Language Log

Bill Bryson forever: infinite thoughts

Theoretical linguists say sentences are of finite length. Traditional grammars say that sentences express complete thoughts. The two are not compatible, as a nice example found in the travel writings of Bill Bryson shows. Theoretical linguists generally assume sentences in natural languages must be of finite length because a sentence that went on forever could never be understood or composed or mentally represented by any finite being even in principle, and it could never be generated by any finite sequence of derivational steps in a generative grammar of the sort Chomsky pioneered.

Traditional grammars generally say that a sentence is the linguistic expression of a complete thought. If it doesn't express a complete thought, then it's elliptical. A sentence like "I was going to clean the rug but I decided not to" is elliptical for "I was going to clean the rug but I decided not to clean the rug", and so on.

But consider this sentence, from page 16 of Bill Bryson's book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (paperback edition, HarperPerennial, 1990), as he lovingly describes what one will typically find in a typical small town in the heartland of America:

The central area of the square will be a park, with fat trees and a bandstand and a pole with an American flag and and scattered benches full of old men in John Deere caps sitting around talking about the days when they had something to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do.

What does it mean? It is clearly elliptical in the traditional sense. The "else" involves an implicit comparison. What Bryson means, quite obviously, is that the benches were full of old men in John Deere caps sitting around talking about the days when they had something to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do other than sit around and talk about the days when they had something else to do...

But although disk space is getting cheaper, it might be better for the archiving of this weblog if I didn't complete the thought, because the completion is going to be infinite. And yet, strangely, we can understand it, and we do understand it, even from one of its elliptical shortenings. You may never previously have realized that you had the profundity to think an infinite thought, but you've thought one today while reading Posted by Geoffrey K. Pullum at September 24, 2003 02:02 PM