Teacher Discussion Forums

To all those who remember Londo Molari, who was so in love with Amorey Gethin that I accused him of being that person, did you ever read Gethin's exchange with Pullum about his book "Anti-linguistics"?


http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J91/J91-2008.pdf


http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J92/J92-2006.pdf

This Gethin article sounds like one that I would like to write, but unfortunately I can't access it.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... ves--.html

By the way, the great thing about Pullum is that he cares enough about the truth to engage with renegades.

Pullum, in his review of Gethin's book, wrote:When by chance Gethin gets hold of the linguistic ball for a moment, he unfailingly drops it. For example, asserting that all ambiguity is lexical ambiguity, he claims (p. 25) that Flying planes can be dangerous is only ambiguous "because '-ing' has more than one meaning" (the wrong morpheme to pick, of course; if he had located the ambiguity in the transitive/intransitive contrast in fly, he might have gotten a few people to listen).

(from the first pdf that Woody linked to ( http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J91/J91-2008.pdf ))

Gethin, replying in a letter to the editor of the same journal, wrote:In the only case where Pullum really attempts a proper discussion of the material (to show that "when by chance Gethin gets hold of the linguistic ball for a moment he unfailingly drops it") his criticism is typical of the barren formality that I complain of: I should have located the ambiguity of Flying planes can be dangerous in the transitive/intransitive contrast in fly, not in -ing. He thus abandons reality, the words actually used, for the sake of an abstraction. And I am not simply insisting on a principle here, for in the process Pullum gets it wrong. The transitive/intransitive difference in the meanings of -ing is not the crucial one, and may not be there at all, as can be seen in, for example, The burning sun.../Burning wood (is wasteful), where (burn)ing is transitive in both cases, but has different meanings. At the same time I cannot think of any sentence where there would be any transitive/intransitive confusion through the use of an infinitive, indicative, or imperative. Can Pullum?

(from the second pdf that Woody linked to ( http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/J/J92/J92-2006.pdf ))

'Flying planes can be dangerous' - rather than try to analyse it too much, I think I'd say, 'I don't think competent pilots would ever say that - it's more like simply a big responsibility - and crashing planes/planes crashing probably aren't ever their fault either. But probably we'd all, pilots and passenger public alike, agree that planes pure and simple (especially non-flying/non-airborne, taxiing ones - surely more intransitive than transitive, not that 'taxiing' needs to be necessarily stated either) can indeed be a danger.' So I'd look around for some genuine(ly) ambiguous sentences, make the grammar one from which you could learn something about the actual language "too". (It's helpful being an EFL teacher sometimes!).

Hmm, Gethin's somehow given me a thought: 'the flying plane(s)'. A 'the' makes it an intransitive (right? LOL), but that would hardly be a revelation to trainee linguists grappling (not grappling trainee linguists!) now with things apparently more pressing or interesting (or just plain "fun") than stuff like boring old countability.

Oh, I have never seen the point of finding real world examples of the same species as made up ones.

"Flying planes can be dangerous".

I can't grasp Gethin's point unless he feels that "flying" is more than the sum of the parts, and that the final meaning is not located anywhere. Box + ed and Knife + ed are not quite the same. And where is the past (or remote, if you like) meaning located in "swam"?

I like his attack on page number pedantry. I recently went to an ESL conference and endured a talk on "writing up your research" which was at least 50% about putting the right commas and capitals and italics in the references. The speaker seemed to think this was very important for getting a good grade, and fervently supported the situation.

P.S Pullum has censored my own posts at LL more than once and called Gethin a knucklehead in the above links. It the wonderful world of linguistics, he still counts as someone relatively prepared to engage with opposite points of view......