Bob,

Thanks for your thoughtful critique of my comments and your vigorous defense of the sentence as a syntactic unit.  I can't disagree with any of what you've argued.  There is no question that the sentence is an important unit, and when we're talking about morpho-syntactic phenomena it is the domain over which and within which large numbers of grammatical phenomena are defined.  I'd probably even agree that there is a set of minimal clause types that we can define for a particular language that correspond to the speech acts that the language defines morphosyntactically--or did I just commit a tautology?  My argument is not with the reality or the importance of the sentence as a linguistic unit; rather it is with the claim that S or IP or CP is the starting point for grammar.  As a domain over which to define a theory of syntax it certainly makes good sense.  But as a domain, it is an a priori that is chosen for methodological reasons, namely, because, as you have pointed out, so many constraints, rules, and relationships can be defined with rigor within that domain.

But let's look at phenomena that have syntactic consequences within sentences but that cannot be defined within the domain of the sentence:  focus, topicality, reference, and tense, to start with.  Many of the consequences for these can all be described at the sentence level for a particular language, but the larger phenomena are phenomena of discourse and of pragmatics, rendering their sentential effects epiphenomena.

But part of what I was getting at comes from my own experience working with speakers of other languages as well as with English speakers at various levels of education and development.  My note on my Pashto student and language consultant was meant to suggest that what works as a well-formed sentence in one social milieu, for example, discourse around a cooking fire in the evening in a village somewhere and what works in another, say a professional sociologist writing for publication in a journal, defines and permits very different syntactic phenomena.  A complex sentence with perhaps more than one clause in passive voice would simply not be comprehended, much less produced by an elder telling a folktale to the folk seated around the fire.  This has nothing to do, obviously, with intelligence; it has to do with media, genre, and situation, as well as language-specific training.  The same can be said for special morphosyntactic phenomena related to initiation rites, relationships between the sexes, etc.  Even within literary written English, compare Henry James and Ernest Hemingway; their very different approaches to the sentence in discourse reflects not just differences in style but even in world view, some of which can be quite conscious.

Of course, a comprehensive grammar must be able to describe all of this, but such a grammar has never yet been written.  Huddleston&Pullum or Quirk et al. describe standard written English pretty thoroughly, but they do not even attempt to work across a full range of genres or registers.

As to competence and performance, perhaps my jaundiced view reflects the times in which I learned our craft, the mid-60s to early 70s.  Syntactic theory was changing rapidly during that period, even moreso than now, and there were competing approaches growing up that were making interesting claims demanding response, all before the generative semantics vs. autonomous syntax war redefined the theory landscape.  It was an exciting time to be doing linguistics, but one of the disagreements that arose regularly at conferences, in classrooms, and even in publication was where the line was drawn between competence and performance.  Broadly put, anything that your theory didn't treat belonged in performance.  Anything it did was part of competence.  I remember having an argument in a syntax class with Barbara Partee in which I was trying to convince her that the grammar must take into account shifts in stress and accent in describing the behavior of quantifiers and negation.  Barbara dismissed those variables as "mere performance."  A few years ago I was interviewing job candidates at the Winter LSA in Chicago, and Joan Bresnan delivered the presidential address in which she argued that grammatical theory now could and must account for such shifts in stress and accent.  Thus over the course of my career, the interaction of stress and accent with quantifiers, negation, and focus has shifted quite clearly from performance to competence.

I recognize that theories change as they are tested, and as they change they gain in explanatory power, and this is, of course, what has happened.  But it does rather undermine the notion competence vs. performance.  This is not to say that native speakers don't have intuitions of grammaticality.  Clearly they do, but these intuitions are grounded, I suspect, in something more broadly cognitive and not in the endlessly shifting convenience of the competence/performance borderline.  What has been described as the competence/performance dichotomy is simply too simplistic to account for human linguistic behavior.  At the very least these categories have to exist as regions on a continuum, but I'm not sure that even that suggestion isn't merely an attempt to save a notion that now has half a century of literature.

Herb


-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates
Sent: 2008-06-21 12:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence? and the importance of thecompetence-performance distinction

I am sorry I am coming late to this discussion.  I agree with everything that has been said.  My colleague Jim Kenkel and I have been looking at a collection of essays written by first year native and non-native speaking college students to understand the non-standard punctuation.  ALL of the essays had sentences that were punctuated according to the standard rules.  Those that were non-standard appeared to be following principles to show the relationship between various ideas.

I am very reticent to question Herb, but there are reasons why the concept of the sentence is more that a "methodological choice."  It is a category that reflects English speakers knowledge of the language.

Herb writes:

  [The S (for sentence)] represented a unit within which certain relationships, structures, and constraints could be discussed without the inconvenience of answering questions about discourse.  This usually got us into an argument about competence and performance, which I held, and hold, to be a corollary of the methodological choice of S as the domain of analysis and description.  In informal speech, in contrast to formal lectures, addresses, sermons, etc., sentences tend to correspond to the breath group, so that the spoken sentence tends to be what one can say in one breath.

***
Note the use of the word "tend."   I think Herb gives away too much with that word.

Do we need the category of "sentence" (or clause) to describe what people do with they speak?

A couple of thought experiences.

I. Try to describe well-formed tag questions (a structure that almost exclusively in the oral language) in English without the use of the category sentence.  You know what tag questions are, don't you?  Tag questions are easy to describe, aren't they?

II. Try to describe well-formed questions (again forms that are very frequent in the oral language) in English without the use of the category sentence.   Some sentences to consider in your description.

1) Is the woman from France?
2) Does the woman live next door?
3) Is the woman who lives next door from France?
4) Does the woman who is from France live next door?
5) Yesterday, did the woman leave?

III.  Try to describe the antecedents of her and herself in the following strings without reference to sentence.  (I recognize that these sentences may not be common in the oral language, but they can be easily understood in the oral language.)

"herself" has to refer to Mary in the following.
6) Mary sees herself on television.
7) Mary wants to see herself on television.

"her" cannot refer to Mary.
8) Mary sees her on television.
9) Mary wants to see her on televison.

"herself" has to refer to Jane.
10) Mary wants Jane to see herself on television. (but remember 7)

"her" can refer to Mary
11) Mary wants Jane to see her on television. (but remember 9)

****
I recognize that I am suggesting the competence-performance distinction is crucial.  By the way, I am not alone in this regard.  The competence-performance distinction is the basis for the suggestions that De Beaugrande in his "Forward to the basics" paper and Noguchi in his NCTE book use for their suggestions in how to show students how to determine whether a string they have written is an appropriate sentence.

Finally, given what I have written above, I have no idea what the following means:

". . . what a sentence can be depends very much on medium, genre, discourse pragmatics, and social setting, among other things."

Do the principles of well-formed tag questions, yes-no questions, and the antecedents of personal pronouns and antecedents change depending on medium, genre, discourse pragmatics, and social setting?

Obviously, the frequency of the use of various forms change and some forms are very rare in some kinds of discourse (just like certain lexical items), but I have no idea how medium, genre, social setting changes the principles for any grammatical structure in English.

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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