"Facebook RLC"

Baal, in this improbable day,
Loco bzura. The white dew holds,
And my car
No longer's boxed in.
Cryptic gray-cerulean
Gewürztraminer node
A rough welcome bides
At the curb
And in the orreries
Oversight and antidote play
They will not play
With me


"My mournful story from thy zither sweeps." --Hafiz


"In what sense, exactly, as Bernstein and Wallace have it, would underlying structures of grammar mirror and reinforce existing social orders?" I agree that "...they mean something like discourse analysis, or something in relation to the sub-area of pragmatics. Or...they are talking about 'metaphors,' in the sense of George Lakoff..." but also & especially the prevalent usage of the "lyrical I" in poetry.

(As an aside, now that the Chomskyite hegemony*--& i am not at all averse to his politics--is drawing to its inevitable close, the LangPo demurral will seem at last almost prophetic...)

Mr Johnson has done his own part in subverting the latter dogma as much as anyone. Still, his truculence on the question of grammar, & the straw men it aims at, misses the point. It is only in analysis that the small-scale aspects of language can be divided from the larger-scale ones. And that is why it is the disjunction that matters, on any scale; and why the people who hate LangPo respond to it with such visceral dislike.

It's tugging at the curtain of the Wizard.

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* "Does no one think that the Chomskyan notion of primitive paralinguistic patterns of linguistic expression is an academic murdering of the realities of language?" --Riding