Text worlds, anaphora and syntactic structures as spandrels

by Dominik Lukeš ·
Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was struggling with.
This is a fascinating stretch of text that shouldn't be possible if all we had was transformational/GB grammar. The gaps, while clear, make little sense. The second clause should have been "and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks for (and that drive conservatives crazy)". But it isn't. What the author is doing is very straightforward. He's building a text world or mental space in which conceptual blending takes space. The grammatical substratum is simply a vehicle that helps build the mental space and parsing it is what happens in the moments of reflection (hypostasis). In this case, the normally backward facing anaphora is actually pointing sideways to other texts and thus building a mental space. This misalignment of constituent roles in contexts of ellipsis is extremely common (sometimes even named by philologists e.g. zeugma). Here's another example I just heard: "People who don't usually talk about this, are." (MP3 Insider, Veronica Belmont on the subject of internet radio licensing). This suggests that syntactic structures enter into the blending process bringing their symbolic meaning and form rather than governing the construction of sentences.

In many ways, we could then compare the syntax as hypostesized by linguists to a spandrel in biology (or an epiphenomenon). It’s just there as a logistical vehicle for words but doesn’t necessarily always have a primary purpose of controlling the construction of grammatical sentences.

This shows blogs to be very useful to the study of language combining the skills of often accomplished writers with the lack of an editorial filter.

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  1. anthony alcock
    Len´s Lament I am a poetaster And I´m gonna sing a song But I think I ought to warn you It could go on forever Just in case you wanna leave While you´ve still got the chance I´d probably do the same But I´ve already spent the money So it´s hey-ho for ego-trips And morbid self-indulgence And as many polysyllables As I can cram in to a sentence That I hope will be as complex In its syntax and its lexis As the work of Henry James When he was domiciled in London Or the late great Herman Melville That quintessential whale man Whose upright Captain Ahab Was a model of endeavour And a symbol for our time The excess of acerbity That permeates the cosmos Is an an existential menace To the roots of metaphysics It´s poisoning our relations Within the global village Let´s return to the values Of early classical Athens And the Periclean vision Of mutual understanding In the framework of a polis And build another temple To the spirit of niceness And escape from the nightmare Of Kafkaesque frustration That threatens our persona And the hypostatic union That underpins the freedom To belong to a militia And kill all commie perverts And vote for Woody Allen To lead us on to wisdom But could he/would he do it ? Oh, life is so uncertain

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