Craig,
   I suspect that some of the exacerbation/frustration that crept into Bob's responses to your posts are not very different from mine.

    First - and foremost for me - is your insistence in these discussions that generative-inspired notions of grammar have NOTHING to say that is useful to the goal of promoting the teaching of grammar.  In fact, you over and over again maintain that generative grammar is even responsible for this situation because you believe that generative grammar claims that grammar is learned naturally from very ordinary exposure to input/verbal interaction . . . whatever.
    Over a period of several years now, this claim of yours has been responded to many times. However, you continue to present to the list the same gross misrepresentations of generative grammar, and then go on to appeal to this parody as reason for dismissing the assumptions of generative grammar as potentially relevant to this list's concerns, and you repeatedly position generative grammar as a clear negative.

   This rhetorical strategy of yours is "tiresome" and "frustrating."  What is the point of it?

    Just two days ago, on Friday, February 06, 2009 1:26 PM, you presented the latest example of this rhetorical strategy, one I consider uncollegial and irresponsible, and which I hope we would try to avoid on this list.

     "If you think grammar is innate and meaningfully neutral, just a system of forms, then don't teach it. It just happens. If you see it as learned and deeply connected to cognition and discourse, then you ought to attend to it and not just expect it to happen.

   There are views of language which support the teaching of grammar and views of language that support our current status quo. Bob and I are on opposite poles of that argument."

  This claim is both ridiculous and insulting. No one who reads this list can believe that Bob Yates, active here for more than a decade and involved with ATEG since 1991, supports the "status quo."  Nor can anyone who reads this list believe that Bob Yates believes that grammar knowledge of the type this list is most interested in - i.e., the grammar of more advanced literacy - "just happens."

    Two months ago on this list there was a discussion about "innateness." I made a small contribution to that discussion on Dec 9 and argued that no "generativist" would claim that the grammar of advanced literacy would be learned without some kind of focused attention/instruction. At the time, you did not quarrel with what was written, but apparently it had no effect on your thinking. Instead of ignoring what are at least intended to be substantive comments, it would be better to explain why they are problematic.

         There was also an appeal to move away from the disparaging rhetoric - an appeal which obviously has been disregarded.



                  We can do better than this.


                                 Jim Kenkel
                                 Eastern Ky Univ







________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 11:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Developmental phases of grammar knowledge

Bob,
   It's hard to read this without getting frustrated. First of all, you
seem to present yourself as an expert on what I'm trying to say.
Secondly, you seem much more interested in putting me down than you are
in discussing the very rich and interesting views of language that are
now being developed (and showing great promise.) I said it before and
I'll say it again: this is silly. If I am such a foolish person, then
don't rely on my explanations. Read Langacker. Read Halliday. Read them
with an open mind, not with a defensive one.
   It is hard to react to this in part because you make three or four
mischaracterizations in a row, sometimes using one to set up another.

 In wanting to deny that students have to be "mentored" or "instructed" on
> grammar, Craig feels the need to reject any observations that EVERY native
> speaker knows a lot about the language and this knowledge is not the
> product of mentoring or instructing or whatever.

    First of all, do I want to deny that students need to be mentored? Do
I reject the notion that every native speaker knows a great deal about
language?  No to both. (Is the first claim a typo?) And certainly any
theory about language needs to come up with an understanding of the
human cognitive apparatus. Children wouldn't learn language if they
weren't able to learn language. We can't teach a stone to talk.

   Here's another confusing summary of my views that I would object to:
   "If that is the case, then there is  a problem with his view of language
that what a child knows about language comes ONLY from interaction (and we
know there is great variation on what that interaction) grammar needs to
be more prominent in the curriculum)."

   Again, I don't ever remember saying that interaction alone accounts for
language. It is a critical component in any theory, including
generative. The rest of the sentence just confuses me.

Here's a nice friendly statement:

If Craig thought about cognitive grammar a little harder, he would realize
> that this knowledge might be the result of the fact that humans all have
> the same cognitive capacities.  As a consequence, proposing a special
> language facility is not necessary.  However, he doesn't want to
> acknowledge that possibility because he believes that claim keeps grammar
> an insignificant part of the curriculum.  To my knowledge, cognitive
> grammar is interested in accounting for knowledge we all have about
> language without the need to cite some kind of special language facility.

