Bob,



I should probably clarify my comments a bit. You'll notice toward the end of that earlier post, I throw in the following:



>>I think functionalists in general don’t mind claiming that performance (including comprehension in a social context, rather than just production) partly creates competence as an epiphenomenon...<<



The "partly" was there by intention, as was the entailment that competence exists (you can't create something that is nonexistent....well, barring certain interpretations of null-elements). Obviously, native speakers do have the ability to recognize if novel strings are acceptable in their language or not. Production and comprehension appear to conform to certain norms, and it's hard to deal with that without positing some kind of "rest state" system (not impossible, since I *think* Eco's semiotics manages it, but I'm by no means positive). Functionalists tend to think the fundamental characteristics of that system are determined by general cognitive constraints together with *meaningful* interaction with other speakers, rather than by the operation of a specific-only-to-language module on a semantically neutral set of input strings. If for "competence" we substitute "how one expects the language to act, given what's gone before," we've got something closer to the functionalist conception (or at least, my version of it). I also don't expect the waiter at a diner to give me apple pie before my meatloaf, or to put the meatloaf on top of a three-inch layer of uncooked cornmeal -- those aren't linguistic expectations, but from my perspective, they're fundamentally the same *kind* of expectations. After all, my parents never told me, "Son....don't put the meatloaf on a three-inch layer of uncooked cornmeal. It's just wrong." Somehow, the absence of negative evidence didn't prevent acquisition. 



As for sentence combining, I don't think *anyone* has problems with the technique as a pedagogic tool. If -- and only if -- one further claims that the operations one performs in a sentence-combining activity mirror psychologically real relationships among underlying abstract representations is there a problem for functionalists. I don't think people relate a sentence with a relative clause in it to a pair of full-clause equivalents with gaps in the right places, but I think it's useful to *pretend* that they do in order to help students practice figuring out whether to use "who" or "whom." I also don't think copular BE is actually an equals sign, but pretending that it is can be useful sometimes (and, of course, I don't think coordinating conjunctions have anything to do with fan-bearing boys). There are lots of teaching tricks that don't presuppose that reality itself is structured like the trick. Due credit goes to Generativists for creating clause-combining as a pedagogic device, but only if the process is reified does it become a theoretic construct.  And of course students, even young ones, produce complex sentence structures. They don't have much practice, though, *talking* about them, or weighing how a particular one will work in a written text, particularly in unfamiliar genres. 





Bill Spruiell





-----Original Message-----

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates

Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:11 PM

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: child language acquisition (- and a plea)



Dear all,



Again Bill Spruiell makes a valuable contribution to this discussion.

Some of what he writes I would disagree because they have the flavor of

his theoretical commitments and I would word them differently. I will

focus on the most important statement that I believe is wrong.



In this post Bill correctly notes that Formalists like me believe that

fundamental to understanding the nature of language requires positing a

difference between competence (what we know is possible in a language)

and performance (what we actually do with that knowledge.)  Especially

for the kind of functionalism Bill is committed to, this is a

distinction without a difference.  From his perspective, understanding

the nature of language is trying to account for how it is used.  In

other words, only performance is the object of study. 



It is this difference that leads to me disagree with the following:



> It doesn't do the wider public any good, though, *especially* since a

majority of the differences between the paradigms > has no real

implication for what we need to do in classrooms.



From a competence-performance distinction, sentence combining exercises

make perfect sense.  Students come to our classes knowing the kind of

subordinate structures that are the focus of such exercises.  Such

exercises allow them to practice them and make them aware of how

information is managed in such subordinate structures.  



It is unclear to me how someone who believes there is only performance

thinks these exercises are valuable.   If students don't produce such

structures, then from a performance perspective, does it follow that

such students don't know how these structures are formed?  In other

words, native and non-native speakers are the same.  (Note: Bill

acknowledges he uses sentence-combining exercises even though is a

functionalist.)



If you are familiar with DeBeaugrande's Forward to  they Basics paper

and Noguchi's NCTE book, then you know they present a number of tests

for students to find a tense verb and whether a string is an appropriate

academic sentence.  From a competence-performance perspective, this is

predicted.  We can use a student's underlying knowledge of the language

to show them what they already know.  I have no idea how a

performance-only perspective explains the success for such tests.



