There are several parts of this post by Bill that I need to respond to.
First, Bill does not quote my entire sentence. This misrepresents my attempt to be neutral.
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Bill writes:
As you no doubt expect, I simply can't resist pointing out that the
expression, "Formalists understand syntax is separate from meaning"
presupposes that formalists are correct, and hence encodes the assertion
that an ongoing debate has been settled.
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Here is my entire passage:
The formalist-functionalist split in linguistics is about whether
grammar, more specifically syntax, is separate from meaning. Formalists
understand syntax is separate from meaning; functionalists don't.
It certainly is interesting Bill did not include what I wrote after the semi-colon. If
what comes at the end of a sentence is most important, my sentence could be understood as priveliging
the functionalist position.
I find the following in Bill's post very strange. I did not know that if I cite a person who makes a point I agree with I am under an obligation to indicate that someone else has a completely different point of view.
Bill writes:
And if you're going to bring up Bickerton, balance
suggests that Sampson be brought into the conversation as well, since he
has provided what quite a number of us regard as a rather convincing set
of counterarguments (cf. "The 'Language Instinct' Debate," Continuum
Publishing, 2005).
I have actually read Sampson. People of very different theoretical persuasions can certainly read the same text differently.
First, let's remember what is being discussed. I cited these two pairs of sentences:
1) Bill wants someone to work for.
2) Bill wants someone to work for him.
3) Which letters did Bill destroy without reading?
4) Which letters did Bill destroy without reading them?
The pronoun deletion in 1 and 2 changes the meaning of the two sentences. The pronoun deletion in 3 and 4 does not change meaning. Bickerton asks for those who claim language evolved to meet human needs what needs were being met by the properties of these pairs of these sentences.
It sure would be instructive to know what the patterns in these pairs are that we all somehow learn that can be described without reference to any grammatical categories.
Sampson tries to show in his text that everything we know about language can be accounted for by the input. He cites searches in the British National Corpus to show that children are exposed to all of the constructions of language. As a consequence, grammar is really the result of these patterns from the input.
What Sampson tries to do and what he actually shows is different. Sampson is correct when he notes a good formalist committed to some view that language is innate cite the following question:
5) Is the woman who lives next door from France?
These types of questions, formalists claim, are rarely in the input and are hard to account for based just on pattern-matching.
After all, both 6 and 7 are possible.
6) Does the woman live next door?
7) Is the woman from France?
Sampson searches the British National Corpus (BNC) to show that structures such as (5) are available to children. I cite from page 82.
. . . to my surprise, I found no examples at all of S[entence]-within-M[ain] S[entence] questions in the spontaneous speech in the BNC/demographic.
Sampson, to his credit, indicate that innatists may be onto something with this example. This is not a convincing counterargument to me.
Something is very important in this discussion for teaching. Bill is not correct when he writes the following:
What we should *most* beware of is letting doctrinal disputes rule out
the use of materials and methodologies that do help students learn. If I
want to explain to an ESL student why and when we tend to use the
passive construction, I'm going to want to talk about things like topic
and foregrounding (without necessarily using those technical terms),
regardless of whether those are located in core syntax or not. As a
linguist, I may care passionately about the theoretical issue of the
status of topic in language processing -- but as an English-teacher, I
don't care where the heck it shows up in the brain.
***********************
As someone interested in knowledge of language and as someone who teaches both native and non-native speakers to be more effective writers, I find that my teaching has to be informed by what my students ALREADY know about language. In other words, what the heck they already know informs where I begin my teaching. This has consequences for Bill's example about the passive.
My research with Jim Kenkel, which has appeared in the Journal of Second Writing and the Journal of Basic Writing, argues that all writers KNOW they have obligations in ordering of information in their texts. In other words, students know that they have to announce a topic before they discuss it, etc. The kinds of sentences that occur in developmental writing, I see, as attempts to meet those obligations with the grammatical resources they have control over. Because developmental writers know already know something about language, from their perspective, they are writing sentences that are communicative and not deliberately awkward or confusing. Jim Kenkel and I have argued that we as writing teachers have to understand student language choices from the students' perspective to improve their writing. This perspective is deeply informed by a particular theory of language.
Of course, my assumption that developmental writers know they have obligations in ordering information in their texts could be wrong. Perhaps, children and adults have no idea that they have obligations in ordering information. The implication from such a perspective is that even telling a coherent story for such students would be next to impossible because they have no idea what obligations they have to order events in the story.
Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
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