Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang,sci.lang.translation,comp.edu.languages.natural
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!news.mathworks.com!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!ix.netcom.com!netcom.com!clarket
From: clarket@netcom.com (Clarke Cooper)
Subject: Re: Bozoism on the Internet
Message-ID: <clarketDFMpxL.5Is@netcom.com>
Followup-To: comp.ai.nat-lang,sci.lang.translation,comp.edu.languages.natural
Organization: Ease
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL1]
References: <43u4ha$665@news.aloha.com>,<446la1$2ta@hobbes.cc.uga.edu> <449gih$5bk@news.aloha.com>
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 18:56:09 GMT
Lines: 71
Sender: clarket@netcom10.netcom.com
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.nat-lang:3937 sci.lang.translation:3336 comp.edu.languages.natural:692


Look, Interlinguish is a nice idea (I checked out your server some
time ago and read the whole damn manifesto) but nowhere near developed
enough yet.  The basic approach is swell (in that humble opinion of
mine) but one weakness is that you're WAY too dependent on the verb
notion, which after all is a category designed after the fact to
explain some aspects of language (and basically IE at that).  It's a
valid category and often useful but not everywhere and always
applicable.  The copula, for instance, looks like a verb in those
languages like English that indulge it but even there all it does is
fill the verb hole and many languages, including casual spoken
English, have no craving for it.

Now lest we all get into huge tizzies about whether copulas are verbs
or angels dancing on pinheads let's drop that particular right now and
just go with its general notion that even as basic a concept as verb
is ill-defined and probably not a good thing to stick in at the
foundation of one's Universalistic Meaning Elucidator (UME), chiefly
because a verb, in fact, is NOT always there.  A verb is FREQUENTLY
there, a verb is USUALLY there, but a verb is only GUARANTEED to be
there if what you're dealing with is a sentence (and still not in all
languages).  "No shit" is not a sentence and does not expand to a
sentence; "No shit" is an expression, expression being a superset of
sentence.  It's perfectly good impolite English to say "No shit", just
as it's perfectly good English to say "Grape" when someone asks you
what your favorite Nehi is.

It is possible to paraphrase "Grape" as "Grape is my favorite Nehi
flavor", but as an answer to a question it's strange English and
will make your interlocutor wonder why you didn't just say "Grape"
like a normal person.  This style of discourse is common across 
languages (that I'm familiar with) and the reason for it is that 
the information sought does not include a verb--grape didn't do
anything nor has it been anywise affected--"grape" is the information
which satisfies the information lack described by the questioner
and there's an end to it.  The sort of perpetration relationship
between subject and object or agent and patient or whoever's there
has no part in this "Grape" expression.

Likewise "No shit" and its many cousins: "oh shit", "holy shit",
"shit", "criminy", "duh", "ouch", and "well excuuuuuuse me".  No shit
bezw. forgiveness is involved in any of these (as there are no grapes
in the Nehi), and if you're already not working with the things that
appear to be there I'll bet you don't want to start positing things
that don't appear to be there (though I am aware of a linguistic
school that thinks otherwise and I'm sure they're very fine people).
Even though the last includes something that appears to be a verb,
"excuuuuuse" is only fulfilling its role in a set expression, the
meaning of which is carried by the tone and has nearly nothing to do
with the word.

You could, if you cared, "expand" any of these into things resembling
complete sentences to show what they allegedly mean but they're
already complete verbless expressions.  Most concepts, actions and
events (or anyhow the aspects of them that humans perceive and find
significant) can, in fact, be paraphrased as sentences, which is why
we use so many of them--this gimmick of expressing things as though
there were a thing doing a thing to a thing is rather powerful--but
you don't always have to and sometimes you can't.

When someone says "No shit" it isn't because they meant to say "Is
that really so?  Well, aren't you smart, you less-than-insignificant
little piece of same" but failed to.  There are no sentences that
correspond exactly to the set of messages that "No shit" carries; 
when people want to present you with that set of messages they say
"No shit" to you.  Worse still, the set varies from person to person
and situation to etc., so unless you can parse "No shit" out into
the sentence that best covers its use here and now you'd best just
deal with it as the simple expression it represents itself with.

Duh.