I certainly do want to think about cognitive grammar a little harder. I do
that most every day. I have realized A LONG TIME AGO that it posits that
all human beings have the same cognitive capacities. Where in the world
does that come from except from personal hostility? Why in the world would
that make grammar an insignificant part of the curriculum? Am I missing
something? The last part of it is telling: cognitive grammar accounts for
knowledge about language as "usage based"; it doesn't assume that we all
have the same knowledge about language and then try to account for that.
It is much more adept at describing differences among languages.
   I have gone easy on the count/non-count challenge. It seems to me that
generative grammar should be on the defensive when it comes down to
recognizing that languages differ greatly across the world. If this
grammar is given us "for free", why don't all humans share it? If it's
innate,why do some languages have it and others not? The explanation
requires innate capacities that are not used, switches that are or are
not turned on, and so on. It gets cumbersome.
   We also have count/non-count distinctions that are item specific. We
might readily say "He showed us three woods that would work", but I
don't think we readily say the same with "lumber." "He showed us three
lumbers that would work" seems awkward. We somehow have to account for
layers of uniqueness, sub-categories. We learn words, certainly, from
interaction. It's not a stretch to believe we learn the grammar along
with it.
   I believe systemic functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics are
compatible, though you are right to say they tend to focus on different
things. SFL is oriented toward discourse, CG toward cognition. But I
think that's a matter of a different focus of attention; one doesn't
negate or contradict the other. By having a usage-based and functional
orientation, they are distinct from generative approaches and see
themselves that way.
   Langacker, for example, points out that discourse functions are built
into the grammar. "One aspect of an expression's import, often a
crucial one, is how it relates to previous or following expressions.
And being abstracted from usage events in discourse, conventional
linguistic units also have this property. The discourse connections
they specify are inherited by the expressions that incorporate them"
(2008, 460). Like SFL, these elements (and he includes information
structuring) are thought of as woven into the grammar, not a separate
(pragmatic) layer.

   Again, I don't think we serve the list well with hostile discourse. I'm
sure I didn't respond to all your objections.
   People may in fact be able to learn some language from observation
alone. A child in a hostile or indifferent environment will no doubt
pick up language as a matter of survival as he/she overhears the
language around and tries to make sense of it. It is hard for me to
imagine that this is ideal. We still need to posit "communicative
intent" and "pattern finding" cognition. I suppose a "usage
environment" is the necessary element, along with whatever cognitive
apparatus we all bring by virtue of being human. But I don't think any
of us would want to trust our children's fate to this sort of test.
Mentoring would mean we take responsibility for orienting a child in
new language worlds.
   Reducing my position to "grammar must be formally taught" isn't helpful.

