The Literary Mind.pdf

158 THE LITERARY MIND
lems of internal organization of the system of grammatical constructions. A consistent
and workable solution to the problem posed by all these conflicting pressures
is the grammar of a language, which will not look uniformly like a set of
local and simple pairings between grammatical structure and story structure.
Plenty of strange opportunistic tricks, many of them ad hoc, are to be expected,
with quirks as one of their manifestations.
On the other hand, there is nothing in the view of grammar as arising from
the projection of story that in principle rules out the evolution of specialization
for the projection of narrative structure to the particular target of voice, and therefore
nothing to say that quirks in grammar as we know it could not arise from
genetic specialization. But the specialization is not in principle needed to get quirks.
Linguistics typically discusses grammar at the level of the sentence. The
theory of grammar as arising from parable invites us to ask whether the structure
of units of discourse higher than the sentence might share structure with sentential
grammatical constructions. Grammatical constructions are units of discourse;
higher units of discourse contain them. A handbook like Style—-Joseph Williams's
summary of his collaboration with Gregory Colomb—which is dedicated to
helping writers make their prose easier for readers to parse, tells writers that a
major improvement can be achieved simply by making the subjects of clauses
correspond to "the cast of characters" in the story and making the verbs that go
with those subjects correspond to "the crucial actions those characters are part
of." Williams and Colomb observe that readers are more likely to find prose clear
and direct when it seems to present characters and their actions, thereby telling
stories. What Williams and Colomb do not observe is that such prose is clearer
exactly because the grammar arises from those basic stories. Readers naturally
expect the stories being told to line up with the structure of the grammatical
constructions being used. They read prose more easily when it follows such an
alignment. Williams and Colomb recognize that many things that are not actually
characters or actions are understood as such by projection, and they frame
their advice accordingly. They advise those who want to write clear prose to
change passages like the first version below into passages like the second version:
Because the intellectual foundations of evolution are the same as so many
other scientific theories, the falsification of their foundations would be
necessary for the replacement of evolutionary theory with creationism.
In contrast to creationism, the theory of evolution shares its intellectual
foundations with many other theories. As a result, creationism will
displace evolutionary theory only when it can first prove that the foundations
of all those other theories are false.