A final example that is predicted by a competence-performance

distinction that has important classroom applications.  Jim Kenkel and I

are looking a 60 essays written by both native and non-native speakers. 

All of the essays have perfectly appropriate punctuated academic

sentences.  Yet, almost all of them also have run-ons, comma splices,

fragments, and/or mixed constructions.  All of these non-mature

structures never occur (with the exception of fragments) in the edited

texts these students read. If what we know about language is the result

of the frequency of the language forms we experience, it is puzzling why

such non-matures structures should occur in the first place.  Likewise,

from the performance-only perspective, why should some sentences be

unproblematic and others problematic?  



These puzzles can be explained, we believe, from a

competence-performance distinction. The data suggest to us that the

writers KNOW they have an obligation to order the information in their

texts in particular ways, i. e. in the areas of announcing new topics

and meeting the obligation of given-new information among others   It is

just such places, trying to meet these obligations, that the writers

"innovate" (produce structures that are non-standard).  It is for a

number of reasons that such writers do not have access to the structures

that mature writers use to meet those obligations.  



The competence-performance distinction is about what is in the mind of a

individual.  Those innovations are not an "error" from the writer's

perspective. The writer is trying to meet obligations of how information

is to be ordered in a text based upon the writer's access to his/her

underlying co(What I have written above is not unique.  It is the disposition

Shaughnessey  proposes we must have in her foundational text Errors and

Expectations.)



As Bill noted in a previous post, systemic functional linguistics is not

a cognitive theory about what a language user knows.  It is a

perspective about the range of grammatical forms found to be used in

well-defined contexts.  From a teaching perspective (especially to

non-native speakers), this is valuable information because it may

suggest grammar that has to be taught.  However, it is not a perspective

that tells a teacher about WHY a student produces structures commonly

labeled an "error" (I prefer the term  "innovation") that are rarely

encountered in real texts. To understand why writers innovate requires

some understanding of what their competence is and how that competence

is accessed to meet their obligations of ordering information in the

text they are constructing



I hope I have shown that there is a teaching perspective at stake in

one's understanding of what it means to know a language.



Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri





>>> "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> 2/11/2009 12:49 PM >>>

Dear All:



At the risk perhaps annoying everyone to one extent or another, I'm

going to describe what I see as the social, rather than scientific,

reasons behind some of the tensions between the major theoretical camps,

with an eye to mitigating them a bit (I say 'annoying' because it's my

*interpretation* of the history, and I may be wrong in unamusing ways; I

trust the other list members will add their voices). 





The Formalist and Functionalists camps operate from different underlying

assumptions, both about what are the "core" linguistic phenomena to

explain, and about methodological procedures. To give an example of the

latter, the Formalist use of Occam's Razor yields a simplicity measure

that focuses on the number of primitive elements in the system, and the

number of "rules" (with rule being defined as a kind of relationship,

rather than a mandate or process). A model with fewer primitives and

rules beats one with more, as long as both can explain the same

phenomena, and the phenomena to be explained comprise mainly (a)

speaker's ability to recognize whether a sentence is grammatical or not,

and (b) the process by which they were able to learn to do that given

limited input.



Most functionalist approaches, on the other hand, expand the phenomena

to be explained to include (c) speakers' choice of structure in context

and (d) relation of language to other human cognitive and communicative

functions. Since functionalists also view production and interpretation

("Performance") as a primary area of concern, a functionalist simplicity

metric has to (or rather, I'd *argue* it has to) take into account not

just number of elements and rules, but also the processing load for a

range of operations distributed across a range of contexts. It's still

Occam's Razor, but it's shaving a different face. Having multiple

representations of the same thing, for example, is a bit messy from an

abstract standpoint, but if the different representations are each

time-savers in a specific context, the benefits may outweigh the

disadvantages (or to put it another way, the simplest way to explain why

speakers take the same amount of time to do X and Y even though those

two tasks are very different is to posit that they're using a different

representation for each). 



 

And here's the problem: There's no real way to prove one simplicity

metric is better than another, especially if what they're measuring are

models of different phenomena. To me, at least, it looks like a classic

situation where both sides should just admit there's probably a lot of

value in what the others are doing, but that they're more interested in

their own thing. We don't, for example, often see sculptors laying into

painters for using incompatible forms.



