Language and Topography

In The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis talked about medieval maps as not useful for navigation, which is something I used for the post I did on Patema Inverted. His point there is that the medieval map was meant to show ideas about the physical world other than pragmatic material accuracy. He notes that mariner's would never criticize such maps because they would never have a frustration with them because they would never try to use them in the first place because they know that that was not what they were made for. Mariners had other means by which to sail, like passed down verbal descriptions of landmarks. While modern map makers do strive for pragmatic accuracy, I would argue that some of the same thing of lack of accuracy at least pertains to usefulness as a problem in modern maps, (at least that is my experience from times of relying to heavily on Google maps when biking or driving). But what I want to focus on here is that language can have the same tension between map attempts at accuracy and other methods.

I think the tension between grammar and performance in language can be the same thing sometimes. A sentence diagram (the structure of subject and verb, with outline of how adverbial modifying phrases and clauses connect to that and all that good stuff) is like a top-view map. Logical sense is also like the map: "logical sense" (for example, the way we usually take "all that glitters is not gold" is actually a case of lack of logical sense because it technically says that gold does not glitter ... ever: for every X, if X glitters then X is gold; as opposed to what we mean: not all that glitters is gold = ~[all that glitters is gold] = there exists an X such that X glitters and X is not gold) strives for mapping the elements in a way that can have its plotting transferred right over to something like symbolic logic notation.

The other guides mariner's would use would be like the organic flow of a speech act as performed. It involves a lot more tone of voice. Sometimes you can get a description of these kinds of things to adapt to the map model, just as you can with Mariner methods (locating on a map the landmarks described in some bit of knowledge of such landmarks passed from sailor to sailor) ... but not always. When you can, though, it's actually an adapting of the linguistic "cartography" to the concretely existing examples, rather than the other way round, which (the map-method being dominant) ultimately winds up in something like computer code. And it is important to note that the concrete examples, like the Mariner's other methods, are the things that have worked (and believe me, as a copy editor, this is a hard admission to make ... but I'm also a huge fan of J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien and Terry Pratchett, so I have marinated my brain in good, interesting writing and know its worth ... even if I at times have trouble reproducing it in my own ramblings here :).

Here is an example of one that can fit in. An example sentence is "He purchased the land, and thus the well that is on the land." This is the way many people would write this, and in a rigid reading of the rules (the map), it is incorrect. Technically it is a compound direct object and should take no separating comma between the two direct objects. Rather, the "thus" should be offset with commas as an adverbial because it does not modify the action directly (as in "he bought the land with cash"), but rather through a further ramification. So, by a rigid reading of grammar, it should be "he purchased the land and, thus, the well on the land." This case is a little bit easier because the nature of the material content helps to see the intended communication (if the well is on the land, then of course he bought the well, so we wouldn't see it as an extra thing in the way that compound constructions usually convey added things [e.g., "I'll have a hamburger and fries"]), but this illustrates the point: the flows of language as performed often adapt to the contours of the subject, just as I am trying here to adapt the grammatical rules to fit the really existing sentence. Everybody naturally hears the first version performed in their head. It works to express the idea of consequentiality much better than the "correct" version.

The adaptation (of the rules/map-method to the actually performed sentence) I am about to give comes from actual experience in editing. I had so many people using the first version that I wound up sitting and thinking one night that I should change them to the "correct" way except that I could hear the first version in my head so well and felt like it did better justice to the intended meaning, and so I tried to see if there was a manner in which I could apply the rules to make it OK.

So, my discovery was that there is a whole lot of elision that goes on in our use of language that we don't realize, and elision is a poetic devise, so this brings us back to the observation that the poetic is the more original and scientific language is always trying to catch up to it: explanation is always chasing after understanding, to use Ricoeur's terms. Here, my "rules" justification of the first version ("He purchased the land, and thus the well that is on the land.") is that it is ACTUALLY a compound sentence (or at least that that is a legitimate reading that justifies the punctuation in the first version), which DOES take a comma to separate its two independent clauses, but there has been considerable elision in the second independent clause in the compound sentence.

Elision is when part of a clause is dropped out with the understanding that it is filled in from a previous clause, repeating that material in a new setting with different other parts. So, what is really there is "He bought the land, and thus [he bought] the well that is on the land," with the bracketed material being what is carried over from the first clause of the compound sentence and then elided.

Two further things can be noted here in support of the claim that the first version is not only allowed, but preferable as being more accurate to the intended sense. Both of these have to do with emphasis, and this point is important in and of itself because it points to the idea that language communicates more than simply the raw data of brute material facts, in this case, emphasis (if you want to put emphasis into factual proposition, you have to introduce new language statements, such as "I want to emphasize that buying the well is a ramification of buying the land"). Even the more rigid version includes some some emphasis with the offsetting of "thus," so the emphasis (something that is not a brute "fact") is so strongly intended that it can't be kept out, but I think the first version does it even more effectively.

