Dear Craig:

I believe that most of us have taken for granted some unsupported 
claims about language. For instance, in one of her messages Martha 
states:

"Our job as grammar techers is to help students bring to a conscious  
level the grammar they know subconsciously, innately, as native  
speakers, as humans."

In one past message you refer to "respect for the language expert in 
all of us," and in this message you state:

" The sense I get is that anything naturally acquired can remain 
unconscious. We have to learn Standard English precisely because it 
is UNNATURAL..."

Statements such as the above are based on Chomsky's unproven claim 
that humans are born with an "universal grammar" in their heads, and 
that "Every human being who speaks  a language knows its grammar" 
(See Fromkin, An Introduction to Language, 2003,p. 14). But these 
claims have never been substantiated. In fact about two hundred pages 
further in the book, Fromkin provides evidence that contradicts the 
notion of a *native grammar.

Webster's defines *native* as "belonging to a person by birth or to a 
thing by nature; inherent." But language is not *inherent* On the 
contrary, language IS *unnatural.* The idea of a *native speaker* is 
simply a myth. Nobody is born with language, or with  knowledge of a 
language. Children who are never exposed to a human language will 
never speak it.All humans acquire or learn language in ways which are 
not yet clear. There are only claims about language acquisition or 
learning, only theories, but no clear evidence.

I assume that most of the people who participate in this discussion 
are monolingual, that is, speak only English. As someone who has 
command of two languages, I wonder how can people who know only one 
language talk about language acquisition and learning as if they were 
two different things, and on what basis they distinguish between a 
*native* and a *nonnative* speaker. I taught my children English as 
their first language in my home country. Did they acquire English or 
they learned it? 

Much noise has been made concerning *prescriptive* and *descriptive.* 
The claim is that *prescriptive* is bad while *descriptive* is good.
But Marenbon (1994)states that the two notions are "mutually 
supportive:"by describing how a certain language is spoken or 
written, the grammarian prescribes usage for those who wish to speak 
or write that language."

It is my perception that most of the discussions or debates on 
language and grammar have a provincial character, that is, they 
reflect a very limited and local experience in language. English is 
just one human language, not *the language.* To attempt to establish 
general principles on the basis of such a limited exposure to 
language is clearly a recipe for a failure to understand how human 
language works. 

There is also the claim that "English has only two tenses," present 
and past. Those who make such a claim probably forgot or don't know 
that tense is deictic, and that expressing tense doesn't have to be 
done only through morphological tags. The future is expressed in 
English through multiple linguistic devices. Many Germanic and 
Romance languages, also, express the future tense through compounded 
tenses, that is through an auxiliary and a main verb.

Why do we have to approach language (and grammar)in such a simplistic 
and outdated manner?

Regards,

Eduard 


On Sat, 11 Feb 2006, Craig Hancock wrote...

>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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