Comments on: [language] Parts of speech confusion http://www.jlake.com/2008/08/19/language-parts-of-speech-confusion/ Jay Lake's Official Web Site Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:52:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: Jaws http://www.jlake.com/2008/08/19/language-parts-of-speech-confusion/#comment-469 Jaws Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:49:36 +0000 http://www.jlake.com/?p=250#comment-469 It's the converse of <i>nominalization</i>. As a smartass student in my first-year legal writing class (who had more experience writing legal documents than did the instructor, and was nearly a decade older), I pointed out that "nominalization" is a nominalization. In the end, what this really reflects is a loosening of formal grammar rules and the borrowing — nay, assault and battery — approach of modern speakers to vocabulary. If we find a word that is onomatopoetically appropriate and whose meaning is appropriate in one grammatical context, we tend to be lazy and import that word to other grammatical contexts (instead of going to a dictionary or thesaurus and looking up the Mrs-Grundy-approved equivalent... and probably losing a few shades of meaning in the process). On the whole, I think this is a good thing. One of the reasons that English has become a <b>scientific</b> <i>lingua franca</i> (puns intended) is the flexibility of its grammar and the absence of stupid gender rules... and I say this as a native speaker of another language. There isn't a good <b>semantic</b> reason for imposing gender or strict SVO/VSO word-order, or indeed anything else; and one of the first things that one learns when studying formal grammars is that meaning gets conveyed best when semantics and syntax are at least parallel, if not indistinguishable. Besides, without transformations like these it's harder — not impossible — to insert at least one pun in every paragraph. And that would be a crying shame. It’s the converse of nominalization. As a smartass student in my first-year legal writing class (who had more experience writing legal documents than did the instructor, and was nearly a decade older), I pointed out that “nominalization” is a nominalization.

In the end, what this really reflects is a loosening of formal grammar rules and the borrowing — nay, assault and battery — approach of modern speakers to vocabulary. If we find a word that is onomatopoetically appropriate and whose meaning is appropriate in one grammatical context, we tend to be lazy and import that word to other grammatical contexts (instead of going to a dictionary or thesaurus and looking up the Mrs-Grundy-approved equivalent… and probably losing a few shades of meaning in the process).

On the whole, I think this is a good thing. One of the reasons that English has become a scientific lingua franca (puns intended) is the flexibility of its grammar and the absence of stupid gender rules… and I say this as a native speaker of another language. There isn’t a good semantic reason for imposing gender or strict SVO/VSO word-order, or indeed anything else; and one of the first things that one learns when studying formal grammars is that meaning gets conveyed best when semantics and syntax are at least parallel, if not indistinguishable.

Besides, without transformations like these it’s harder — not impossible — to insert at least one pun in every paragraph. And that would be a crying shame.

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