Couch 201: The Transformative Grammar Couch

I'm not entirely sure I even know what transformational grammar is. Also, I'm sure I've never had to diagram a sentence.

Una would spell it youre.

Which means, Kit, it is fine to drop commas since the Couch starter is an apostrophe refuse-to-use-r.

I'm bored. Coworkers are bothering me today. I want to put on my headphones and just pretend I'm not here and that I can't hear them. I want this last half hour of work to be over so I can be in weekend mode. Just grumbling. Don't mind me.

I don't remember a single thing about it. Shows how practical it has been to my profession. I remember vaguely enjoying the course because it was a like a word puzzle to me, but once the course was over, that was the end of its practical use. I suppose I gained deeper understanding of grammar and sentence formation, but I certainly don't specifically use analysis anymore. I would have to reteach it to myself at this point. I remember it being said the only reason we had to take the course was because it was that professor's pet course. I suspect once he retired, it was taken off the required course list.

Not that I'm actually working....

Does anyone have some awesome plans for the weekend? I have to read a chapter of a book tonight so I can be ready for book club tomorrow morning, but I don't have anything planned that is out of the ordinary.

I want to live vicariously through someone else's awesome weekend plans!

Yes, I am spamming the couch a little.

Sorry everyone. I'm not usually so chatty.

They are at it again. Who can blame Buzz Aldrin for punching people. Conspiracy theorists

Oh goodness! I made it to the weekend! Yippee!! So ready....

I have waited 7 years to use that emoji.

Have a good one my weekends are really boring.

I'm going to a bridal shower tomorrow. Should be fun.

Artley, I'm sure it was dropped. It's usually offered in grad linguistics programs, and even then, only programs that are theoretical in their orientation. And I remember very few specifics from the course; it was more that it informed my thinking about grammar at a foundational level.


SlumberKitty, Transformational or Transformational Generative Grammar is a paradigm developed by Noam Chomsky as a way of conceiving of grammar not prescriptively, like we all learned in school, but as a conceptual framework to understand the structure of language as an inherent capacity, comprised of both an internal awareness and an externalized influence. So it assumes that language has inherent structure and relationships between parts that are reflective of both internal capacity for language and external usage input from the environment. Sometimes it's described as the "deep structure" of all language.


The sort of rules we associate with prescriptive grammar are only descriptive of externalized language. TG helps explain a lot about the gap between what native speakers of a language intuitively understand about the relationship between form and meaning, and what non-native speakers find contradictory and experience as "exceptions to the rules"--which English is full of!

But I don't think this^ will fit on a pillow!

Not my weekend! Im just waiting for it to cool off so i can go down to the laundry room and warsh me some undergotchies

An it just started storming.

Tomorrow I'm going sailing, which I haven't done in yeeeears (I'm going to take a refresher course first). And on Sunday I have a date for breakfast (another doctor who's working the night shift) and in the evening will watch Stranger Things with my local bff. Does that count?? Objectively it's not very a exciting plan, but I'm excited anyway

I am supposed to be working on my final portfolio for poetry class this weekend while I'm on vacation, but am getting very little done. Up next are some pics from the Grand Canyon.

A few pics from today.

I am going on a trip this week. I doubt I will remember to take pictures but there are already lots of pictures of the area, so if I really need to see it again - I can probably find a better one than I would take on the internet or in a book. Not only does it take me forever to find the camera app on my phone, once I do find it, I often accidentally take pictures of my fingers or such (often is relative to the times I remember to take pictures. So not often in general but often when I remember to try to take a picture.)

That's the view of the GC I remember! It's the only side I've seen. Art, have you been up to the mesas, to the Hopi community? I loved it up there, but it's been years since I went.

I learned this lesson when taking pictures of archaeological sites. Very quickly one pile of rubble looks like another and you can’t tell whether you took the picture to illustrate the fluting on the column drums or maybe it was the clamp marks on the drums or maybe it was the design of the stylobate underneath them?

Isn't there a Monty Python sketch about that? I have a vague memory of John Cleese describing his photos...

No, I haven't. I'll look them up. We went to the South Rim today, but my favorite place in all of Arizona is the North Rim. I finally got back there after 30+ years a couple years ago. Wish we had time this trip to go that far around, but we don't. It's over 200 miles I think to the other side from where we are.

This weekend I am going to attempt to not let the anniversary of the night my husband set our house on fire bother me. Unfortunately, it bothers me.