Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Dave Washburn" <dwashbur AT nyx.net>]

Peter,
I think we're talking right past each other.  See below.
> 
> Thank you, Dave, for your interesting comments and your time taken on 
> this. I was of course not trying to say that there is no place for 
> understanding the word and clause level. But I hope no-one's 
> understanding of art stops at the brush-stroke level. Let me answer 
> some specific points below.

And of course I wasn't saying there's no place for understanding at 
the discourse level.  However, discourses are built out of clauses; 
some clauses in any language are grammatical and some are not, 
and the question for the transformational grammarian is, why?  This 
has to be answered at the clause level, not the discourse level, 
because no amount of discourse study is going to tell me why "my 
dog ate jump tomorrow" is not a grammatically well-formed clause.  
I have to look at the grammatical rules that generate English 
clauses to determine that.

> ______________________________ Reply Separator 
> _________________________________
> Subject: Re[3]: WP
> Author:  dwashbur AT nyx.net at internet
> Date:    26/01/1999 17:28
> 
> 
> DW: Again,
> the real question is "what am I trying to accomplish when I listen 
> to/examine this work?"
> 
> PK: Well, if you want to study techniques of harmony etc maybe you 
> don't need to look at the higher level. But if you want to understand 
> the overall message of the composer, you need to examine the work as a 
> whole and not just its parts. The latter is the better analogy to the 
> interest I have in the Hebrew Bible.

Agreed.  That's why I mentioned form.  However, in music, form is 
built out of smaller parts, all of which contribute.  If one part of that 
form, say a transition in sonata-allegro form, is badly formed or 
musically unsound, it can throw off the rest of the composition.  
OTOH, there are some examples, like the development section of 
Beethoven's 3rd symphony in the first movement, where a skilled 
composer can get away with violating the form somewhat (in this 
case, Beethoven actually introduced a completely new melodic 
theme in the development section, which was supposed to be a no-
no).  Likewise, a skilled poet or prose writer can introduce a 
grammatically ill-formed clause into a discourse and make it work 
for the sake of certain effects; the problem is that discourse 
analysis can't tell us whether or why that one clause is not well-
formed; for that we have to drop to the clause level.

> PK: > Do you really understand real utterances in your own language, 
> say > what your family members say to you, on a word-by-word basis?
> 
> DW: Sometimes not even then ;-)  The difference, of course, is that 
> the language they speak is also my native language and I've already 
> coded the intuitions about the rules it uses to generate clauses 
> into my brain cells.  We don't have anybody like that with BH,...
> 
> PK: Well, I am assuming a basic knowledge of Hebrew grammar and 
> vocabulary in parallel with discourse studies; but not the sort of 
> argument I have heard in which we are expected to answer every 
> question at the clause level before even considering discourse.

I didn't say every question, and I apologize if it sounded that way.  
Of course we use discourse to tell us how various types of clauses 
were (are) used to build bigger units.  But that's precisely my point: 
this presupposes that we know all we need to know about those 
various types of clauses, and in Hebrew (since we don't have any 
native speakers) we haven't reached that point.  So I'm suggesting 
that we need to answer more of the questions still pending about 
the nature of individual clauses before our discourse analysis has a 
solid basis on which to stand.  We can attempt discourse analysis 
based on the current state of things, of course, but IMO the results 
are far from assured because we're building on assumptions as 
much as anything else.  Does that help?

> DW: My goal is to find the rules for BH that generated all and only the 
> grammatical sentences in the language.
> I don't think that we can analyze the larger discourse units properly 
> unless and until we understand the generating and filtering system 
> that excluded nongrammatical clauses from the native speaker's
> mental grammar.
> 
> PK: A great goal. I would rather say "discourses" than "sentences", 

No, because as far as I know nobody has posited such a thing as 
an "ungrammatical" or "grammatically ill-formed" discourse.  
Grammatical (syntactic) ill-formedness happens at the clause level, 
not the discourse level.

