Bill's post is real valuable for how it describes most differences between various perspectives/theories on the nature of language. If you are interested in the differences of theory and wish to explore them more, this post is very good background to begin your further exploration.
I wish to address his last paragraph.
There's an additional reason for CG/SFL clustering, but it's one that
exists "outside" either theory. CG, by its nature, must also
acknowledge that cognitive processing constraints - short term memory
limitations, etc. - have a direct effect on the structure (and
structures) of language. SFL theorists have spent a fair amount of time
describing what Halliday terms the "textual metafunction," which among
other things is concerned with maintaining new vs. old information
contrasts, and cohesion. The kinds of constructs one needs for the
textual metafunction happen to dovetail fairly well with notions of
processing constraints - in other words, part of CG may be quite useful
as a kind of backdrop to SFL and vice versa. In generative models, the
*basic* structure of language has nothing to do with more general
nonlinguistic processing constraints, so there isn't that kind of
"contact point" between the theories.
****
Because generative approaches are interested in what are the possible forms of a language, such approaches have little to say on how such forms are used by speakers/writers. In other words, generative approaches assume a competence-performance distinction. As teachers, we are interested in whether the competence of our students (their knowledge of what is possible in English) is sufficient for the kinds of tasks they use language for (an issue of performance). As Jim Kenkel has noted, generative approaches do consider the constraints that exist on those structures that move information around in a sentence: passive constructions, clefts, pre- and post-posing.
Bill observes, correctly I believe, that no theory predicts when structures that change the normal order of information in a sentence are used. That requires assumptions outside of any theory of language.
There is only one part of the final paragraph that is not quite right. There are implications in generative theory that do predict some general processing constraints that we see in student writing and reading.
The work of Perera on the acquisition of children's writing is a case in point. Perera notes that sentences that have a lot of structure in the subject NP (a heavy subject) of children's writing occurs relatively late. If it is correct to characterize the English sentences as S = NP VP (where VP is V NP). this makes all kinds of sense. There is a great deal of nonlinguistic processing to keep in mind when processing a heavy subject before getting to the verb and figuring out whether it needs to be overtly marked for agreement. If there is a of structure in the object, there is not as much load on processing. So, a sentence like (1) is easier to process than (2).
1) This is the cat that chased the rat that lives in the house that Jack built.
2) The cat that chased the rat that lives in the house that Jack built is there.
A simple. For which sentence is it easier to make a yes/no question?
Likewise, the work of Carol Chomsky on the child acquisition of structures like John is easy to please vs. John is eager to please can be accounted for by the kind of abstract structure proposed in generative accounts. C. Chomsky was able to demonstrate that young kids initially interpret a sentence like (1) as it is the doll who has difficulty seeing.
1)The doll is hard to see.
She did this by showing a doll with its eyes blindfolded to a child and asking the child whether the doll was easy to see or hard to see. Most children below the age of six answered "the doll was hard to see" (because it was blindfolded.) In other words, the child assumed the was seeing and not that in this construct someone is trying to see the doll. This is all about processing that a generative approaches have helped to discover. There are other examples.
With that being said, I find Bill's post a big advance on this discussion.
Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>>> "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> 2/9/2009 12:47 PM >>>
Dear All:
I'd like to address one point in the recent debate about developmental
phases of grammar - but I want to be careful to emphasize that it's a
very focused (in other words, it doesn't have a large impact on the
debate as a whole, but hey, it came up). And I think I may be able to
address it noninflammatorily (Word just red-lined that, but I have a
deriving license).
Halliday is quite clear about his grammatical model being a statement
about social practice, rather than about cognition. In a sense, he's
recapitulating an old trend in linguistics: we're much more confident
with statements about what we observe going on than we are with
statements about what we think might be going on in people's heads,
unless we have some way to measure the latter directly. He's also from
the "hocus-pocus" approach to linguistics rather than the "god's truth"
approach, for the same kinds of reasons. In other words, if the grammar
describes what's going on well, and acts as an explanation insofar as
it lets you predict the kinds of things you'll encounter, why go out on
a limb and claim Full Truthiness?
Cognitive grammar, a la Langacker and others, is a "god's truth" model,
and does make claims about what's going on in people's heads. It would
thus seem at first to stand in opposition to Halliday's - and it does,
if the only dimension we're organizing along is the
internal/external-phenomena one.
There are, however, other dimensions along which CG and SLF tend to
"cluster" together. Both acknowledge that social context directly
affects what is produced, and more importantly, both consider the social
environment to have a *direct* effect on the basic structure of
language. In most Generative approaches I'm familiar with, any kind of
selection effect due to social context is outside the scope of "grammar"
- the grammar defines the set of what is within the realm of
possibility, and that set has nothing to do with social interaction. In
a particular social situation, a speaker might choose a subset of that
set, but that's not an issue for the grammar. There's a sense in which
sociolinguists, to generativists, are looking at something fundamentally
different from what "core linguists" look at.
There's an additional reason for CG/SFL clustering, but it's one that
exists "outside" either theory. CG, by its nature, must also
acknowledge that cognitive processing constraints - short term memory
limitations, etc. - have a direct effect on the structure (and
structures) of language. SFL theorists have spent a fair amount of time
describing what Halliday terms the "textual metafunction," which among
other things is concerned with maintaining new vs. old information
contrasts, and cohesion. The kinds of constructs one needs for the
textual metafunction happen to dovetail fairly well with notions of
processing constraints - in other words, part of CG may be quite useful
as a kind of backdrop to SFL and vice versa. In generative models, the
*basic* structure of language has nothing to do with more general
nonlinguistic processing constraints, so there isn't that kind of
"contact point" between the theories.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
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