Stories And Us

I would like to dedicate this post to disagreeing with the Atkins-Levin reading. I think to look at language in any light other than the diachronic view is worthless. And sure that's a pretty strong claim but I think that as the majority of language is spoken in informal settings and is being updated with every new song lyric or cultural fad, to rigorous note how verbs and objects and subjects all fit together doesn't hold any meaning outside of an academic setting.

The text talked about all these different classifications of words and what subjects they prefer and where they should fall in a sentence and what they should act upon, but people aren't rational beings.
I would argue that no one takes the time or exhibits the forethought to carefully piece together their sentences before uttering them (which is largely because we don't have the ability to go back an edit things once we've said them -- which is a tragedy to be talked about at a later date). The only time someone actually goes through and puts words down in any orderly or rigorously structured way is when they're writing in an academic standpoint and doing their best to appear educated. Therefore, to extensively document in corpus and lexicon how language should operate and move around in relation to itself hold no meaning and carries no practicality outside of doing a final revision on a written document.

Now on the point of diachronic being the only way to really look at language. People make words up or reassign meanings based on cultural waves all the time. For instance, since the word 'dank' first appeared it's changed meaning at least three times (or if the meaning didn't fully change it was expanded to encompass more situations). So in this case it makes no sense to say what subjects or objects should follow because that will depend on the culture using it which is not a constant in any sense of the word. The Atkin-Levin text kept referencing literary works as "special" or "exceptional" use cases but, if we're being honest with ourselves, every time we speak we're adding another passage to the literary work that is our lives and so these cases shouldn't be deemed "exceptional" but commonplace. If we look at all our lives and conversations as the stories that they are these literary cases are the way in which we use language so to look at it as synchronic for even an hour means we've missed so much and so many changes.