Bill,
   I'm not sure how hard to push these positions on the ATEG list, which
has to, almost by definition, be a big tent. I'm sure there are dangers
to placing blame.
   I don't think the problem is Chomsky so much as a long U.S. tradition
of seeing grammar in largely formal/descriptive versus prescriptive
terms. We want to know how to classify sentences and we want to know if
they are correct. This deeply entrenched dichotomy, this narrow
either/or choice, may be the problem. The anti-grammar argument seems
to be that describing sentences doesn't help us be better writers and
doesn't even help us be more "correct" in our writing. There doesn't
seem to be a recognition that grammar study could do more than describe
the grammaticalness or correctness of forms.
   I don't agree that grammar was always about error. When I was in what
we used to call Junior High, I had wonderful teachers who did what so
many of us are talking about, breaking down sentences for the pleasure
of seeing how they work. It was a delight to me, and it gave me a
grounding in language that has been amended and fine-tuned, for sure,
over the years, but is in a very real sense built out of those early
insights and that early pleasure.
   I may be one of the few people on list who feel that correcting
language is a trivial pursuit. Typically, we just correct language, try
to decide how to do it with as little metalanguage as possible, with no
accountability for what students know or "need" to know. The prevailing
view, in fact, is that they don't need to know much. If we aim at
something much deeper, these issues of "correctness" will come along,
but correctness seems unfortunate as a central approach, whether
championed by Chomsky or anyone else. It's a little like saying
students don't need to know about history; they just need to know how
to vote. As a writer, I make language choices constantly, and
correctness seems to me a very trivial part of that. (It's less
trivial, I know, for people who are hurt by it. And I help those
studnets every day. But my job is to help empower them, not to
reinforce the notion that correctness is a central goal.)
   Innateness is just one part of the theory. If grammar is wired in, then
it has no central connection to our embodied experience of the world or
our social interactions or the shared building of meaning within our
disciplines. The rules are rules about "forms", not observations about
the rich and interactive construction of meaning.
    Innateness also brings with it the widespread belief that children
know most of an adult language by the time they reach school. We don't
pay much attention to the complex ways in which that language grows
and needs to grow as the child enters into more mature roles and more
mature relationships with the world. Reducing it to acquiring
"Standard English" is part of the problem.
   I agree that progressive educators wanted to toss out grammar and did
so in a fairly shallow way. It's also possible that new paradigms would
be oversimplified in the same way. But we would be less in danger of
that if English teachers had some training in language beyond
(typically) a single survey course. A great deal would change if we
thought of grammar as an important part of the English curriculum,
deeply entwined with cognition and interaction, not just concerned with
the narrow goal of correctness.
   We should also wonder why grammar is finding its way back into
curriculums around the world, but the powers that be here (in NCTE) are
doing their best to minimize it and keep it out. Our long history of
formal grammar may be part of that, along with our tendency to
associate grammar with regressive, error centered pedagogy. We don't
think grammar has much to do with "creativity" or with the higher order
concerns in the English curriculum. Functional and cognitive approaches
may be uniquely suited to pulling us out of that. They don't treat form
and meaning as separate, but as innately entwined.

Craig
 Craig et al.:
>
>
>
> I'm going to risk being repetitive at this point and bring up an issue
> that I and others have made before, albeit several months ago, I think:
> we can't much blame linguistic theory for what the "anti-grammar" folks
> have done with it.  Craig, I know you're specifically addressing the
> issue as it has played out in Education, and you're quite right on that,
> but I think some contextualization is always useful, esp. since there
> may be new readers on the list that didn't see the earlier discussion.
>
>
>
> It's true that Chomsky argued that a grammatical faculty is innate and
> that children naturally acquire it in the first years of life without
> any educational intervention, but the kind of English taught in school
> has never really been about the students' pre-existing language use to
> any large extent. Instead, it focuses on whatever changes are perceived
> as needed to enable the child to use formal written English (whatever
> that is).
