I guess, Herb, another semi-epigram could be, 'Any epigram loses in validity 
and pithiness the more qualifications it needs.

Ron Sheen


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, September 22, 2007 5:54 PM
Subject: Re: Stahlke's law of language was Predictors


Ron,

As always, context is critical, and I provided none.  Like the
Neo-Grammarian Principle, with which I really don't have the temerity to
compare my humble quip, my laconic, pithy epigram has to be fleshed out
with some care, once attention has been gained, which, of course, is the
rhetorical function of an epigram.  Osthoff, Brugmann, and their
Junggrammatiker colleagues back in the 1870s and 80s used the epigram
"Sound change is regular and allows no exceptions" precisely to attract
attention to that theoretical position and its consequences.  Hans Hock,
in his Principles of Historical Linguistics, fleshes out the epigram
with some care and makes it a rather more modest, though still powerful
and profound, claim.  I also would not compare my remark with Edward
Sapir's profoundly wise statement, "All grammars leak," surely one of
the clearest statements ever of the humility of good science.

I think I first made my statement in the mid 70s when there was some
discussion about readability metrics going on.  These were based largely
on counting words per sentence or per T-unit, with no attention to
structure.  Thus a sentence like the immediately preceding would be
rated more complex and less readable than a sentence like

The policeman the boy the dog bit called came.

The latter is shorter but is so syntactically dense that, while fully
grammatical, is uninterpretable to most readers.  I've used it often in
undergraduate grammar classes to illustrate this point, and I have yet
to see a student interpret it correctly on first try.  Of course,
inserting a "that" or two to clearly mark relative clauses makes a huge
difference:

The policemen that the boy that the dog bit called came.

The epigram became relevant again in the mid 80s when software
developers were working industriously in fond hope of developing useful,
helpful grammar checking software.  Before the advent of affordable
artificial intelligence in the early 90s, grammar checkers were also
based on tokens that could easily be counted or at least identified in
lists, which is a cognitively similar task.  And these grammar checkers
were largely useless.  Contemporary grammar checking of the sort found
in Word 2007 is much more sophisticated but still crude and of marginal
usefulness.

Of course the earlier of these periods preceded the availability on line
or on CD of large corpora and of tools for the fairly easy manipulation
and searching of them.  Large corpora did exist, like the then 15-year
old Brown University Corpus, but these were not accessible to most
linguists.  By the late 80s such corpora were becoming more readily
available, sophisticated, and accessible so that such monumental and
elegant empirical studies could be done as Douglas Biber's 1988
_Variation across Speech and Writing_.  However, studies like this and
like his (ed al.) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English do not
use corpora to describe sentence structure.  Even Greenbaum's
corpus-based Oxford English Grammar doesn't purport to do so.  Rather,
corpus studies are use to demonstrate the distribution of structures
across genres.  His 1988 book, in fact, uses corpora precisely to define
genres empirically, on the basis of some remarkable empirical design and
statistical analysis.  The structures themselves are identified on the
basis of more traditional qualitative linguistic methods.

So hedged about, I would still stand by my statement.

Herb


As to Stahlke's Law of Language:  Anything in language that you can
count
doesn't (count).

Where does this leave corpus studies and the putative significance of
certain percentages of usage?

In my view, Herb's law may sound laconic and pithy but will not
withstand
close scrutiny

Ron Sheen.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 11:44 AM
Subject: Re: Predictors


There is the risk of a reductionist argument in this discussion of
whether
the goals of a mission statement must be measurable ("quantitatively"
becomes redundant).  We've just been through the unit assessment part of
the
process in our university, a four-year effort driven by state mandates
for
teacher education programs that then became a university-wide mandate.
What
happens all too easily, and what happened too often in our case, is that
the
questions of what's meaningful are reduced questions of what's
measurable,
often a different domain entirely.  And so we ended up with artifacts in

each course for which we could construct explicit rubrics.  A student
would
be shown to have met a goal when an artifact had met the rubrics at an
acceptable level.  Unfortunately, the goals of gaining scholarly rigor,
curiosity, and perceptiveness are simply not in the same universe of
discourse. Nor are the goals of tolerance, valuing diversity, etc.

Not all that is worth judging or attaining is objectively measurable, an

analog to
Herb

________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of DD Farms
Sent: Wed 9/19/2007 9:03 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Predictors



At 10:16 PM 9/18/2007, Paul E. Doniger wrote: . . .
>DD responded:"So true. But the schools seem to have no clearly
>assigned missions.

>I'm not sure what DD means, but every school I've worked in has had
>a mission statement, and mostly good ones.

DD: I meant an operationally definition. Not to improve the student
in something not defined, but to improve the students' score on the
ACT, or their results in some other test. Not feel good, achieve
excellence, if that is not operationally defined. I don't mind a
definition that strives for more students passing the National Latin
Test, nor achieve a lower drop out rate.

>My present school's mission (and I hope to stay here for the rest of
>my career) is as follows: "The mission of Pomperaug Regional High
>School, a caring community committed to excellence, is to educate
>each student to become a productive, responsible, enlightened
>citizen and a creative life-long learner through high quality,
>dynamic, innovative learning experiences in collaboration with the
>Region 15 community."

DD: And how is one supposed to measure that?

>It seems a pretty "clearly assigned mission" to me, and one that
>drives our curriculum; it's well worth supporting. We are constantly
>asked to hold our students accountable to a high standard.

DD: What standard?

>We also try to keep the community involved (it's easy for me,
>running a theatre program that depends on parents and local
>businesses being involved).
>I often wonder where people get their ideas about public schools and
>what goes on inside them Certainly, having taught both in the inner
>cities and in a blue collar town, I have seen some of the failings
>that have been mentioned in this thread, but mostly, I've seen good
>teaching and very little "dumbing down." . . .

DD: I have also taught in the public school system. I did my utmost
to achieve what I thought was desirable, but no clear mission statement
had
I.

>  What really causes problems for education are often those things
> that are out of our control: Budget cuts, large classes (usually a
> result of budget restraints), unfunded government mandates (like
> Craig, I am "not a fan" of NCLB -- actually, I hate the thing),
> standardized testing interrupting the process, consumerism,
> materialism, technological distractions (TV was just the
> beginning), and the drive to focus on the goal of creating a work
> force rather than creating "good citizens" in a Jeffersonian sense.

DD: I note you specify "education." Undefined. No clear mission
statement.

>Add to this that since the 1940s, 12 years of public education has
>become the minimal requirement for every American; there is a
>greater percentage of people who are expected to graduate from high
>school than ever in history -- and the stigma of not graduating is
>immense, both socially and economically.

DD: So the standards for so doing have been reduced to see it that they
do.

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