> but of course that changes it from a very difficult task into an 
> impossible one! To my mind, the problem with this approach is that 
> the filtering system is not just within the clause but also comes 
> down from the discourse level. Maybe you are thinking of separate 
> clause level and discourse level filters. But in fact (thinking of 
> English) I suspect that if you try to filter out at the clause level 
> only those sentences which could not be valid in any discourse 
> context (including a conversation between people who have a very 
> high level of shared background knowledge e.g. between husband and 
> wife), you would be left with a very weak filter. (Or none at all if 
> you allow the context "The following sentence is invalid: ..." ;-) )

Here's where I think we're talking past each other.  "The tree are 
fly" is not ill-formed because of a discourse filter, it's ill-formed 
because it violates several clause-level grammatical rules.  Or take 
another example, this one from Spanish: we take the clause 
"Usted tiene el libro."  If I want to make this into a question, I don't 
do it by putting it into a different discourse context, I do it by 
changing the word order: "?Tiene usted el libro?"  [note: I know the 
inverted question mark is around here somewhere, but I don't have 
time to look for it.  Sorry.]  This is a clause-level rule.  Now, I can 
take that question and insert it into a larger discourse unit and use 
it to build a scenario within that discourse, but the discourse itself 
is not what determines whether or not this is a question.  Clause-
level syntax does that.

> DW: Structural grammars are by nature overly complex and rather 
> disunified,
> whereas generative grammars seek ultimate simplicity and unity of 
> usage based on the (internal) rules that do the generating.  Once 
> we have those, we can look at how variously-generated clauses are
> put together into larger discourse units and used creatively; I don't 
> know how a generative approach would do the reverse.
> 
> PK: Maybe the generative approach is so inherently over-simplifying 
> here that it has to be modified.

Uh-uh.  From what we know of the language faculty, the speaker's 
internal grammar uses "a finite set of rules to generate an infinite 
number of grammatical sentences," to use Chomsky's expression.  
If the structuralist approach were the way that the mind generates 
sentences, then a child would never be able to learn the language 
because the plethora of internal rules would be too much for his/her 
capacity for the abstract and complex.  One of the major 
contributions of transformational-generative grammar has been the 
discovery that the rules we use to generate sentences in any 
language are remarkably simple.

> DW: If I say "it's cloudy today" nobody needs a larger discourse 
> unit to understand what I mean.
> 
> PK: Rather, if you say this as a complete discourse (i.e. with a 
> zero discourse context e.g. you say this and nothing else to 
> someone next to you on a bus) people probably know what you mean. 
> But if you say this as part of a longer discourse on a different 
> subject e.g. about the water in an aquarium, the meaning may be 
> quite different. So you cannot determine the meaning apart from 
> the discourse.

Again, I disagree.  The example you pulled out is a little artificial in 
the context that I presented mine, because all I said was one 
sentence/clause.  It's possible to speak of the "zero discourse 
context" of course, but it seems to me that a zero discourse is no 
discourse at all and what we're actually dealing with is a single 
clause.  Perhaps a better example would be if I say, in any 
discourse context, "My house is brown."  It doesn't matter whether 
this is in a larger discourse context or a single-clause context, it is 
understood the same way.  It might be *used* for different purposes 
in different discourses, but the clause itself says what it says 
because of the clause-level syntax that makes it well-formed.

> DW: I tell my daughter, "Read!"  And she doesn't need a clause to 
> figure out what I mean.  She grabs her book.
> 
> PK: This is simply a one clause, one word discourse. The word 
> "read" does not always mean in other contexts exactly what it means 
> in this context e.g. it may be present tense or infinitive rather 
> than an imperative.

The fact that it doesn't always mean that has nothing to do with 
this particular example.  And of course we can define it as a one-
word discourse, but that begs the clause-level question, "why is 
this one word the equivalent of a grammatically well-formed 
clause?"  Again, discourse can't tell me that.  And this is the 
question that I'm out to answer.


Dave Washburn
http://www.nyx.net/~dwashbur
A Bible that's falling apart means a life that isn't.