History complicates things, though (and here's where I might start

raising hacklewhen American linguistics had gotten rather rigid, and demanded a

lock-step adherence to behaviorism. The Generative paradigm didn't just

emerge as a theoretic position, it had to establish itself as a kind of

alternative power structure, and its proponents, in some cases, used

rather blatantly political strategies to accomplish this (and there were

blatantly political strategies used by their opponents as well). A

number of generativists adopted -- or appear to me to have adopted --

the stance that those not adhering to the model weren't really

linguists, or were thinking unclearly, and certainly shouldn't ever be

hired (again, the old-school behaviorists sometimes treated early

Generativists that way, so there's a lot of blame to go around). Giving

books titles like "The Theory of Syntax" didn't help the situation much,

since it wouldn't have taken much effort to use "A" instead of "The."

The models in the paradigm are usually marvels of internal consistency,

but their proponents appeared to demand that everyone agree with all of

their underlying assumptions, and some of those assumptions are beyond

the reach of empiricism (so are some of functionalism's, of course; the

problem isn't the existence of such assumptions, but rather the demand

to "convert," and the attitude that refusal represents an inability to

perceive Revealed Truth).



Functionalists of my generation thus came of academic age feeling

roughly like academic equivalents of medieval heretics, and we've got

baggage. I fully realize that claiming every linguist should become a

functionalist is committing exactly the same kind of move that give me

baggage to begin with, but it's sooooo tempting to take potshots (fill

in the image of the peasant from "Monty Python's Holy Grail" shouting

"Witness the Oppression!" and waving a hoe). It doesn't do the wider

public any good, though, *especially* since a majority of the

differences between the paradigms has no real implication for what we

need to do in classrooms. I may get arguments on this, but I don't think

applying some of Halliday's concepts to create teaching tools would

threaten any Formalist -- and as a Functionalist, I use

sentence-combining exercises (which are, really, Generative-esque) all

the time. I don't really think *anyone* in a K-12 classroom should have

to look at my Stratificational diagrams (frankly, even other linguists

don't; if you stand far enough back to see the entire diagram, you can't

see the nodes anymore). 



Sincerely,



Bill Spruiell





-----Original Message-----

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar

[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain

Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:51 AM

To: [log in to unmask] 

Subject: Re: child language acquisition (- and a plea)



Jim,



Ignoring the difference between performance and competence is to me

tantamount to denying the reality of the difference between the way the

brain works and the way it is put together.  And indeed the way it often

works in learning is to put together new structures on top of or by

displacing the disused ones.



If we can see the difference that the five syntactic structures make,

that I mentioned in my former post, I think we can develop "rules" or

principles of pedagogy in grammar, such as: "do not nest structures more

than three levels", "do not self-embed structures more than two levels",

"do not mix right-branching and left-branching structures of more than

one level," etc.  If the student does not understand how to recognize

the structure, it is not possible to be explicit about the bad

(ineffective) syntax.  We can only say things like, "That's too

complicated," "the reader gets confused," "split this complex sentence

up."  Or maybe, "the reader's construal capacity is being taxed and your

writing is not effective."  And maybe that's enough for some.



-----Original Message-----

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar

[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kenkel, Jim

Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 10:30 PM

To: [log in to unmask] 

Subject: Re:     I don't think it is the messenger being attacked.  Instead, what is

being criticized is yet another instance of hand-waving. Yes, it is a

very good thing to bring an article that you think interesting to the

attention of the group.  I thank you for it because it _really_ is a

good thing.  But to mention this article - even to summarize it - and

then to suggest that ATEG should  embrace some kind of (vague)

functional orientation as  opposed to some kind of (vague) "formalist"

orientation is to engage in nothing more than hand-waving.  To make this

article and your assertions about it meaningful to this list, I think

what is needed is to take the time to relate the data and claims of this

article to the kinds of language/grammar/writing relevant to the

concerns of ATEG members in order to show how insightfully it relates to

those concerns.  Otherwise, you are only preaching to your own choir,

which is not very interesting because choirs don't demand very much.



      It may very well be that this article will turn out to be

fantastic for the goals of ATEG, but from what you have given us, there

is no way of knowing what its relevance is. Also, when you are able to

present the data and claims of this article and propose how they are

relevant to the concerns of ATEG, then the list can really have

something to discuss. And maybe it would provide some help for ALL OF US

as we try to move forward - wherever "forward" happens to be.



