We have a terminological quibble here. "Traditional grammar" has at
least two distinct meanings: what Ed Schuster calls traditional school
grammar and what Noam Chomsky calls traditional grammar. What Ed's
refers to is what most of us have rejected as a combination of
prescription, social mythology, and sloppy thinking about language.
What Chomsky refers to is an important part of the Western intellectual
tradition and has a history going back to the Greeks. Serious studies
of grammar of the sort that Jespersen, Kruizinga, Poutsma and other did
in the late 19th and early 20th cc. are both rigorous grammatical
descriptions and insightful natural histories of English at their times.
I find myself going back to Jespersen for nearly every paper I do on
English, and I invariably find new insights and valuable data.
The modern compendious grammars, especially Quirk et al., Greenbaum's
Oxford English Grammar, Biber et al., and Huddleston and Pullum's
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, are very much in that
tradition, drawing on the most useful of contemporary theory and
methodology while presenting their descriptions in accessible language
that college students can deal with without too much struggle.
We're not going to stop using traditional grammar in these two senses,
but it is worth keeping in mind the distinction between a continuing
intellectual tradition and a mixture of bad content and bad pedagogy.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Crow, John T
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 9:35 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Charrow's article
Dick,
Great response to the article on traditional grammar. All of the
traditional grammar teaching in the world cannot stop languages from
changing, nor can it force-feed prescriptive dictates upon a
non-receptive audience.
I would suggest that, if students several generations ago were better
writers--and I think they were, it was because they _read_ a lot more.
They were better writers in spite of traditional grammar, not because of
it. (Just for the record: I certainly favor grammar instruction, but
NOT traditional grammar.)
John
>From: "Veit, Richard" <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: From the Washington Times
>Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2004 23:45:34 -0500
>
>I would like to know when that wonderful time was when people didn't
make
>grammatical errors, when Americans were routinely literate, when
students
>could write fluently, when no one had problems with the who/whom
>distinction or used "criteria" as a singular noun. Folk wisdom says it
was
>about a generation ago. Of course, that's what folk wisdom has always
said.
>
>A generation ago (as folk wisdom would have it) the English language
was
>just fine and people used it well. Today, however, the language is
>deteriorating, and people no longer speak or write it properly. That's
a
>common complaint in 2004, and it's easy to find other similar
complaints
>today--just as it was easy to find them in 1975, and in 1950, and in
1925,
>and in 1800 and 1600 and 1400. People seem always to have believed the
>language was on the decline and to have expressed that belief in almost
>identical terms ever since there has been an English language. Harvey
>Daniels did a nice job of presenting these complaints through the ages
in
>his 1983 book Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis
Reconsidered.
>The evident conclusion is that such fulminations have their origin in
the
>human psyche far more than in objective reality.
>
>If our language were on a thousand year downward slope, we'd all be
>muttering gibberish by now. But just because past Jeremiahs were wrong,
>that doesn't prove that now isn't the one time in our history when our
>language really is falling apart. The odds are against this hypothesis,
>however, and before accepting it, we need to see objective evidence and
not
>the glib anecdotes that Charrow presents.
>
>Dick Veit
>UNCW English Department
>
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