GHOST Grammar
Fang Gui-Ling
Assisted Professor
Mei You College of Cognizable Linguisticity
Macao
[This very special article first appeared in Speculative Grammarian—Platinum Edition, Volume CLXXIII, Number 3.1415926535897932384626433832795 (05:56:48 a.m., July 4, 2015). For those not familiar with our Platinum Tier Membership, it is our most exclusive, deluxxe subscription plan; it includes leather-bound issues—dated via volume/number with sub-yoctosecond accuracy—delivered twelve to fifteen times per hour during business hours, your very own floggable intern on retainer, and many other perks. In order to solicit bids for a very limited number of subscriptions recently made available, we’re offering this one-time-only sample of the kind of exclusive, timely, and actionable content contained therein. You know you’re worth it. —Eds.]
In a previous study, I presented incontrovertible evidence that grammatical entities are both ranked and anchored to the relative strength of nodular growths, I think. I argued for the incontrovertible belief that grammar reveals itself through spuriously labelled syntactic nodes, I thought.
On second thought, however, it turns out I didn’t. My findings were not false, of course, but my mind/brain had remained in deceitful contemplation of mere trees. This is a requirement that at the time seemed entirely natural in order to express intuitive ideas about grammatical architecture. The present theoretical epiphany, however, fittingly came to me in a year ending in the number 5,1 exactly 5 years after my previous piece saw the light of day.2 This is incontrovertible proof that 5-final multiples of 5 favor revival of The Theory, as the current spree of (re)publication by my betters and elders shows. High 5-cyclicity rulz, in short, in all likelihood because of 5’s Roman counterpart heading the word Veritas (a designation by which The Theory is popularly known), which aptly contains V recursive eras enclosing it, where it is incontrovertibly it, for each era in turn.
Grammar is properly a GHOST (Gnomic Higher-Order Syntactico-Theological) Grammar, I think. Therefore, I am now able to announce that grammatical entities are entirely absent until they unexpectedly pop up, as and when theoretical need arises, out of their (apparently) empty syntactic recesses. Formalizing absence has never been an issue for The Theory, so we have, this time/era:
Rule 1. ∅ → α 3
Rule 2. α → ∅
where ∅ is a blank and α isn’t.
The elegance of this exquisite complementarity, Ockham-razored to the quick (and the undead popping-up entities), incontrovertibly explains why Rule 1 feeds/bleeds Rule 2 while Rule 2 bleeds/feeds Rule 1, and vice versa. As recursively, the formalization further satisfies 5-fold congruity: to wit, two entities + two rules + the single unifying blankness of it all, qed.
The derivational cycle preserves the Veritas symbol as a gentle reminder of binary truths which were it in bygone eras:
Besides explanatorily adequate, this forest diagram is incontrovertibly pretty. I offer it here ready to cut-and-frame on The Wall that we all must face when invoking the GHOSTly α of the day/era.
The deep structure is then:
The surface structure, whose psychological reality is far from demonstrated, can nevertheless be reasonably hypothesized to reflect the haunting hunt for GHOST chains of speech sounds out of the sounds of silence (see Rule 1, above) or, as incontrovertibly, texts like this article.
1 About 15 minutes ago, to be precise.
2 That’s three years after publication, plus the usual two of peer review and bribery.
3 Rule 1 has earned the charming nickname Little Bang, by demiurgic analogy to the Other Bang.4
4 If physicists can, why can’t we?
5 Deep structure, as a keen observer won’t fail to notice, is indistinguishable from any of the other bricks in The Wall.