     As for your sense of being offended by the old story of the guy and

the lamp post, try to be generous and don't assume that all of the

qualities of the character in the story are being attributed to you and

your post.  It is up to you, but I think a better thing to do would be

to take a deep breath and move on.



    As for the implications that you draw from this article, I would

caution you again that presenting gross misrepresentations of

generative/formalist approaches to language helps no one. It is only in

these gross misrepresentations of generative grammar where are found

claims about "language" being "pre-wired into the brain."  Even intro to

linguistics texts don't make this claim - at least the ones that I have

taught from over the years. Also, I don't think it is fair at all to say

that generative grammar sees grammar as "rules."  But I would be happy

to be helped here by Bruce and Bill if they think they have something to

say on this point.



               *                              *                         

   *                                *                               *   

                          *



      Before I call it a night, I would like to say something about ATEG

, this list, and how we could think of ourselves. I am very

uncomfortable with an ATEG that believes it knows God's truth. Anyone

not belonging to that particular congregation is going to be pushed out,

which is not a good thing. I really believe that we should be cautious

about our claims. The phenomenon - language - we work with is not well

understood. Moreover, we should remind ourselves that in addition to

this task, we have taken on the further, and perhaps ultimately

insurmountable tasks of understanding how the domains of language that

might concern us are _learned_ and how they might be effectively

_taught_.



    Can any of us have confidence that we know all of God's truth in

this context?



    I am just speaking for myself, but I think we could take a lesson

from the founder of this group, Ed Vavra. Whatever each of us may think

of the strengths and weaknesses of KISS, it is easy to respect Ed's

contributions to discussions on this list.  To me at least, it is clear

that Ed  carefully reads the posts he responds to, and his responses are

always thoughtful. He is not careless with anyone's posts.  Importantly,

Ed's posts also remind us why this list exists, and that is to develop

our understandings of English grammar so that we can use these

understandings to help learners.



      Finally, it might be helpful, when abeen injured in some way, to think of Ed, of his history here, and of

how he has conducted himself. He started this list because he had a

commitment to help learners and he believed that he had a set of good

ideas on how that goal could be pursued. He hoped that through ATEG, a

community of people could develop to further this goal.

      Well, it didn't work out the way that Ed would have dictated, if

he had been The King of ATEG. There can be no doubt that Ed feels some

disappointment, given how much of himself he put into this organization.

But Ed continues in good faith, and, very impressive to me, he continues

to put his ideas on the line before this group. Of course, in doing so,

he may be critical of other proposals, but always in an open,

constructive way, and he has never to my knowledge tried to silence

other participants, even if they disagreed with him.



                             Jim Kenkel

                              Eastern Kentucky University









________________________________________

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar

[[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock

[[log in to unmask]] 

Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 5:58 PM

To: [log in to unmask] 

Subject: Re: child language acquisition



Bob,

   I have a copy of the article in PDF format and have been told I can

pass it on. (Requests should come to me off list. We are not set up for

attachments.) I would be happy to send you one. I extend that to

others.

   I had to laugh. The first sentence expresses appreciation, and a few

sentences down I'm a drunk too stupid to look for my keys where I

dropped them.

   If you don't like the message, attack the messenger.

   The gist of the article is that emergent, usage-based models are more

empirically sound.

   I hope people can see independently that I have particulars to fill

these general statements. It is easier to talk about those with people

who feel they are valuable than with those who attack your motives and

your intelligence or who feel "this could not possibly be true." Come

to the 4C's conference and join our workshop on the genre/grammar

connection. There's a practical side to it. >

   I believe I am accused of favoring a theory that is practical at the

expense of a theory that is true. The literature increasingly seems to

be on the emergent side. The pedagogical implications have yet to be

fully worked out. I would hope that ATEG would be a place where some of

that discussion can happen.







Craig

I appreciate Craig providing us with the abstract from the paper.  It

> sounds interesting and I'm in the process of getting it by

interlibrary

> loan.

>

> I want to explain why the following statement that does make someone

> like me angry.

> And, it is not  because it dismisses another understanding of

language.

