The discoverer and developer of the system described in this text, herein termed “itemic grammar,” Robert K. Joyce, or his estate, claims custody of this system as a found treasure trove. Copies of this text can be created and distributed, but the theory of this system cannot be taught in any school or institution, and study of this system may not constitute any requirement for graduation or certification in any school or institution, without permission of the custodian of this system.

The text provided here is licensed as follows: Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material of whatever nature included in this weblog and any related pages, including the weblog’s archives, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license. (CreativeCommons License)

© 1998 – 2009 by Robert K. Joyce

I, Robert K. Joyce, am the author of the text of this site, but I am known elsewhere on the internet as “blues,” so this site refers to me as blues.

I can be contacted via e-mail at:

robertkj a+ fastmail do+ fm

While it utilizes much of the terminology of currently conventional linguistics, the structure and concepts of itemics are alien to any theories of grammar the reader may have heretofore encountered in linguistics. Probably one does not need to know anything about conventional linguistics to learn itemics. Like conventional linguistics, itemics is “descriptive,” not “prescriptive,” so I am not in the business of “telling people how to talk” here. Itemics involves a lot of symbolism, so it can look like mathematics, but it is not really a mathematical system (there will be more on that later).

In this text, I will present most of the new concepts in an assertive mode of exposition, rather than a propositional mode of exposition. I will assert many things that are hypothetical as if they were absolutely true. So I won’t have to keep saying things like “It is proposed here that all noun phrase items are referential.” Instead, I will usually just say “All noun phrase items are referential” (I’ll explain these terms later). (This is vaguely related to the traditional concepts of indicative versus subjunctive mood.) Clearly, though this entire system is a proposal, not a system of established scientific laws.

This is a “work in progress,” so I will make minor corrections, additions, and changes from time to time.

A novel method of making the text “searchable” will be utilized. Paragraphs will look like this:

|'0023:40'| “This is a paragraph.”

I will begin all paragraphs with reference marks consisting of at least four numerals, beginning with the text search aid “ |' ”, and include a “special” decimal-point “ : ” (a colon) ending with the text search aid “ '| ”. The numerals preceding the “special” decimal point will be in decimal format (base 10, utilizing 0 ~ 9), while the numerals following the decimal point will be in octal format (base 8, or utilizing 0 ~ 7), in order to greatly simplify the interpolation of new paragraphs into any pre-existing text. This should make it easy to find terms and concepts (which may appear in the index) that are introduced and further described in these paragraphs. So, I would make reference to a paragraph, say, “|'023:40'|” with these search indications. References to paragraphs, linguistic “examples”, and text “sections” will follow the same scheme, and will be integrated into the paragraph numbering scheme. “Examples” will be indicated numerically with the same numerical reference scheme and larger “sections” of text will be indicated numerically via the same scheme. This will facilitate simple search (and replace) operations, if they become needed.

Important terms that are listed and referenced in the Index will often be marked with double angle quotes. An example is: « important term ».

The various sections of text will be divided into larger “phases” of text, so that people who just want to read, say, the first phase will at least have some reasonable idea of what the whole system is about. Successive phases will then simply delve into more detailed material.

|'0001:00'|

|'0002:00'| Itemic linguistc analysis is very different from other currently common (“conventional”) methods of linguistic analysis. If you have studied linguistics in an academic setting, the material presented here will not be very comprehensible in terms of what you learned previously. These differences will become especially evident in the ways I utilize terminology.

|'0003:00'| « Itemic » is a human language, but it is not a spoken language. Every term and phrase in Itemic is “marked”, and this would likely make it impossible to actually speak Itemic. However, it can be written. Every natural language is a compressed version of Itemic, and different natural languages use radically different techniques to perform compression, which enables them to be spoken. Itemic is the natural language of the human neurolinguistic system, so all spoken languages are « translated » into (and out of) pure Itemic in the brain. We will be discussing « English Itemic » here. Like all natural languages, English Itemic possesses its own particular structures to support speech compression.

|'0004:00'| The order of words and structures that occur “in parallel” Itemic phrases is of no consequence, because all structures in Itemic are “marked”. Itemic linguistics is not concerned with morphology or phonology, so to avoid confusion, Itemic “markings” will be called « marklets ». And all Itemic structures will be « markleted ». The order of words and structures in spoken English is crucial. For example:

^/¯¯¯¯¯

“Jack ate rice.”

_{\_____}

is fine, but

^/¯¯¯¯¯

“Rice Jack ate.”

_{\_____}

is not typically grammatical. However, in Itemic (in it’s own symbolic representation):

^/¯¯¯¯¯

[^oj|<Rice> ^sj|<Jack> ^v|(ate).]

_{\_____}

is perfectly grammatical, since the components are “marked”, or rather, « markleted ». The marklet “^sj” indicates a “subject”, the marklet “^oj” indicates an “object”, and the marklet “^v” indicates a “verb”.

|'0008:00'| We are now « analyzing » a sentence example. We are consciously inserting marklets. This is an operation that a “listener” would perform unconsciously (performing an unconscious mental operation that I will call « assessment »). Everything in Itemic is markleted, and there is no “movement” of phrases, such as is proposed in current theories of syntax. In fact, all of the words in English can remain in place in English Itemic. Much of what this analysis requires, really, is that we merely marklet the words and phrases.

|'0009:00'| Here is an example similar to the one above, but further analyzed, with additional marklets revealed:

^/¯¯¯¯¯

[^{sj np}|<The kid> ^v|(ate) ^{oj np}|<the rice>.]

_{\_____}