Herb,
    This is a thoughtful post. I certainly wouldn't want to create the
impression that generative grammar has nothing to offer or that
linguists trained in those approaches aren't already contributing very
valuably to our project.    >
    One key, I think, to terminology is whether we can build on it
usefully. If knowledge about language is not considered useful, then
it's enough to use soft terms that help an individual deal with error
in their work (although this works better in theory than it ever has
in practice.) "Phrase and "clause", for example, may seem like
technical terms, but they are useful at every level of understanding.


I'm probably shooting at a non-existent target, but one of the strengths,
> to my mind, of the Scope and Sequence effort is that it is informed by but
> not in thrall to any particular theory of grammar.  Craig in particular
> brings in insights from Halliday's functional grammar and others draw on
> the insights of generative grammar, and there have been useful
> contributions from more traditional grammars.  One of the important but
> ignored episodes in the decline of grammar instruction in the schools is
> the brief '60s project to bring current transformational grammar directly
> into the classroom.  This not only failed but resulted in a discrediting
> of anything linguistic among many in language arts, a reaction I've run
> into more than once when talking with teachers and colleagues in
> education.  That project was ill-conceived, as Chomsky himself noted when
> he said in an interview that he saw no place for transformational grammar
> in the schools, that rather good traditional grammar should be taught,
> referring to traditional grammarians like Jespersen.
>
> There is a lot of content that can be made useful and valuable without
> formal theoretical overhead.  Of course, what constitutes "formal
> theoretical overhead" has fuzzy edges and some specific concepts, like,
> perhaps, "movement" or "scope" work better than others, perhaps like
> "trace" or "cline".  The content of such concepts can frequently be
> handled well without formal treatment of the theoretical construct.  My
> sense is that more progress will be made if we can avoid arguments over
> particular theories.
>
> Herb
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Craig
> Hancock
> Sent: Sat 2/11/2006 12:01 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: On the irrelevance of generative grammar
>
> Bob,
>     Within the context of the statement (To Cynthia), what I was intending
> to say is that we have no history within public education of thinking
> of grammar in relation to meaning.  You are right in pointing out, as
> Martha does so well in her "English Teaching: Practice and Critique"
> article, that there was a huge interest in linguistically informed
> grammars in the fifties. She does cite generative grammar as one of
> the forces that helped derail it. Her description of the auxiliary
> system may have been influenced by Chomsky, but I don't think Chomsky
> advocated teaching it in the schools. The sense I get is that anything
> naturally acquired can remain unconscious. We have to learn Standard
> English precisely because it is UNNATURAL, which makes it less like a
> range of rhetorical options than like a selection of approved forms. I
> know you have told me (as have other members on the list who may or
> may not be in that camp) that we have no need to teach native speakers
> about determiners precisely because they don't make errors with them.
> This seems to me the central position of minimalist approaches and
> "grammar in context", which advocates ignoring grammar unless there
> are "errors" and using as little metalanguage as possible. Martha's
> position (I hope I can presume) and my own is that knowledge about
> language helps us deeply in our dealings with the world, including
> reading and writing, and that we should teach directly even those
> aspects that have no direct bearing on avoiding typical errors.
>   I apologize if I have given misleading views on generative grammar. "We
> have no history" is an unfortunate phrasing.  "We have no recent
> history" would have been much better.
>
> Craig
>
>
>
>  With the recent discussion on linguistic grammar, I find the following
>> statement by Craig strange.
>>
>>> (We have no history of talking about grammar in that way. Even
>> generative grammar largely sees itself as irrelevant.)
>>
>> Actually, in the States in the 1950s, major journals in the US (English
>> Journal and CCC) had numerous articles on how linguistic insights can
>> inform teaching about grammar.
>>
>> Martha's post on linguistic grammar make assumptions by "generative
>> grammarians."  For example, the syntactic description of the English
>> auxilauxiliarystem in her text really comes from Chomsky.
>>
>> The notion that most of our grammatical knowledge is innate is a
>> fundamental assumption of generative grammar.  This innate assumption is
>> NOT fundamental to systemic functional linguistics.
>>
>> Bob Yates
>> Central Missouri State University
>>
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