Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 – Swampland – TIME
David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was struggling with.
This is a fascinating stretch of text that shouldn’t be possible if all we had was transformational/GB grammar. The gaps, while clear, make little sense. The second clause should have been “and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks for (and that drive conservatives crazy)”. But it isn’t. What the author is doing is very straightforward. He’s building a text world or mental space in which conceptual blending takes space. The grammatical substratum is simply a vehicle that helps build the mental space and parsing it is what happens in the moments of reflection (hypostasis). In this case, the normally backward facing anaphora is actually pointing sideways to other texts and thus building a mental space.
This misalignment of constituent roles in contexts of ellipsis is extremely common (sometimes even named by philologists e.g. zeugma). Here’s another example I just heard: “People who don’t usually talk about this, are.” (MP3 Insider, Veronica Belmont on the subject of internet radio licensing). This suggests that syntactic structures enter into the blending process bringing their symbolic meaning and form rather than governing the construction of sentences.
In many ways, we could then compare the syntax as hypostesized by linguists to a spandrel in biology (or an epiphenomenon). It’s just there as a logistical vehicle for words but doesn’t necessarily always have a primary purpose of controlling the construction of grammatical sentences.
This shows blogs to be very useful to the study of language combining the skills of often accomplished writers with the lack of an editorial filter.
Len´s Lament
I am a poetaster
And I´m gonna sing a song
But I think I ought to warn you
It could go on forever
Just in case you wanna leave
While you´ve still got the chance
I´d probably do the same
But I´ve already spent the money
So it´s hey-ho for ego-trips
And morbid self-indulgence
And as many polysyllables
As I can cram in to a sentence
That I hope will be as complex
In its syntax and its lexis
As the work of Henry James
When he was domiciled in London
Or the late great Herman Melville
That quintessential whale man
Whose upright Captain Ahab
Was a model of endeavour
And a symbol for our time
The excess of acerbity
That permeates the cosmos
Is an an existential menace
To the roots of metaphysics
It´s poisoning our relations
Within the global village
Let´s return to the values
Of early classical Athens
And the Periclean vision
Of mutual understanding
In the framework of a polis
And build another temple
To the spirit of niceness
And escape from the nightmare
Of Kafkaesque frustration
That threatens our persona
And the hypostatic union
That underpins the freedom
To belong to a militia
And kill all commie perverts
And vote for Woody Allen
To lead us on to wisdom
But could he/would he do it ?
Oh, life is so uncertain