I have added a good few more gerunds, nouns and verbs to The Santorum Variations (4), published a few columns down, and I will shovel more in as they arrive from Iceland, Siberia and Pasadena over the weekend. It is exciting work, and my friend Noam Chomsky, who rings in hourly, is planning on the basis of this burgeoning anthology of old addled words a whole new theory of human memory and becoming a pest. I will try to sleep a while and get back to you.
Watch this space.
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Ah, Robert dear boy, modelling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the “productivity” or “creativity” of language. A formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. Pāṇini’s notion of an explicit generative grammar is all very well, even though it is also related to rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.
But yes, my next book will most certainly explore the anthology of addled words as you so piquantly put it. A Pest, eh? Just as well I never sue.
By the way, I thoroughly enjoy the posts of Doug Quixote and I’ll use some of his excellent phrases, if he will agree.
Apologies to all for the hoax, but I couldn’t resist after Bob’s post.