Re: THEORY: Browsing at Borders Public Library

On Sun, 10 Oct 1999, Ed Heil wrote:

> When I don't have any cash but have a few hours to kill, I like to go
> sit down at my local Border's Bookstore and browse, and often I'll sit
> down and read the better part of a book.
Don't try that at a bookstore over here. If they have a place to sit
at all, it's meant for an attendant who looks out for customers
thumbing the books a bit too much...

>
> I found a fascinating book called _The Origins of Complex Language,_
> which presents the theory that syntactic structure, as it exists in
> human languages, exists as an analogue of syllable structure.
<...>

> But it was a whole bundle of fun and interesting things to think
> about.  I recommend it.
It sounds a bit like the author suddenly had an inspiration, turned
it into a theory and then tried to bend everything to fit the theory,
a bit on a par with the sudden 'insight' that told a study mate of
mine that vowels don't exist, but are all caused by deep-level
tonal phenomena ;-).

>
> Another author I was looking at was Anna Wierzbicka.  She is an
> enthusiastic practicioner of an art oft disparaged or ignored in
> linguistics but surely of interest to conlangers -- the art of
> definition.  She dislikes mainstream linguists who tend to ignore the
> problem of defining words altogether, and she dislikes my beloved
> Cognitive Linguistics people like George Lakoff and Ronald Langacker
> because they are too enamored of messy problems of language meaning
> which are caused by the peculiarities of our cognitive apparatus.
> (While writing them off, she manages to absorb into her work,
> sometimes in somewhat unusual ways, just about everything important
> they have had to say.)
>
I think the title you are looking for is:

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1988. _The semantics of grammar_ Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.

I have always taken her remarks about Lakoff for truth. She says
that he 'finds three examples, all from English, enough leavening
for a 600 page book.', while in truth _Women, Fire and Dangerous
Things_ is chock-full of interesting examples from all kinds of
languages. She means the 'case studies' of course, and it is true
that in those Lakoff delves a bit deeper than in the examples he
uses to construe his argument, but still...

Anyway, her own work is very interesting, and, as you say, somewhat
unusual. She's almost unique in having a unique theory of herself,
while not being a loony. She insists in rigourous methods and scholarly
accountability. Bound to make her unpopular ;-).

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt