Language’s Revenge

Terence G. MacNamee

dedicated to G. Westphal-Montt

As I with a bunch of data Was working hard and deep, My left hemisphere gave up the ghost And I drifted off to sleep. I dreamt my soul was restless And left its corporal seat; I went to the beach where the mind of man And the sea of nature meet. A group of restricted relatives Were sporting in the sand, As a blocked and starred non-sentence Swam sadly from the land. A phonology tree grew near them With underlying roots; There were phonemes on its branches And allophonic shoots. As I watched the shifting stresses, Something made me jump— A morpheme leapt out from a phrase And bit me in the rump. And all at once behind me I heard an angry yell, Like a hundred immediate constituents Or all the hosts of hell: “In vain do linguists seek to reach Explanatory adequacy; You competence models will never exhaust Our phenomenology. Your depredations on us Would infuriate the saints, With your transformations, ad hoc rules And terminal constraints. We are not feature matrices, Nor phones, if you’ll allow; We are the vowels of Ancient Greek, And we’re coming to get you now.” I heard them charge as if they meant To push me in the deep, When my biorhythms suddenly jumped, And I awoke from sleep. The morphemes stood upon the page As they would speak no more; The Naturalness Condition held; And all was as before.