ozarque's Journal

Writing nonfiction; linguistics; verbal self-defense; request for help; part two...
In the previous post about the English VAPs I said: "Please remember that these are examples of how each pattern may be used in speech, not the actual patterns themselves. The patterns would have to be written in formal notation, with variables." And

quantumkitty commented: "I'm sure I'm not the only linguist in the audience, or the only person who could figure this out -- would you consider posting the patterns as well?"

I answered this comment with a thank-you, followed by saying that "I'm not that brave." I'd like to explain that a bit. Please remember that I'm the person who still, at age seventy-one, can't do long division. I'm the person who failed The Tortoise And The Hare Exam despite the best efforts of scores of LJers to help me pass it. I'm math-numb the way other people might be color-blind or tone-deaf. And here I am, in public, surrounded by mathematicians and logicians and computer programmers and semioticians and semanticists and savants and geeks of every conceivable description and discipline, being asked to commit the act of formal notation. Trust me: That's terrifying.

There's also a technical glitch with the notation; I don't know how to do it (or even if it's possible to do it) in LJ. I can't do it without curly brackets -- the ones that mean "this is a set of items from which you are to choose just one member of the set." I don't know how to do curly brackets here, and I can't post the formal notation without them.

What I can do -- might could be -- is just talk you through the notation for the pattern that underlies example #1 on my list, to give you an idea of what it's like. And I guess I'm brave enough to do that. I guess.

The example is:
1. "If you REALLY loved me, YOU wouldn't waste MONEY the way you do!"

For purposes of this discussion, let's assume that the Attacker is a woman, and that the Target is her husband. [I have no evidence that this is any more likely than the other way around, no.] And for purposes of completeness, I need to mention that there is a logical counterpart of example #1 that goes like this:

#if there exists a person [X] such that [X] is a man who really loves his wife, then [X] would not waste money the way you do#

This sequence surfaces in English as the Computer Mode version of example #1:
"A person who REALLY loved his wife wouldn't waste MONEY the way you do!"

If the Attacker says that Computer Mode version aloud to her husband directly, the husband understands it to mean the same thing -- in terms of its propositions -- that example #1 means.

Now... The first item in the pattern is "if"; the second item is "you." The third item has to appear in curly brackets, because it is a set of possibilities. "Really" is the most common member of the set; other members are "truly, genuinely, actually," and more. [For example: "If you genuinely CARED about the sales figures for your department, YOU'D get your work done on TIME!"] Item four in the pattern will be a variable -- [X]; in example #1 the content of [X] is "loved me." The comma in my example is optional, since not all Attackers will pause after speaking the fourth item; if it is to be included in the formal notation -- and my personal preference is that it should be -- it becomes item five and goes in parentheses to indicate its optional status. The sixth item in the pattern is "YOU."

Item seven in the pattern has to be in curly braces, because it consists of a set of English modal auxiliaries followed by the negative, with the negative in parentheses to indicate that it's optional. [Examples: "If you REALLY loved me, YOU wouldn't SMOKE!" "If you REALLY loved me, YOU'D get a JOB!" "If you REALLY love me, YOU'LL get a JOB!"] The item can't just say "modal auxiliary," because not all of the modals are eligible to appear; there has to be a listed set of the eligible ones. [Note: There's a technical problem here, since the negative isn't always truly optional; it's sometimes determined by the content of the preceding clause, and a native speaker of English will always know whether it's required or not. I continue to indicate it as optional on the grounds that the Attacker is free to choose the structure of the preceding clause; many formalists would object to my doing that.]

Item eight in the pattern is the variable [Y]; in example #1, the content of [Y] is "waste MONEY the way you do!"

My preference is to indicate where the extra emphatic stresses go in the pattern by using capital letters. Others might prefer to indicate them differently -- one possibility is putting the feature [+EXTRA STRESS] under the stressed word or syllable. [Note: "extra stress" is defined in my theoretical model as any emphatic stress added to an utterance solely to carry an emotional message and not required (other than coincidentally) for any other purpose by the grammar -- not contrastive stress, for example, or the sort of "announcement" stress required for "WOW! I WON the SWEEPstakes!"]

Finally, the notation for this pattern -- using various combinations of brackets -- perhaps has to indicate the choices that speakers are free to make in the placement of the extra emphatic stresses. The following (and more) are permitted:

"If you REALLY loved me, YOU wouldn't waste MONEY the way you do!"
"If you REALLY loved me, you WOULDN'T waste MONEY the way you do!"
"If you really LOVED me, YOU wouldn't waste MONEY the way you do!"
"If you really LOVED me, you wouldn't WASTE MONEY the way you do!"
"If you REALLY loved me, you wouldn't WASTE MONEY the way you do!"

I say "perhaps" this has to be indicated, because the placement of the extra emphatic stresses is determined by the grammar of English, based on where the native speaker wants to indicate the focus of his or her attention, and on the phonological rules of the language. If that's taken as a given, which seems to me to be reasonable, this last frill can be dispensed with.

Suppose Providence is smiling on me this morning... Then I won't have lost count of the items or left out any of the items or made any typographical errors....

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