>

>

> *****

>  I know I get people angry when I say this, but a more functional,

> emergent understanding of grammar also gives us a better chance of

> arguing for a much larger place for attention to it in the English

> curriculum.

>    For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in

> which

> knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional

> model, those connections are already there. As Bill put it in a recent

> post, there is no performance/competence split.

> ****

>

> The first paragraph, "might give us a better chance," reminds me of

the

> joke about  the drunk looking for his car keys under a lamp post.

> Someone comes up and asks, "What are you doing?" The drunk replies,

> "Looking for my car keys."  The stranger asks, "Where did you lose

> them?"  The drunk answers, "Over there, but the light is better here."

>

> It may or may not be true that a "functional, emergent understanding"

> is better for understanding the nature of language, but it fits

Craig's

> purposes (the light is better there).

>

> As interesting as the paper he cites is, the second paragraph is key.

> If it is true that a functional model makes the connections that are

> already there between formal structures and how they are> not a theory of language that posits a competence-performance

> distinction, then Craig should be able to demonstrate why without

> reference to this paper.  In other words, how does positing direct

> connections between formal structures and their use assists writing

and

> grammar teachers in the classroom and not proposing a

> competence-performance distinction?

>

> (For examples of how positing a competence-performance distinction can

> assist writing teachers see the papers that Jim Kenkel and I have in

the

> Journal of Second Language Writing and the Journal of Basic English.)

>

> I don't get angry when someone suggests a view of language that I have

> might be wrong.  I was educated at a university that taught me to

always

> consider the data first.

>

> It deeply offends me when someone tells me my views are wrong because

> it doesn't accomplish the goals that person wants to accomplish in the

> way that person wants them accomplished. And, that person proposes a

> solution that is so general that I have no idea what he is talking

> about.

>

> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

>

>

>

>>>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 2/10/2009 1:13 PM >>>

> As one happy result of our online discussion, I have been alerted to a

> very interesting, very current article on these issues.

>     “Building Language Competence in First Language

> Acquisition”.European

> Review, Vol 16, No. 4, 445-456.  2008.

>    Elena Lieven, the author, is, according to the author note,

Director

> of

> the Max Planck Child Study Centre in the School of Psychological

> Sciences at the University of Manchester and was editor of The Journal

> of Child Language from 1996-2005.

>

>    The abstract is as follows:

>

>      “Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic

> tools

> adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for

> whether they are psychologically real for young children. However,

> when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical

> perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not

> operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead

> on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning

> constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic

> representations only on the basis of the language they hear and use

> and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of

> use only gradually as well—again on the basis of linguistic

> experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from

> empirical analyses of children’s early multi-word utterances, the

> development of the transitive construction and certain types of

> errors are presented to illustrate this approach.”

>

>     Some of you may find the article useful for the careful and

> thoughtful

> way she presents the dual perspectives of Universal Grammar and the

> alternative (constructive, emergent, usage-based) approach. In all

> three of the empirical studies summarized, the constructivist model

> seems the most in play.

>

> Here’s from the conclusion:  “The structure of language emerges

> from

> language use historically and ontogenetically. Children use what they

> hear

> in order to communicate and thus come to share in a language community

> in

> terms of the network of form-meaning mappings that comprises their

> grammar.” She points out that much work needs to be done, including

> a

> focus on the role of “saliency, communicative relevance to the child

> and

> relationships between items in the network of connectionsâ€|” “My

aim

> here

> has been to illustrate ways in which a constructivist accounts would

> approach these issues and to argue that because these accounts are

> more

> psychologically realistic, they are likely to provide a much sounder

> theoretical and empirical basis for further research.”

>

>    I think there are major implications. One, certainly, is that the

> grammar of the language doesn't seem to be already pre-wired into the

> brain. Acquisition depends a great deal on input, on the kinds of

> interactions involved. The other implication is that gramamr is not

> best thought of as a set of abstract, formal "rules". It is, by its

> very nature, functional in orientation, connected to a shared language

> community.

>

>    I know I get people angry when I say this, but a more functional,

> emergent understanding of grammar also gives us a better chance of

> arguing for a much larger place for attention to it in the English

> curriculum.

>    For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in

> which

> knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional

> model, those connections are already there. As Bill put it in a recent

> post, there is no performance/competence split.

>

> Craig

>

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