Drawbacks of Carnie

Carnie offered a lot of insight in to the unconscious methods that we uncover and convey meaning though language. I was surprised to see how intricate the rules of English grammar, or rather, the descriptive syntactic rules of English. I had no idea that there were so many rules governing the usage of anaphora and it was very interesting to see how things were deemed wrong or how he readjusted his hypotheses to create a “rule.”

 Carnie abstracts the idea of a rule further with the example given on page 39, example 10, which is comprised of made up words that have clearly defined functions in the sentence. This exemplifies that the meaning we obtain from phrases are not from the words but from the placement and the function we ascribe to that placement; the meaning of word is not as important as we believe it to be. Because of this I especially agree that Linguistics is a scientific discipline and not just an area of study with a humanistic approach. The only way that Carnie could deduct conclusions was through experimental trials.

 However, I do question where Carnie checked his rules and sentence trials with in his tests on pages 9-11? He began the chapter explaining that nothing in language has a standard yet he is comparing to a standard. What standard is that, where he deems something isn’t correct and retests his hypotheses. What vernacular of English does this pertain to? Where is he deriving his basis for correctness in general?

In regards to his discussion about parts of speech I do not agree that destruction is a verb. It is an idea, it is the state of something that was destructed or ruined. It is not the same as destruct, the actual verb. I do agree that the parameters that define parts of speech are ambiguous. For example in African American Vernacular English, some verbs are used as adjectives. For example someone might say: “she ∅ wildin’ ”, which may seem like a normal subject-verb phrase but the “portion” actually functions to describe the subject as crazy or sporadic. Any of those words functions just as clearly as “wildin’.” This idea becomes even more complex when you delve into word trees to understand how morphemes, words and placement come together to create a sentence. It’s very interesting to see how Standard English has unknowingly became standardized and in which way it is standardized, but I do wish he explored how different types of English speakers (Midwest, Southern English, African and African American Vernacular English, Louisiana-Creole English etc.) also spoke with the same type of standard rules just not those present in Standard English. I feel that he could have dismantled a lot of stereotypes if he had incorporated those explanations. This is where I see Carnie falls short in his explanations of the English Language.