Re: Chomsky's notions

On Thu, 29 Jan 2004 19:52:04 -0500, Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:

>> To use one
>> >> of Lakoff's great examples, compare the following two sentences:
>> >>
>> >>      If I were you I'd hate me.
>
>?Underlying:  "you hate me" or "you ought to hate me"-- therefore "if I
were
>you, I'd hate me".  It also works with "people hate me" therefore.....
>> >>
>> >>      If I were you I'd hate myself."
>
>?Underlying:  You hate yourself, therefore "If I were you, I'd hate myself"
>Seems to me these work much better if one appends "too"
--------
Yes, those would be the underlying sentences, however I believe Lakoff's
point is that Transformational Grammar doesn't allow any valid way to map
(or transform) deep structure 'you' into surface structure 'I' since
whether at the deep or surface structures 'you' must remain 2nd person
while 'I' must remain first person, i.e., must remain different parties.
Transformational theory doesn't allow a "pronominal reference switching"
rule.  Yet the examples shows it, in fact, does happen in real spoken
English.  The cognitivists explain it through "mental space" theory by
which the mind (via imagination) allows elements from one cognitive domain
to be mapped onto different elements in a dissimilar but analogous
hypothetical domain.

--John Quijada