Why was it that while I was in school, we had to dissect stories? Why couldn't we just accept them as stories? Entertainment? Words?
I'M TIRED OF HAVING TO FIND THE FUCKING THEME
Because school is where you exercise your brain. Enjoy the stories on your own time.
Because school makes you believe
a) language makes sense
b) grammar, syntax, conventional coherence, etc, do exist as they conceive it, and linguistic competence doesn't really matter (even Chomsky has limited views on this, which is quite a surprise)
c) literature is not expression or something authors make about their world and people interpret according to whatever the texts suggest them
(about a) and b) just read some futurist poetry or so, you get the meaning and it's absolutely «incorrect» by school standards...)
Simply enjoying stories as entertainment makes you naive and confused and most likely causes Parkinson's disease.
> Why couldn't we just accept them as stories?
Because when you get above the level of pulp fiction, stories have more depth than the immediate actions described. If you fail to see this, you really can't claim to be very intelligent.
I dropped out of my english course the second it became apparent that we'd be ripping apart another Shakespeare. I simply don't have time to destroy art, especially when they were so wrong about so many things in terms of symbolism.
>b) grammar, syntax, conventional coherence, etc, do exist as they conceive it, and linguistic competence doesn't really matter (even Chomsky has limited views on this, which is quite a surprise)
what
>7
Chomsky invented the term "linguistic competence", but he says that we have the ability to discern what's "right" and what's "wrong", and has narrow views on what's "right" and what's "wrong" when talking about just pretty much that isn't morphology (or what would traditionally be called morphology). That's quite surprising coming from him.
> If you fail to see this, you really can't claim to be very intelligent.
Gee, thanks guy.
>>8
At the danger of sounding arrogant, I can assure you I am quite familiar with Chomsky's approach, although I'm definitely not a subscriber of Chomskianism. What I however was what-ing at is this:
>and has narrow views on what's "right" and what's "wrong" when talking about just pretty much that isn't morphology (or what would traditionally be called morphology). That's quite surprising coming from him.
I'm just intrigued to learn what you mean by "narrow views", or why you find "that" surprising coming from him.
Then what would you call an incapability of seeing beyond the immediate meaning of words? An insistance to take statements at face value without looking any further?
I have no doubt that you are familiar with his approach - else you wouldn't have been intrigued by my opinion!! Basically, what I think is that he ends up admitting that there is a "langue" in the Saussurean sense, simply because he thinks that readjustment rules tend to produce the same operations in all individuals who speak a language, and that such operations are only those that we can verify in speech considered "standard" nowadays, and that going any further is "breaking" language - he also thinks that universal grammar is tied to the brain processes we can verify in languages. While this is not necessarily conflictive or incoherent, I think languages are TOO socially regulated - the points he states about this (pidgins, translation, children learning) are more about how human societies evolve than about language itself - and if you accept things like "all languages have a pronominal system", then you have to accept language stems from a limited notion of society (abstraction of "subjects" and interaction with them), serves to expand it, and THEN society stops language in order to assert itself and limit individuals. I have the feeling that Chomsky thinks that language ultimately serves a purpose in reference to "things", and "universal things", that there's "something" behind language and its processes, which is very difficult to sustain, and all this turns transformational linguistics into not emphasising the role of individuals in all social processes and language (which would be a coherent view for an anarchist like Chomsky), but into just a cover for making "scientific linguistics", which is ultimately dissappointing.
>>11
I'm afraid my post was knee-jerk. I actually agree with your statement.
It's just that I also think a large amount of literary interpretation is so much bullshit. There's a point beyond which derived meaning is solely the reader's overactive imagination (and I think many English majors live beyond that point).
How do you know when you've gone beyond that point? What if the patterns you see are coincidental?
>>12
ah! I think that many of the flaws in Chomsky's theory stem from the fact that it was mostly conceived as a means to finally get rid of Skinner once and for all. Chomsky's strict neocartesianism (among other things) ruin his views on language acquisition in many parts for me, but I think there's pretty convincing evidence that in the context of a Fodorian general theory, UG "works out".
Anyways, >>12, thanks for expounding your views on the matter at hand.
>>14
Yeah, I think you're right! I mean, Chomsky's problem sometimes is that his theories are pretty convincing, but then his approach cripples them, but anyway... the Fodor thing is ironic considering how Fodor is a functionalist himself, but on the philosophy of mind scale I guess you're right...! Though, as I said, it probably wouldn't work in the same terms as Chomsky thinks.
Anyway, thanks for the discussion! It's always nice to find people interested in linguistics :)