Re: OT Faffy/Mike/Linguistics 101 - getting v. OT

[Guest guest]

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> Can an American explain the difference between

> (1) " did you do that yet? "

> and

> (2) " have you done that yet? "

>

> I have to completely agree with Jo at this point - the first to us

Brits

> sounds pretty gross but seems to be used in the same environments

as (2).

> I don't think it's possible for us to see what the difference in

use is

> between these two with " yet " as they are used in the US. It's

probably too

> subtle I'd be interested to know what the difference in use is.

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Hi Helen,

I think it's too subtle for an explanation based on native speaker

intuition, and of a course a technical explanation could just as

easily be constructed by someone who doesn't speak any English. I

think it's omething about the internal frame of reference of the

speaker at the time of utterance. I wouldn't even know how to

explain this kind of thing to be honest, and my own intuitions are

very murky on this topic; it's just abstract intuition. But keep in

mind that I have the same basic feeling that the " have " sentence is

much more natural; it's just that I can't come up with a judgement to

reject the other one. Even after thinking about it for a while

yesterday, understanding Jo's excellent point, and running through

lots of declarative examples, I still feel it's okay. It could

be " lexical slipping " in American English, in the sense that " did "

actually means " have " in these cases, in which there would actually

be no difference in meaning! That's just a funky off-the-cuff

speculation about a possibility. My stronger hunch is that it's just

a speaker switching their frame of reference in the middle of a

sentence, pretty normal in actual life. Gets into the classic

ol' " competence vs performance " debate... Don't want to go there!

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> Also while we're here, can you say in the US (Ok, I know I'm

collapsing over

> 100 dialects and 250000000 ideolects)

>

> " There's the book that I didn't know where it was!! "

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Ah, more " competence vs performance " murky grey area! I'd be willing

to bet that no US speakers would judge this to be grammatical, and it

certainly makes me cringe to read, but of course people actually do

say these things often enough! I hear it once in a while and I think

I've caught myself trying to rescue a doomed relative clause like

that a few times in casual speech. When we talked about this topic

in one of my syntax courses I think it was claimed that some dialects

of German and other languages permit these types of relative clauses

(geez, can't remember the technical name for them offhand) as fully

grammatical, but I think it's one of those things that's murky

because probably just about every language has these as " processing

errors " and there's always the data-collecting problem... By the

way, I doubt the mechanisms involved are the same, but these types of

relative clauses are very normal and common in Japanese, Korean, and

(I think) other languages where pronouns are typically not

overt. " There's the book I didn't know where was " is perfect and

normal in Japanese.

ah, but what about Br Eng? I'd be shocked if your sentence was okay

over there...

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> Also... Mike, I'd be interested to know what your research areas

are as I am

> also in the field. Loosely. I enjoyed your posts as you said

very nicely

> what I no longer can be bothered to point out!

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thanks! i'm a grad-student and my current research interests are the

theoretical foundations of phrase structure theories (TAG, x-bar

theory, c-command, etc), information-structure/intonation mappings

(focus, topicalization, etc), and, as a tiny side-interest, stress

and intonation in Japanese. very keen to work on the semantics of

quantification in the future sometime, but more like distant future,

because i'll be switching more to computer science/computational

linguistics areas soon ($$??). i come more from a math/comp sci

background, esp computability/logic...

holy-OT-schmoly!

Mike

SE Pennsylvania