linguistic structures - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland ...

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The approach, therefore, seems successful. The students have memorized some formulas, the
definitions in (4), applied them in exercises, and learned a tool that can be reused elsewhere. The
teachers have done their job in supplying the formula for completing the assignment.
The difficulty is that English also has sentences like (6).
(6) The little girl feared the dogs.
In (6), the dogs are still causing the fear and the little girl is still experiencing the fear so it seems,
according to (4), that the dogs is still the subject phrase and the little girl is still the object phrase.
If that is correct, then we cannot say that subjects precede verbs in English and objects follow, which
seems to be the case in most sentences. So something is wrong. Since students do not know how
or why the definitions in (4) were proposed in the first place, they generally have no idea what to
do when the definitions seem to fail as they do in sentences like (6).
Now notice what is going on here at an abstract level. We have some data, which happen to be
sentences in English. We have a hypothesis which describes the data, namely, (4). We get some
further data which the hypothesis can’t handle. Thus, we must revise the hypothesis and look for
another proposal. This is exactly what happens frequently in the workplace. Consider, for example,
another scenario from the auto industry.
Several years ago, Ford Motor Company produced a van called the Mercury Villager. This van
originally only had a sliding door on the passenger side. Marketing analysts at Ford had determined
that parents would not want to have a sliding door on the driver’s side because their children might
get out of the van on the side of traffic. The other major auto manufacturers had vans with sliding
doors on both sides, because their marketing analysts had determined that people would find it too
inconvenient going to one side of the car to deposit items like groceries and then walking to the
other side of the car to get into the driver’s seat. Having sliding doors on both sides of the van was
considered a plus. Ultimately, Ford modified its design and offered a new Villager with sliding
doors on both sides. “A sliding door on the driver’s side of the vehicle [was] the subject of popular
demand from customers” (carpartswholesale.com/cpw/mercury~villager~parts.html). At an abstract
level, this problem has the same characteristics as our grammatical problem. Ford began with data,
namely, its marketing analysis of what it seemed parents wanted in a van. Ford then designed a car
accordingly. But further data indicated that the design did not match all the needs of its customers.
So, Ford began to produce a new van which did match the additional customer information.
Returning to our grammatical example, consider now an alternative approach to describing subjects
and objects which begins by looking at the data, that is, good sentences like those in (5), (6), and (7),
as well as bad sentences like those in (8), where the asterisk means that the sentence is
ungrammatical.
(7) a. They frightened her.
b. She feared them.