentences would still exist,
>because they're built by the rest of the grammar. The same is not true
>for "God save the Queen", and hence I see it as being a genuine
>construction, a structure that would not exist but for the existence of
>the construction.
## I still don't really understand the contrast you're making. Why can't we
say that the grammar contains a pattern "God save X!" (where X = a member
of royalty)? I think you agreed that the patterns in the grammar may be of
different degrees of generality.

>
>Try this analogy. Language as chess (as usual). You can remember a chess
>game as an abstract series of moves. Or you can remember an actual game,
>with the players, the mood, the setting, and so on. With sufficient
experience
>of actual games you can think of particular types of move or move-sequence
>as 'aggressive', 'timid', 'desperate', 'typically Estonian', or whatever.
All that
>is independent of the abstract rules of chess.
>
>I think it's worth separating the abstract rules of chess out from the rest,
>mainly because it allows us to understand the abstract game better.
## I actually think that chess is a bad analogy precisely because the rules
are so clearly different from the strategies. The rules are unchanging,
heavily codified, deliberately invented and taught by explicit instruction;
you can learn them in an afternoon. The strategies evolve, aren't codified
in the same way, are acquired by experience, etc. Moreover chess is
competitive, so success depends entirely on defeating the other person,
whereas language is cooperative and success depends on communication. You
can speak French well if you can do it without breaking any of the rules,
but playing chess without breaking any of the rules doesn't count as
playing it well.

>### I've forgotten your conjoinability evidence - perhaps you can remind us.
>
>*"What's he doing here and doing sitting reading that newspaper?"
## Yes, I agree this is pretty bad, but maybe it's easy to explain
pragmatically: "doing" carries no extra meaning so it's redundant and just
adds to complexity compared with the synonymous (a) (which strikes me as ok).
(a)     What's he doing here and sitting reading that newspaper?

>I'm thinking that a better slogan than "constructions all the way down" might
>be "stylistics all the way up" -- the knowledge that subjects precede verbs
>is simply a more general variety of the knowledge that words A and B
>cooccur with salient frequency in genre/register C when said by an older
>female to a younger socially superior male. (i.e. subjects precede verbs
with
>100% frequencey in all genres/registers.)
## That sounds pretty good to me!

>
>This is not at all the same position as one that says that The-More-The-More
>is generated by rules of the same sort as, but greater specificity than,
those
>that generate, say, subject+verb.
## Ah, now you've lost me again.

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