Word: grammar
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...White House tapes spun in relentless revelation, they emitted a verbal cacophony offending those stalwart upholders of the exigenicies of the nations's grammar and the subtleties of its idiomatic charm. The defenders of lucid prose shuddered at the mangled sentences--the pronouns without antecedents, the flabby modifiers, the split infinitives, the undue use of the passive voice, the malevolent creeping of coarse phraseology. A nation stood appalled that the language of Jefferson, of Webster, of Emerson, Melville, and Mencken could be contorted into such a mockery of America's verbal heritage...
BERNSTEIN CONTINUES his search for universality with a discussion of transformational grammar, a field which has become the dominant area of study of American linguistics in the ten years since it sprang fully-clothed from the brow of Noam Chomsky. Contemporary linguistics, focusing on syntax, aims at uncovering the structures underlying language. And this is the source of the universality that Bernstein finds so attractive--beneath their surface differences, Chomsky believes, languages are organized on a few simple and universal principles...
Traditional phrase structure grammar analyzed sentences independent of their relation to other sentences: for example, a passive sentence like "Max was crushed by the safe" would be parsed into subject-verb-prepositional phrase. Chomsky's contribution was to recognize that the same, easily described relationship between that sentence and its active counterpart, "The safe crushed Max," exists between countless other pairs of sentences. He conceived of "transformations" as simple devices to describe the relations between simple sentences like "The safe crushed Max" and complex ones like "Max was crushed by the safe," "What the safe did was crush...
Chomsky also believed that features of transformational theory that were found in every language--linguistics universals--would necessarily be innate, biological structures. Again, in the context of contemporary linguistic theory this is an eccentric view, but it is the view Bernstein has grabbed onto--he sees transformational grammar as a "subconscious process," innate and not learned...
...Your grammar fails," the Eliot Pronounced with Bacchic glee...