Excuse me, but would someone tell me what KISS stands for.
Thank you,
Christine Gray
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Edward Vavra
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 3:31 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Rigid theories
Bill,
Thanks for the explanation, and for the preface that notes that it
has "little direct application." I do, however, wish that explanations
provided on this site could regularly be so prefaced. We often get
explanations that require a ton of the background linguistics to make
them comprehensible. As I have noted before, in themselves they do not
bother me, but they probably confuse the pedagogy more than they help.
I have, by the way, been considering advertising KISS grammar as
"the only honest approach to teaching grammar." By that I mean that it
is clearly labeled as one approach to grammatical analysis, with a
clearly defined set of terms. Anyone who is interested can look at other
grammars, other definitions, etc., but KISS itself keeps its terms
systematically clear. As you noted, various theories of grammar come
with complex philosophical and linguistic assumptions, most of which are
never made clear, yet the proponents of them claim that they are simply
teaching "grammar." To the general public, and to practicing teachers, I
think that that is very unfair.
Thanks again,
Ed
>>> [log in to unmask] 02/16/04 12:49PM >>>
[This one is primarily theory-wrangling, with little direct
application
to pedagogy]
Ed,
I probably wasn't very clear in that initial statement. What I meant
was
that quite a number of theories would hold that a given non-ambiguous
sentence has exactly one correct structure; syntactic argumentation in
those theories thus takes the form of a discussion about which
possible
structure is the correct one. For example, given a basic transitive
sentence skeleton like [S V O], there are at least two possible
groupings:
1. (S V) O
2. S (V O)
In what I'll call "monostructural" theories, practitioners take as a
given that they have to pick one of those two (this is in part driven
by
some initial assumptions in how to "count" simplicity in a theory).
Each
has benefits - the first one provides a very convenient domain for
talking about subject/verb agreement, while the second accounts much
better for the observation that knowing the kind of verb you have lets
you predict the kind of object, or whether there will be an object or
not, better than it lets you make predications about the subject (and
besides, it fits the traditional subject/predicate distinction). In
all
the monostructural approaches I'm aware of, practitioners pick the
second; the price, of course, is having to go to some extra lengths to
deal with subject/verb agreement.
"Multistructural" theories would allow for *both* 1 and 2 to be
potentially "correct" simultaneously, so the question of "which one is
correct?" isn't really relevant. This kind of approach can (but
doesn't
have to be) motivated by a different way of counting simplicity.
Both mono- and multistructural theories can be deployed in "God's
Truth"
and "Hocus Pocus" forms - in the first case, the practitioner claims
that the underlying reality of human language is such that sentences
really do/don't have single structural descriptions (whether we know
what they are or not); in the second, the practitioner claims that
there
is no way of knowing for sure, but that assuming that they do/don't
have
single structural descriptions is useful for practical reasons. A
position of "agnostic humility" (which I happen to regard as quite
healthy!) is possible in all four combinations of the two
distinctions.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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