Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

wrong way round

Continuing with John Ellis’ three initial missteps in theories of language, today it’s misstep number two:

I now turn to the second [misstep], which [...] has a form specific to language theory as well as a more general form that relates to inquiry in general. This broader form consists in a mistaken attitude that can be found in any field; it is the habit of assuming that one begins by taking simple cases and generalizes from them to derive principles that can then be used to break down the hard cases. The most important specific manifestation of this attitude in theory of language occurs in semantics; the easy starting point will be the descriptive words that appear to have clear correlations in physical reality—say, round, square, mile—while evaluative words are the hard cases, to be approached only when the basic principles of how words work have been extracted from the easy cases. The consequence of this way of beginning is that descriptive words will come to be seen as more basic to the functioning of language than evaluative words; this, as we shall see, is a mistake that has devastating consequences, for it has the hierarchy of descriptive and evaluative words the wrong way round. Another manifestation of the same underlying attitude to inquiry can be seen in the generative grammarian‘s whole approach to the understanding of language: syntactic patterns are easier to systematize than semantic ones, and thus syntactic analysis comes before semantics. Soon enough, this temporal priority has become a logical one, in which it is syntax that shows us how language works.

[Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic, pp.20f.]

So, he’s dropped the awkward pieces of languages—so as to side-step the whole lack of definitions of phrases, clauses, sentences, utterances, etc. problem—and now writes of words unproblematically. More later. Earlier entries: degré zéro and language != communication.