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October 2, 2013

Stranding prepositions; the above all language intuition

Post #3 (Sep 02 and Sep 08 posts continue)
If you are writing social sciences and journalism, you are mainly focusing on lives of people and life of yours. We, language and linguistics bloggers, however, are not in the businesses of politicking people but in the business of politicking the nucleus of a subject. There is the power of the intuition in one hand and the logic of a language on the other. But the latter is not without its controversies, first in order  to  code the constituencies for a further elaboration like in this example to which posters are working on today or like on the preposition stranding literature: 
  1. He is nice to talk to.
  2. These are the graffiti areas that i should look after.
On the preposition stranding 'to' and 'after':
  • They are prepositions.  --some grammarians
  • They are not prepositions but our way of doing things with words. --Bernstein
There is so many literatures about this, but they are too redundant to take them for any reasonable analysis as to what one’s interest is if only concerned in simplifying the language logic so that the patterns behind the syntagma can be logically expressive.
Among theorists and hypotheses, the current literary works on this, posted on Sep 02, seems a sufficient enough achievement as far as the complications involved are concerned in bringing them together to a perspective by cutting away the arbitraries or nonsenses for an elaborative hypothesis. And with the addendum of the test of semantic predicates by the way of  moving the preposition to the front of the sentence to see whether that makes an equal syntactic validity or not, as Bernstein pioneered in this literature, the proposed paradigm seems now as an already sufficient makeover from our traditional views of the matter like in these example:
  1. To he is nice to talk.
  2. These are the graffiti areas after that i should look.
So what else the conflict or critical in our conventions to me or anyone else, whereas something else is said to be a logically binding, is perhaps the code of functionality in which each class of word or phrase makes a syntax meaningful.  Like in the above examples, the terminal word 'to' and 'after' are prepositions  for many  grammarians, but i am not in the highest favor of taking the traditional view, regardless of the matter whether i agree instead with  Bernstein's  literature work about this or not. But to sum up ‘worlds of literatures’ available:
  1. A preposition, literarily, is pre-positioned before its object (understood or otherwise.
  2. A phrasal prepositions is an obligatory adjunct, not a preposition, as in the second example. 
  3. A preposition (yes), a preposition verb (yes), but not the preposition in a preposition verb can strand for meaning. 
  4. A compound preposition predicator has no preposition (looks like a preposition but a different class. 
  5. A verb cannot take a preposition for a complement as a prepositional phrase unless it has the alternative for a semi complement as an adverbial.
However, one of my neighbors also said that she would rather say something like 'The saffron is a good ingredient to cook with.' than 'The saffron is a good ingredient to cook' in order to have the thought of the speech to be expressed meaningfully. Certainly the first example adds meaning, and this is where the terminal word is understood as a preposition for its functional Ø object complement.  
There are so many further hard questions along the way for confusions if we already know where to begin our search for answers. But i am not very happy with the keep on going on this further. My next post is on the professional ", too".

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous5/10/13 10:03

    A very un-intelligent analysis.

    In my university session, this 'thought' level of yours would merit a C-.

    Please put more detail into this sort of analysis

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. First of all, we don't really want to restrict the styles of comments that we can accept for the standard. It doesn't mean that you can't post anything. We try our best to leave comments as they receive.

      But the danger is that there is so many folks in the business of vandalisms to win their cause against deficiencies, whether they are intellectual or just spiritual. That's fine. But it also means that any kid from a secondary school can post something like this. So unless we know your level of education, readability, insight, we have no way of knowing where you are.

      The LingLang post says that this is as the sum-up of 'worlds of literatures' available to the standard for any reasonable analysis. So you have to begin at lease in a simple way to show your understanding first in order to ask more details. You can get lots of details about this. You have to read them first, get some understanding about psl, master it, and then come back with your confident to write a critics or ask details. But as for your post, only you have to tell me how we can understand you whether you can read our posts to have some grasp on the subjects discussed.

      Delete
  2. Your post is mere a descriptive nature, but today the prescriptivism on this subject is more complex. Here, for example, what a page from University of Texas says on the prescriptivism for 3rd year English students.

    ReplyDelete