Bruce,
I agree that writers have emulated Latin style. I suspect periodic sentences are an instance of this, but these are stylistic choices that may lead to strange sounding syntactic decisions. As to the split infinitive, David Mulroy has researched this and shows that the rule was not formulated until the mid 1860s. The ban on preposition stranding is a good example. Who/whom/whose is a more complex matter. Joan C. Beal has a corpus-based and nicely nuanced discussion of it in her English in Modern Times (Holder Arnold 2004). What does show Latin influence is the fact that these wh- forms generalized from being question words, their etymological source, to serving also as relative pronouns. This shift actually took place twice in the history of English, once during the OE period in the 10th and 11th cc., and very much under the influence of Latin, and once again in the 14th c. Our modern grammar, of course, is the result of the latter shift. The reason the shift happened twice, of course, is due to the interruption by the Norman Invasion. The use of the "of" genitive is partly due to French influence, but I think it too results from largely internal pressures. Here's a table of change in usage taken from a Charles C. Fries article from the 1960s (I don't have the exact reference handy).
Year 900 1000 1100 1200 1250 1300 1400 1500
Acc-obj. before verb 52.50 52.70 40.00 27.60 14.30 7.00 1.87
Acc-obj. after verb 47.50 46.30 60.00 72.35 85.70 92.00 98.13
Genitive before its noun 52.40 96.10 77.40 87.40 99.10
Genitive after its noun 47.60 30.90 22.60 12.60 0.90
Periphrastic genitive 0.50 1.00 1.20 6.30 31.40 84.50
If you load that table into Excel and generate a line-graph from it, you see quite a dramatic complementarity between the rise of the prenominal genitive, the decline of the postnominal, and the rise of the periphrastic ("of" genitive). I'm sending you a file of it separately as an attachment. Number agreement, as we've seen, is another matter entirely. Huddleston&Pullum have some good material on it.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
[log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: June 20, 2008 4:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
Herb,
Your examples are impressive to your point. I agree that borrowing syntax was not heavy. I think we are speaking of the writing of the scholars who were conversant in Latin and borrowed its structures. Maybe a few examples would be appropriate. We might mention the avoidance of the split infinitive. There is the requirement for the preposition to stay with the object, to which it belongs. There is the retention of case endings on relative pronouns. Then there is the troublesome gerund/gerundive decision that seems to have been brought over from Latin. The many genitive uses with "of" in preference to the possessive seem to be Latinizations. I guess the question is whether and to what extent such influences were deliberate. The recent discussion about a logical number agreement rule might be to this point. If someone wants their language to be logical, and they change it to be more logical, is that being deliberate about making such changes? Maybe sometimes it is, especially in formal contexts. Yet sometimes it would seem to be quite unconsciously and automatically done -- an inadvertant mathematical message cross-over. Maybe also if the innovation doesn't affect the peasant farmer in the West Riding of Yorkshire, it doesn't count as wholesale.
Bruce
>>> "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]> 06/20/08 11:23 AM >>>
Words are pretty easy to borrow, as a glance at the OED makes clear. A huge proportion of English vocabulary is borrowed. Morphology and function words can also be borrowed, but it’s a little less common. Of course we probably borrowed “she” from Old Norse, although that hasn’t been proved, and we certainly borrowed from them the th- third person plural pronouns. Many, in fact, most of our derivational prefixes and suffixes are, but the borrowed ones tend to be less regular and predictable than the native ones, like the contrast between –ness (native) and (-ity) (borrowed). Syntactic borrowing, on the other hand, is unusual. Most of the form of modern English syntax is the result of natural, internal, historical development, although phrases and compounds like “court martial” show some French influence. A lot of vocabulary with Latin etymology is, in fact, English creation of new words from stems that were not put together that way in Latin, and so we have Latinate words like “contraception”, made up of a prefix and a bound root both of which are from Latin but which do not occur in this combination in Latin.
For English to have borrowed Latin syntax heavily, there would probably have had to be a longish period of close cultural contact between a native Latin speaking community and a native English speaking community, and even then much in the way of syntactic borrowing would be difficult to demonstrate and to distinguish from natural historical changes in English.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
Sent: 2008-06-20 12:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
I wonder about the apparent aversion to borrowing syntax from Latin, when it was OK to borrow vocabulary items wholesale. I wonder about how deliberate the process was. After all, the cultures were amalgamating and their various registers were blending.
Bruce
>>> Patricia Lafayllve <[log in to unmask]> 06/20/08 9:46 AM >>>
I would agree – and then add that, depending on what is meant by “sentence” we might have to look at the people who deliberately added a lot of Latinized structures to English and called it “formal grammar.”
