Argumentation

A grammar is part of a language description. A descriptive text is not an argumentative text. It is true that a linguistic description presupposes an analysis. It needs generalization and therefore involves subsuming phenomena under general concepts. Often alternative analyses seem possible. Other text sorts, esp. articles in specialized journals, necessarily involve argumentation for the preferred analysis and against other analyses that seem possible but are considered inadequate. A grammar is not of such a text sort. There is no room for justifying all the descriptive statements made, let alone for considering alternative analyses, proving them wrong and discarding them.

The preferred format for proposing the subsumption of a phenomenon under a concept or a generalization in a semasiological grammar is as follows:

1. Formulate the generalization, typically provided by a construction formula containing the grammatical categories and functions under which the phenomenon under description is subsumed.
2. Provide a representative example.
3. Enumerate the properties of the phenomenon implied by the generalization (and the construction schema). These are just the properties which force or justify the analysis proposed and exclude alternative analyses.

The same goes for methodological problems of analysis. There are homonymous formatives and grammatical constructions, and sometimes criteria for disambiguation are hard to come by. In such cases, too, the terse formulation goes like this: While formative F is homonymous between meanings A and B, it is A in context C1 and B in context C2. In other contexts like C3, the ambiguity persists.

Exceptionally, an analysis may be explicitly justified if its rationale is, after all the descriptive statements, nevertheless not immediately obvious to the reader. The Cabecar formative dä serves both as the copula and as an information structure articulator. After an implicitly nominalized subject clause, it is analysed as the copula although it is optional there. The reader wonders why it is not the information structure articulator, in which case the implicit nominalization would vanish. The possibility of following the subject clause by the instant resumptive preceding dä shows that the latter must be the copula. Since this is rare, the reader does not know it unless he is told so.

Obligatoriness and optionality

Modal verbs, esp. deontic expressions like must, are most of the time misplaced in grammatical description. Commenting on a demonstrative in an example sentence, a grammatical description of 2019 claims:

“Since the ‘meat’ is located in front of the speech-act participants, the proximal determiner must be used.”

The text had better said: “... the proximal determiner is used.” Specifically, there is no instance in the language or the speech community that could force a speaker to apply a rule of this system. A rule of a language system has no coercive force; it is just a generalization about what speakers do, and what is consequently found in utterances and texts, under certain conditions. More generally, a linguistic description is not a moral doctrine. It states what is the case, not what must or must not be done.

In line with the above, a succinct formulation of obligatoriness vs. optionality of a rule is like this:

• Obligatory rule: Unadorned predication, saying that the construction has such and such properties.
• Optional rule or feature: Qualified predication, saying that the rule applies optionaly or the construction optionally has such a property. If an item occurs optionally, the text may also say that it is omissible.

If an item is obligatory in a certain construction, this entails that the latter becomes ungrammatical if the item is omitted. Provided that a convention about obligatoriness as proposed above is observed, adding an example lacking the item in question and preceded by an asterisk is redundant. (The amount of text of a descriptive grammar can easily be trebled by presenting examples for ungrammatical constructions, as their number is infinite.)

If an item is omissible in a construction, this entails that the construction is equally grammatical with and without the item. This, however, can mean either of two things:

1. The item is omissible without any discernible consequences, in particular at the level of semantics, style and pragmatics. This is, then, a case of free variation.
2. If the item is omitted, the meaning of the construction changes in a specific way.