Word: syntax
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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...
...Chomsky also imagined that those transformations were part of the internal grammar of every speaker, actually used in producing and understanding sentences, but most linguists today ignore that aspect of his theory. Transformational grammar is generally treated as an abstract model of a language's syntax...
Auden was always more interested in experimenting with syntax than with things like meter and stanza and he was content to pour his unusual grammar into the molds of sonnet, quatrain and blank verse. His chief experiments in Thank You, Fog are with verbs. Poets who write in English, he tells us in one of his "Shorts," "can very easily turn nouns, if we wish, into verbs." He proceeds to do so with gusto, not only to nouns but almost every unit of syntax he can get his hands on. Some examples from a single new poem, "Archeology:" "vacancied long...
...often lack verbs. Sometimes this seems to be an attempt at ironic distancing--for instance, Rubin sometimes tries without success to tell us what Vietnamese think Americans think Vietnamese are thinking--but most times it seems to be just the way Rubin writes. Partly as a result of his syntax and partly because of the childish-sounding exclamations with which he dots their speech, Rubin's Rhade only intermittently attain the dignity they need to make us fully care for them--a dignity we do sense, for instance, hearing about the days when the sky was so low that fish...
...personal business, they felt that Expos offered more of a chance than other courses for students to relate their education to the rest of their lives. It's hard to see how this opportunity would exist, if Expos were reduced to a standardized course in grammar and syntax...