I think, generally, the commonly referred to “sentence” is probably that thing people tried to formalize in grammar books, once such things existed. I forget who referred to “statements” versus “sentences,” but that was a good point – we’ve always spoken in statements (or, at least, we have since we’ve had language), and once we began writing we moved from lists to statements fairly quickly. But we had no formalized “grammar,” per se, for many centuries after that, which might mean that the “sentence” is a relatively new adoption. So much depends on point of view!
-patty
________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 11:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
You’ll need to define your last question. What do you mean by beginning “to write in ‘sentences’ or what we call ‘sentences’”? If you mean a form like the sentence has today in many written languages, then you’re looking at the late medieval period. But if you’re at “sentence” as a way of expressing a limited block of meaning within a context that shapes it, then people started writing in sentences as soon as they started writing anything more richly structured than lists.
Herb
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carol Morrison
Sent: 2008-06-20 09:30
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
I guess what piqued my curiosity about the Washington Post article was the use of the word "invention" as the method of the sentence's origin. It's not that I think that the sentence was fabricated in a lab one afternoon, or invented in the way that Marconi invented the wireless telegraph or that Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press, but at some point, somebody or bodies must have proclaimed: "Aha! The sentence! What a beautiful grammatical unit...Henceforth, mankind shall write in sentences!" (Or at least English-speaking college freshman will write in sentences). Anyway, after reading the stunning tribute and eulogy to the sentence, I thought that if people are going to speak of it posthumously, it would be nice to commemorate its birth (or standardization in English grammar). I am interested in finding out when people began to write in "sentences" or what we call "sentences."
--- On Thu, 6/19/08, Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Thursday, June 19, 2008, 8:37 AM
Herb,
A corrolary to this--I'm not sure if you would agree--is that the
sentence EVOLVES over time, and it is something we all contribute to.
It isn't invented at the top and then imposed downward against the
unruly riffraff.
The best standards have everything to do with what works, what helps us
accomplish our communally evolving goals.
Text messaging is something we should delight in and admire. I have yet
to see any serious encroachment into the academic world. I have just
read 43 freshmen placement essays without a single instance of
text-messaging creeping over.
Craig>
Forty or so years ago I used to argue with transformational-generative
> grammarians, and they were that then, that the sentence, in particular the
> symbol S, was not a logical primitive but a methodological choice. It
> 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. In the early 70s I
> was teaching a linguistic field methods course with a linguistics grad
> student as native speaker. His language was Pashto, and as we got into
> the syntax of Pashto, we explored a variety of canonical sentence types
> and then started working on complex sentences, looking into subordinate
> clauses and the constraints that apply to complex sentence structures.
> The Pashto speaker paused at one point and said, "You can put
together a
> sentence like that in Pashto, but no one every would. When people tell
> stories, argue with each other, talk about affairs of their families and
> communities, they use simple sentences." That just drove home
further for
> me the observation that what a sentence can be depends very much on
> medium, genre, discourse pragmatics, and social setting, among other
> things.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Carol Morrison
> Sent: 2008-06-18 20:45
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
>
>
> I found this on leithart.com under the subheading: The History of the
> Sentence
>
> Ian Robinson's The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the
> Reformation and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1998) is a fascinating
> discussion of the history of the sentence and of English punctuation, and,
> despite its heavy-handed title, is a delight to read.
>
> Does the sentence have a history? Robinson shows that it does. Even in our
> day, when the well-formed sentence is described as the key to prose
> writing, there are many intelligible uses of language that do not employ
> well-formed sentences - lists, lecture notes, football broadcasts.
> (Robinson is not an opponent of the well-formed sentence; his are
> wonderful; but he recognizes that it is not the only possible unit of
> sense.)
>
> Prior to the modern period, Robinson argues, the sentence was not
> recognized as a syntactical unit at all: "Medieval grammar, following
the
> classical tradition, was of course highly developed, but there never
> emerged in the medieval period any conception of the sentence as
> syntactical unit." The word "sentence" is used in the
Middle Ages, but
> means something like "sense" or "gist." "Thou
speakest sentences" says a
> character in Ben Jonson's Poetaster, and he does not mean that someone
"is
> speaking dramatically but that he is speaking sense and, in particular,
> uttering weighty, authoritative dicta."