>
>
>
> In other words, one could be the most ardent supporter of Chomsky's
> Innatist position, and still acknowledge that kids in school are
> learning patterns that they haven't acquired in their home environment,
> and that (by the time they're in school) probably require some conscious
> metalinguistic knowledge to work with. The anti-grammar position that
> emerged in education seems partly based on a failure to distinguish
> between "English" in general and "formal written English" - in other
> words, some educators took a set of statements that related to
> descriptive grammar and then simply assumed that they entailed
> acquisition of a prescriptive system would be automatic, or that
> acquisition of a new system starting around age six would be just as
> automatic as one the child had been exposed to from birth. Chomsky's
> remarks about the irrelevance of negative feedback to acquisition were
> similarly overgeneralized (many of the formal English "rules" aren't
> introduced until high school, and any old-school generativist would say
> that by that time, the kids are learning language, not acquiring it).
>
>
>
> As someone who really, really doesn't agree with major components of the
> Innatist position, I'd love to blame what happened in Education on
> Chomsky, but in all honesty I can't (there's plenty in linguistics I can
> whinge about, but that's a different matter). I suspect that if another
> linguistic paradigm becomes dominant in the U.S., it will be just as
> susceptible to being oversimplified, misconstrued, and turned into some
> kind of frightening fad ("Well, Connectionism says that we should never
> talk about word meaning").
>
>
>
> I wholeheartedly agree that there are multiple current approaches with
> valuable things to say about teaching grammar, and about the reasons for
> teaching grammar - I just don't think we can blame the current state of
> affairs primarily on Innatism. It was the handiest tool for
> rationalizing what a lot of educators probably wanted to do anyway, and
> they didn't much care whether the details of the actual theory supported
> what they wanted to do with it.
>
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 12:26 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Correct?
>
>
>
> Gregg (and all),
>   The article I referred to below and emphatically recommend is
> "Cognitive Processes in Grammaticalization" , author Joan Bybee, in The
> New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to
> Language Structure, volume 2. editor Michael Tomasello. Lawrence
> Erlbaum, 2003.
>    As I stated earlier, she does a nice job of using "am going to" as a
> case study of grammaticalization. (Think of the difference between "I am
> going to London" and "I am going to shop"). She also discusses the
> expansion of "to" as infinitive marker from Old English to the present.
> The fact that we have some verbs that take infinitive without "to" (make
> and help would be examples) is because they became entrenched before
> "to" expanded.
>    We originally designated "purpose" in an infinitive in part with a
> suffix: "thanne wolde he maken hem to drynken".  (Bybee's example).
> Eventually, the infinitive marker was lost.
>    The article summarizes very thoughtful positions on what
> grammaticalization teaches us about the nature of language. Here are two
> that I find compelling: "Grammar is not a static, closed, or
> self-contained system, but is highly susceptible to change and highly
> affected by language use."  And "Many of the very basic mechanisms that
> constitute the process of grammaticalization are cognitive processes
> that are not necessarily restricted to language."
>    These new understandings of language/grammar have serious
> implications for HOW grammar should be taught. I would add that it has
> implications for the question of WHETHER grammar should be taught. The
> anti-grammar folk tend to base their arguments on theories of language
> that are being thoughtfully challenged.
>
> Craig
>
>
> Craig Hancock wrote:
>
> Gregg,
>    If you think of "have to" as a paraphrastic version of "must" , then
> it gives us the advantage (along with be supposed to and be able to and
> be going to) of combining a modal notion with tense. "I had to do it."
> "I was supposed to do it." "I was able to do it." "I have to do it." "I
> am supposed to do it." "I was going to do it." "I am going to do it."
> and so on.)  Because they are useful forms, it's easy to see why they
> have evolved as common patterns. They are a very good argument for
> grammar itself as in flux and responsive to functional pressures.  I
> have seen a very good  description of the history of "am going to", but
> it's at home. I'll track it down.
>    Goldberg's "Constructions at Work" is first rate and very recent
> (2006).
>    Construction grammar is a strand of cognitive linguistics. I highly
> recommend Langacker's "Cognitive Grammar: a Basic Introduction (Oxford,
> 2008). He is probably the most seminal figure in the field.