Craig






Let's understand what the debate about theories of language and teaching
> grammar is about.
>
> Craig and I agree that the teaching grammar in the curriculum is being
> neglected.  He is trying to find a way to make it more important.
>
> He believes, incorrectly I think, that claims that students already know
> grammar before they get to school is responsible for this sad set of
> affairs.  (People who cite claims that language is part of our biological
> endowment so grammar is already in place seriously misunderstand those
> claims and why formal knowledge of grammar is important in writing and
> reading.)
>
> In his belief that claims that grammar is innate have lead to the sad
> state of grammar in the curriculum, Craig is looking for a theory of
> language which validates his view that grammar must be formally taught.
> He finds such views in "cognitive grammar" and ties that into the systemic
> functional linguistics which is not interested in what people know about
> language but what are the range of grammatical choices in specific
> contexts.
>
> In wanting to deny that students have to be "mentored" or "instructed" on
> grammar, Craig feels the need to reject any observations that EVERY native
> speaker knows a lot about the language and this knowledge is not the
> product of mentoring or instructing or whatever.
>
> As a consequence, he is not even away that sometimes his evidence, such as
> it is, doesn't support what he wants it to support.
>
> I cited the count/noncount distinction because it has never been, to my
> knowledge, part of the K-12 curriculum.  Despite Craig's claim that
> children are exposed to "radically different" language, every native
> speaker seems to get this distinction.
>
> If that is the case, then there is  a problem with his view of language
> that what a child knows about language comes ONLY from interaction (and we
> know there is great variation on what that interaction) grammar needs to
> be more prominent in the curriculum).  Here is Craig's belief how
> "cognitive linguistics" can explain the count/noncount distinction.
>
>    I think Langacker does a wonderful job handling count and non-count
> (mass nouns) as cognitive categories. There are some very interesting
> ways in which nouns shift from one category to another. "Yellow", for
> example, is not normally a count noun, but we can say "I like the
> yellow" or "I tried several yellows." "I don't like many wines."  "He
> had too many beers." "I love diamond." (non-count). "She wore several
> diamonds." (count.)  I suspect that these are learned as we pick up
> vocabulary. There's no reason to believe the count/non-count
> distinction is a purely formal system, separate from our interaction
> with the world and our ways of talking about it and conceptualizing it.
> Is "wood" count or mass?  "They broke through the plaster to wood." "He
> tried several woods before he found one that looked right." The
> question came up in my class just the other day about "trouble."  "He
> got into trouble." "Nobody knows the troubles I've seen." These are
> fairly dynamic categories.
>
> All of the examples are known to all NATIVE speakers.  (I don't remember
> Langacker saying anything about the kinds of interaction children need to
> get all of these structures and Langacker identifies no speech community
> that does not have the full range of structures because certain kinds of
> interactions never take place.) Has ANYONE noticed a native speaker who is
> completely befuddled by "I tried several yellows"?
>
> The point is that all native speakers know almost all of English grammar,
> and they especially know about the count/noncount distinction in English
> nouns. NO one has to mentor them.  And, the best evidence I have for this
> is that dictionaries for native speakers say nothing about this
> distinction, nor do dictionaries consider the examples Craig has. I point
> out that this lack of description for native speakers means everyone seems
> to have the same knowledge.
>
> If Craig thought about cognitive grammar a little harder, he would realize
> that this knowledge might be the result of the fact that humans all have
> the same cognitive capacities.  As a consequence, proposing a special
> language facility is not necessary.  However, he doesn't want to
> acknowledge that possibility because he believes that claim keeps grammar
> an insignificant part of the curriculum.  To my knowledge, cognitive
> grammar is interested in accounting for knowledge we all have about
> language without the need to cite some kind of special language facility.
>
> His commitment to systemic functional linguistics, a view of language that
> is only interested in characterizing the possible range of choices a
> language user has in a given context, means in citing Langacker and all of
> the variation in the count/noncount distinction, Craig is able to say:
> "Because language is the result of interaction and not everyone has the
> same kind of interaction, some speakers won't get all the variations.  It
> is just those speakers that need to be mentored to get those variations."
>
> Craig's commitment to systemic functional linguistics means he is only
> interested in what is possible in a language.  Remember he likes to cite
> corpus data to account for what we know.  Because I really believe we need
> a competence (what is possible in a language) and performance (what we
> actually do) distinction, grammaticality judgments are one way to discover
> what are underlying competence is.
>
> In this discussion, it is unfair for me to use grammaticality judgments.
> This is so because Craig has no theory of language that accounts for them.
>  Remember he claims our knowledge of language comes in interaction.  So,
> he writes this response which completely ignores the examples I used.
>
> There can be a number of different reasons why certain structures may
> strike us as "not possible" in the language. "Bob likes ice cream
> and..." may very well come up in the right kind of context. "I like ice
> cream and fudge. Sally likes ice cream and nuts. Bob likes ice cream
> and...?" With the right inflection, it would be treated like a sensible
> question. An utterance needs motivation, and new utterances need to pay
> off before they will be accepted.
>
> I noted (1) and (2) are possible, but only (3) is a possible wh-question
> and not (4).  Craig did not explain why EVERY native speaker knows the
> normal wh-question is not possible for (4).  The problem that a strictly
> interaction account has when it comes to grammaticality judgments is that
> we have to notice structures we have never heard. Can anyone report what
> structures they have never heard and therefore they KNOW such structures
> are not possible in English?
>
> 1) Bob likes ice cream with what?
> 2) Bob likes ice cream and what?
>
> 3) What does Bob like ice cream with?
> 4) *What does Bob like ice cream and?
>
> (Our judgments about 1-4 can be explained by the fact that in 1 and 3
> "what" is the object of preposition and in 2 and 4 "what" is part of a
> coordinating construction.  However, that observation does not help a
> theory of language that claims there is no special knowledge that we have
> about language.  From that point of view, there is no such thing as a
> preposition or a conjunction. I have no idea how "interaction" makes it
> possible for a person to figure out the constraints on movement that
> exists for one and not the other.)
>
> The following statement is an empirical question.
>
>    Cognitive and functional approaches are not naive. They give very
> robust explanations for all the phenomena you bring up as "proof"
> against them.
>
> However, to the degree that such approaches are robust explanations, those
> explanations are robust for EVERY native speaker.
>
> Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri
>
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