Comments on: Clausetrophobia http://noncompositional.com/2006/01/clausetrophobia/ Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:04:39 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 hourly 1 By: PathToFIND http://noncompositional.com/2006/01/clausetrophobia/comment-page-1/#comment-42886 PathToFIND Fri, 25 Dec 2009 09:19:31 +0000 http://noncompositional.com/2006/01/clausetrophobia/#comment-42886 <p>I want to quote your post in my blog. It can? And you et an account on Twitter?</p> I want to quote your post in my blog. It can? And you et an account on Twitter?

]]> By: Klinton http://noncompositional.com/2006/01/clausetrophobia/comment-page-1/#comment-53 Klinton Mon, 16 Jan 2006 07:07:23 +0000 http://noncompositional.com/2006/01/clausetrophobia/#comment-53 <p>So, I certainly didn't realize that this entire field of "interactional linguistics" was the object of discussion. That helps significantly. In that sense, it sounds like the talk was saying something like "From this new paradigm, we wanted to figure out what really matters for people in linguistic interaction. And we found it's the clause, because (a) people have a really good handle on when they're going to end (or at least the prosodically closed ones...) and take turns appropriately and (b) clauses are the major carriers of linguistic social actions (and those cases that aren't are arguably referring to a nearby clause or could be "filled out" as a clause or are some sort of strange clause in disguise ("thank you!")</p> <p>It certainly seems plausible to me that that was the basic idea. And it's certainly interesting from that perspective. But if so, why did she bring up language evo? I think that (as one of my interests) was the part of the talk that I thought the most about and was the most confused about. Her data say nothing AFAICS on the question of whether (a) language evolved clauses because clauses are really good at these things (which she seemed to hint at sometimes) or (b) clauses are so great and seem so central to language because we use them for so many things, but there's nothing special about the clause itself other than that we use it for lots of things (and thus, we could expect an alien race to get along without them just fine.)</p> <p>thanks for the summary in any case. it was very helpful.</p> So, I certainly didn’t realize that this entire field of “interactional linguistics” was the object of discussion. That helps significantly. In that sense, it sounds like the talk was saying something like “From this new paradigm, we wanted to figure out what really matters for people in linguistic interaction. And we found it’s the clause, because (a) people have a really good handle on when they’re going to end (or at least the prosodically closed ones…) and take turns appropriately and (b) clauses are the major carriers of linguistic social actions (and those cases that aren’t are arguably referring to a nearby clause or could be “filled out” as a clause or are some sort of strange clause in disguise (“thank you!”)

It certainly seems plausible to me that that was the basic idea. And it’s certainly interesting from that perspective. But if so, why did she bring up language evo? I think that (as one of my interests) was the part of the talk that I thought the most about and was the most confused about. Her data say nothing AFAICS on the question of whether (a) language evolved clauses because clauses are really good at these things (which she seemed to hint at sometimes) or (b) clauses are so great and seem so central to language because we use them for so many things, but there’s nothing special about the clause itself other than that we use it for lots of things (and thus, we could expect an alien race to get along without them just fine.)

thanks for the summary in any case. it was very helpful.

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