>
> --- On Wed, 6/18/08, Spruiell, William C <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Spruiell, William C <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 4:42 PM
>
> Anyone who thinks that abbreviations and "squiggle" notations
like
>
> ":-)" are a problem in current writing should be forced to try
to
>
> read medieval manuscripts. Start with really expensive writing materials
>
> (vellum anyone?), make the writing process laborious (sharpen quill, grind
>
> stuff for ink, blot the vellum...) and throw in a bunch of insular monks
> (well,
>
> insular even for monks), and you get pages of squigglefest. At least the
>
> computer environment prevents some of the excesses of calligraphy that
> would
>
> otherwise occur.
>
>
>
> I suspect that the comments about sentences in that piece were actually
>
> comments about punctuation. If so, I'm not really sure how to maintain
the
>
> claim that clearly demarcated sentences are necessary for clear thought,
> given
>
> that -- in all probability -- Plato, Aristotle, etc. didn't mark
sentence
>
> boundaries in writing at all. Languages always have clause complexes;
> writing
>
> systems may or may not orthographically mark these in various ways.
>
>
>
> All that having been said (I don't usually adopt absolute positions,
but
>
> I'll certainly use absolutes), I *do* tend to notice a link between
>
> orthographically-unstructured writing, etc. and bad argumentation in my
>
> students -- but I don't think the first causes the second. Instead,
>
> it's simply that students who don't read much good argumentation
tend
>
> not to argue well, and if they're reading mainly text messages from
other
>
> students, they're not reading much good argumentation. Other studies
>
> (including something from NCTE that I may be able to dig out later) have
> shown
>
> that students *are* reading a good bit -- but I suspect what they're
>
> reading is the kind of texts that are produced by others in their age
> group,
>
> and that emphasize easy social interaction over critical thinking. "U
R
>
> teh uber-newb, d00d!" is fascinating in its own right, but if
that's
>
> the kind of thing you're used to, you'll find academic or business
>
> writing quite alien.
>
>
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
> Dept. of English
>
> Central Michigan University
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
>
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
>
> Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 1:35 PM
>
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Subject: Re: The Death of the Sentence?
>
>
>
>>
>
> Carol,
>
> I read the article in part because the inbox announced that Martha
>
> Kolln had been consulted. Martha's comments are about the only
>
> thoughtful part of it. It left me thinking that it's not the death of
>
> the sentence that's a problem, but the general shallowness of
>
> conversation about it, including those (Martha the main exception) in
>
> our "discipline" of English who weighed in. I suspect they
thought
>
> any
>
> working journalist could handle the topic, but the results in this case
>
> are comic.
>
> The idea that the sentence was "invented several centuries"
ago
>
> and
>
> "brought order to chaos" is the sort of silliness that fills the
bulk
>
> of the article.
>
> It's high tine for NCTE to begin advocating at least some direct
>
> teaching about language.
>
>
>
> Craig >
>
>
>
> Hi everyone. This was in my NCTE inbox this morning, so some of you may
>
>> have read it. (This is only part of the article). I bolded the second
to
>
>> last line because it interests me: Does anyone know who
>
> "invented" the
>
>> sentence?
>
>>
>
>> The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?
>
>> By Linton Weeks
>
>> Washington Post Staff Writer
>
>> Sunday, June 15, 2008; Page M01
>
>>
>
>> The demise of orderly writing: signs everywhere.
>
>> One recent report, young Americans don't write well.
>
>> In a survey, Internet language -- abbreviated wds, :) and txt msging
--
>
>> seeping into academic writing.
>
>> But above all, what really scares a lot of scholars: the impending
death
>
>> of the English sentence.
>
>> Librarian of Congress James Billington, for one. "I see creeping
>
>> inarticulateness," he says, and the demise of the basic component
of
>
> human
>
>> communication: the sentence.
>
>> This assault on the lowly -- and mighty -- sentence, he says, is
>
>> symptomatic of a disease potentially fatal to civilization. If the
>
>> sentence croaks, so will critical thought. The chronicling of history.
>
>> Storytelling itself.
>
>> He has a point. The sentence itself is a story, with a beginning, a
>> middle
>
>> and an end. Something happens in a sentence. Without subjects, there
are
>
>> no heroes or villains. Without verbs, there is no action. Without
>> objects,
>
>> nothing is moved, changed, destroyed or created.
>
>> Plus, simple sentences clarify complex situations. ("Jesus
>
> wept.")
>
>> Since its invention centuries ago, the sentence has brought order to
>
>> chaos. It's the handle on the pitcher, a tonic chord in music, a
stair
>
>> step chiseled in a mountainside.
>
>>
>
>>
>
>>
>
>>
>
>>
>
>> To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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