The first of those two aspects is simply the elision itself. As a poetic, out of the ordinary practice (at least of the ordinary for the way we think of factual predication), it has a natural rhetorical force. It's like John Irving's missing finger being more effective for pointing in A Prayer for Owen Meany: the fact that something is missing that you would expect to be there gets your attention more (in this case, you would expect a full clause after what is obviously set up as a comma + conjunction for a compound sentence). The second thing is that, with the first version, the idea of the consequentiality has a whole clause dedicated to it, rather than one offset word, making it weightier in grabbing attention.

So, there is all this going on in the statement that makes the more rigid/formal "map" version (all that is on the page is the compound direct object, so it should be punctuated as that) less adequately, and thus less accurately, convey the intended sense (this is a very hard admission to make for a copy editor who loved the symbolic logic course in college, but then, I also am editing academic material, and I don't think you can pull that off with poetry, and so what I edit is fun for me as an exercise in balancing the map with the flow, or maybe better to say that I try to manage the interplay between them ... as G.K. Chesterton noted in Orthodoxy when discussing the romance of orthodoxy versus the stability of the Greek column, stable balance can be a very boring thing ... but I also have to note that many of my edits wind up being precisely enforcing prosaic grammar logic because poetic style is a skill that takes developing [Dr Donnelly, the advanced writing prof in college brought in an article from The New Yorker on bat boxes and said "if you're to write about bat boxes and get it published in The New Yorker ... you have to be good], and you can tell that many of academic authors don't have it honed the way journalists, so they are hearing a certain performance in their head but how they are translating it onto the page has so many possible other renderings when you can't rely on tone of voice being heard that it winds up in a muddle and it's better to go with the prosaic grammar).

Not all situations are going to be this adaptable to a "rules" explanation, but it helps to understand the terrain (the lay of the land in mapping versus other describing/method) to look at one that is.

Addendum
Now that I have gone and written this, I realize that the tension is felt much more with compound predicates, which also do not take a comma separating ([subject][predicate 1] comma + conjunction [predicate 2]), the tension being felt more because so little is elided (only the subject), making it harder to notice that it is elision. So here it would be something like "He bought the land, and so has the use of the well on it." The "rules map" way would be "He bought the land and, so, has the use of the well on it" (because the compound predicate takes no comma, and thus the word "so" has to be set off with commas) whereas many authors would do it the first way because the intended sense of emphasis is better served by reading it as "He bought the land, and so [he] has the use of the well on it."
[Extra note, the reason that the commas disappear that would offset "so" or "thus" is that, with a comma preceding a conjunction, if what follows the conjunction is an introductory adverbial, the opening comma of the offsetting pair always subsumes back into the comma before the conjunction ("he thinks the law is unjust, and in this case, I tend to agree"), and my practice, which I think is fairly widely done, is that, with words as short as "thus" and "so," both comas subsume back into the comma before the conjunction. The reason the opening subsumes back is a universally accepted allowance of performance aspects into formal written grammar: everybody so naturally performs it without the performative pause of the opening comma in this situation (introductory adverbial in the second independent clause of a compound sentence) that is has been accepted as part of the written "rules" even though it has no "grammatical" base. Commas were originally to preserve performative pauses in writing, and many of those performative pauses had grammatical functions, and those became codified in the grammar rules for comma usage. But you still get some tendency to insert commas for performative pauses that are not grammatical in nature, which, in addition to being unreliable because it depends on accompanying tone of voice that cannot be represented on the page,  then starts to generate confusion sometimes with the grammatical function of commas, and so it is best to use only those that have the grammar function. But in some cases, with dropping them for easier flow in performance, since it is so common, as here, some aspects of performance adaptations get set into the formal/logical grammar rules. Although, many writers don't realize that it is only for commas: when the conjunction is after a period or semicolon, the opening comma of an introductory adverbial stays in because those harder stops do not make it natural for the comma to subsume back the way the softer stop of the comma, which is the same performance level as the opening comma of the introductory adverbial. And it also only really works with conjunctions, "and" and "but," because of the expected performative flow in the conjunction of the predications ... when you have a non-restrictive clause opening with "which" and there is an introductory adverbial, the parenthetical nature of the non-restrictive makes the stop harder and the flow more stilted, such that the opening comma will not subsume back. All of this is very much more the organic side of speech/writing, rather than the logical.]