>
> Craig
>
>
> Gregg Heacock wrote:
>
> Herbert,
>
>  I raised a question about the possible evolution of usage for "have" as
> in "I have to do this."  Might this have developed from "I have this to
> do"?  Do you believe Beth Levin's book would cover this?  I went to
> Amazon to check out her work.  This led me to other works you or others
> may be able to comment upon:
>
> Argument Realization (Research Surveys in Linguistics)by Beth Levin,
>
> Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language by Adele
> Goldberg,
>
> Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure
> (Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series) by Adele E. Goldberg
>
>  All of these sound interesting.  I am curious to know what you or
> others have to say of these works.
>
>  Much obliged,
>
>  Gregg
>
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 3, 2008, at 11:18 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> From a lexical semantic and syntactic point of view, let me once again
> recommend Beth Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations (Chicago
> 1993) as the most detailed published analysis I know of of how meaning
> and form work together to classify verbs in useful ways.  Of course, her
> overall classification, with about 330 classes, might be a bit much for
> an undergrad grammar class, but as a reference work and as an
> introduction to the subtlety and power of the concepts, it's a great
> piece of scholarship to have on your shelf.  And she is pretty much
> neutral when it comes to theory, at least in this book.  You don't have
> to be a linguist to read it.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
> Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
>
> Emeritus Professor of English
>
> Ball State University
>
> Muncie, IN  47306
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
> ________________________________________
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> [[log in to unmask]]
>
> Sent: December 3, 2008 11:52 AM
>
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Subject: Re: Correct?
>
>
>
> Bruce,
>
>    If I want a problem to go away or want my refrigerator to fill up,
> then I don't expect the problem or the refrigerator to do anything. But
> that only becomes a problem when we want to define the construction in a
> narrow way. If the construction builds from the ground up, then we need
> to expect these anomalies in the same way we expect word meanings to
> grow and change.
>
>    Is wanting X to Y the same as expecting X to Y? How about
> encouraging? discouraging? Helping? Ordering? Making? The more abstract
> the classification pattern, the further it drifts from the real world of
> meaning.
>
>   Each of these verbs uses these constructions in unique ways. The
> patterns build from use, not independently of it.
>
>
>
> Craig
>
>
>
> Bruce Despain wrote:
>
> Your pattern,  "If I say that 'X V-ed Y to Z' am I saying that it's Y
> who will be doing the Z-ing?" looks like what might be described in a
> constructional grammar (CG).   These folks are averse to describing the
> relationships of constructions as built up of other constructions.  They
> like to contrast the usage construction meaning vs. the grammatical
> construction meaning.
>
>
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:36 PM
>
> To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
>
> Subject: Re: Correct?
>
>
>
> Dear All:
>
>
>
> I suspect that one of the reasons that many modern grammars use what
> seem to be simplistic structural pattern definitions (e.g. [S V DO INF]
> for both "We wanted him to be hired" and "We wanted him to go home") is
> that the differences among those sentences are differences in what the
> various participants are doing - the relationships among them - and we
> don't really have a theoretically agnostic way of talking about that.
> The minute a term like "underlying subject" is used, the description is
> locked into a particular model.
>
>
>
> This is true of all descriptions, of course (simply by using a label
> like "infinitive," I've committed to a kind of model), but cases like
> these bring up major points of contention among current models. Almost
> everyone who works on English is happy with the term "infinitive," but
> there is nowhere near the same level of consensus  about the idea that
> infinitives are really, truly, made out of full sentences, etc. I have a
> knee-jerk reaction the minute I see a phrase like "underlying subject,"
> and I'm sure I use phrases that others on the list would have an
> immediate negative reaction to as well.  One way authors of grammar
> books can try to dodge the entire issue is simply to omit any references
> to this type of material at all, and thus we end up with [S V DO INF].
>
>
>
> Older grammars, like the ones Herb mentions, did something that I think
> we can still do: we can all agree that there are different patterns of
> relationships among the participants, even if we don't agree on why
> those differences exist. To some extent, the differences among the
> patterns can be "anchored" by relating them to native-speaker reactions
> to questions about implications of the structure (e.g. "If I say that 'X
> V-ed Y to Z' am I saying that it's Y who will be doing the Z-ing?").  In
> other words, we can adopt ways to probe for differences that there will
> be wide consensus on, even if there is no such consensus on what the
> differences mean for a theory of linguistic structure (this is what I'm
> trying to get at with the term "theoretically agnostic").
>
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University
>
>
>
>
>
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