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LESSON SIX
Prequel
I had almost no feedback after Lesson Five; that worries me. If it was
because you were all swamped with end-of-the-year tasks....exams or
taxes, for example....that's okay. If it was because you were all taking
well-earned vacations on tropical islands, that's okay too. But if it was
because you perceived Lesson Five as defective, that's most definitely
not okay. If it's a quality control problem, you have to tell me; otherwise,
I can't possibly fix it.
Introduction
Although when you study languages you learn scores of rules (often with
scores of "exceptions" and "irregularities"), all human languages have
only four kinds of rules: deletion rules; insertion rules; substitution
rules; and movement rules. (When you read somewhere that there are
only three kinds of rules, it's because the writer is defining deletion as
the insertion of zero. That's legitimate, but it creates confusion.) If ever
you are analyzing a language and you come across any other kind of
grammar rule, you can safely assume that the language in question is
extraterrestrial. Students always ask me, "But what other kind of rule
could there be? I can't think of anything else!", and I tell them that that's
precisely the point. For the human brain, languages are specified as
having no more than four kinds of rules, and the four kinds are deletion,
insertion, substitution, and movement. This is true for all parts of the
grammar -- phonology, morphology, syntax, etc. -- separately and in
combination. (You might want to try imagining an ET language that lacks
one or more of the Terran processes, and see what you come up with.)
Let's assume that -- however linguists want to express it formally --
there is some point in the life of a human thought at which the speaker
is aware of the thought about to be spoken but hasn't yet given it a
surface shape. We'll call that stage "deep structure" for convenience,
although the term is out of fashion in contemporary lingustics. The
beginning and ending of a deep structure will always be marked with a
pound symbol. Here's an example of each kind of rule in action.
1. Deletion
2. Insertion
a. #is raining#
b. It is raining.
3. Substitution
4. Movement
a. #I hate eggplant#
b. Eggplant I hate.
Deletion Rules
When a deep structure undergoes a rule (or rules) and the end result is a
sequence that can be spoken, the rule has transformed the sequence.
Because no transformational rule can ever be allowed to change
meaning, deletion rules can only be of two kinds.
5a. #if the Venusians say they will explain their warp drive,
they will explain their warp drive#
5b. "If the Venusians say they will explain their warp drive,
they will."
Examples 5a and 5b demonstrate the kind of deletion called
"deletion under identity," where we understand a chunk of language --
even though it's not there on the surface -- because it's identical to a
chunk that is present on the surface.
You could construct a deep structure like "If the Venusians say they
will explain their warp drive, they will only be lying" and delete "only be
lying"; you have a perfect moral right to do so, and I'll defend that right.
However, when you said the resulting sequence aloud -- "If the
Venusians say they will explain their warp drive, they will" -- you would
have no right to expect that anyone would understand your sentence as
ending with "only be lying." The deletion rule you're using allows the
deletion of everything that follows the second "will," if and only if
everything from "will" on is identical in both parts of the sentence.
Insertion Rules
7.b. "It is raining cats and dogs." (Usually "It's raining cats and
dogs.")
This also happens in some other situations in which the surface
subject position in the sentence is vacant. For example, the "it" in
sentences like 8a and 8b doesn't refer to any actual (or even any
hypothetical) "it."
8.a. "It's clear that linguistics is a useful subject."
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