Re: Chomsky's notions

John Quijada wrote:

> While Chomsky's theories (and those of his many followers) are all very
> elegant, they suffer from one big fundamental flaw in my opinion:  It's not
> how language actually works.  I think the cognitivists such as Lakoff,
> Fauconnier, Talmy, etc. have shown a lot of evidence for that.  To use one
> of Lakoff's great examples, compare the following two sentences:
>
>      If I were you I'd hate me.
>
>      If I were you I'd hate myself.
>
> Compare these 2 sentences as to which party (the speaker or the addressee)
> is being referred to by the word "me" in Sentence 1 versus "myself" in
> Sentence 2.  Chomskian theory has no way of explaining this switch.
Fascinating! In fact, I googled in order to learn more, but there was
only one result and it was in German.

http://www.hausarbeiten.de/rd/faecher/hausarbeit/lin/19559.html

I'm now trying to ponder how *I* think these sentences work. It's a
stumper, isn't it? Let's suppose Fred is speaking to George.

The second sentence is regular. In all of the following cases, _my_
means _George's_.

   If I were you I'd shoot myself (= my self)
   If I were you I'd shoot my dog

also similar:

   If I lived next door I'd bulldoze my house

The phrase "if I were you" 'pulls' all references to the first person
from "Fred" to "George", yet a switch in the nominative (I -> George)
does not induce a switch in the accusative (me -> Fred). An analogy
with a physical system suggests that insufficient force was exherted
by the nominative "I" upon the accusative "me" to make the latter
shift from "Fred" to "George". We can therefore hypothesise some kind
of 'barrier' that reduces the 'force' exherted by the nominative upon
the accusative (much as the force of gravity is reduced by the barrier
of distance).

One explanation is that due to our experience of language, we 'expect'
the nominative and accusative to refer to different entities, since
this holds true in the overwhelming majority of sentences. Since
inventing jargon is fun, let's call this the "expected differential
reference hypothesis". To continue the physical analogy, imagine that
- whereas the switch of the nominative "I" from "Fred" to "George"
exherts a GRAVITATIONAL ATTRACTION pulling all first person references
in the same direction - there is also a MAGNETIC REPULSION pushing
whatever entity is in the accusative away from being the same as the
entity in the nominative.

Alternatively, the brain may be pre-wired to keep track of the
nominative "I" seperately from the accusative "me", with the cases
therefore being insulated from each other in the above context. Let's
call this the "cognitive barrier hypothesis". The barrier in this case
is more passive, like the role distance plays in the force of gravity.

Do similar sentences work any differently in other languages? And, er,
please tell, what have *real* linguists come up with? :-)

Adrian

(one can be almost as creative with crackpot-linguistics-made-up-on-the-spot
as one can with conlangs).