Craig,

I'm afraid my first paragraph started out as an ironic remark on style
and then developed into a thesis.  I think the taste vs. knowledge
distinction that we've discussed briefly is an interesting one and worth
exploring in the context of teaching English and language arts.
However, we're pretty much in agreement that teachers who have been
inadequately trained in grammar and have to rely on taste will often
make statements about language that have no empirical basis.

As to our discussion of tense and aspect, I don't think we so much
disagree as operate in different universes of discourse.  You're a
rhetorician and grammarian who works closely with and is deeply
concerned about the language development of minority students.  As a
rhetorician, you use particular linguistic theories that work well for
teaching rhetorical concepts, cognitive linguistics and systemic
functional linguistics.  As a linguist, particularly as a descriptive
and historical linguist, I don't have that particular set of concerns.
I'm interested in describing the phenomena that theoreticians and
rhetoricians have to explain and use.  One thing I like about
descriptive grammars like Huddleston&Pullum's is that, while they are
theoretically informed at a sophisticated level, their goals are
describing what the language does, not a theoretical framework that
tries to make sense of all of that.  That approach provides the
empirical grist that the theoretician and rhetorician need to work from.
It's not that I don't find cognitive linguistic theory or systemic
functional linguistic theory useful or compelling in their approaches to
explaining linguistic phenomena; I tend to prefer them, in fact, to more
formalist schools of thought in my field.  But for the work I do they
simply don't offer me a lot.

No matter our theoretical orientation, we need sound descriptions of the
facts of language, and that's where my primary interest lies.  From the
outside, from the perspective of the composition teacher, of the
literary critic, or of a fine colleague of mine in anthropology, what I
work on lies well below their level of interest.  To the comp teacher,
for example, it really makes little difference whether we call "that" in
a relative clause a pronoun or a subordinator.  The kinds of arguments I
raised about that in previous messages have very little import for the
teacher of writing and of rhetoric.

You're quite right when you say that your "primary focus (as it is in
CG) should be how these structures work to help us build a shared
understanding of the world."  As a rhetorical grammarian and teacher or
writing that's exactly where your focus should be.  But you still need
to know what "these structures" are, and that's not a trivial matter.
It is the matter of descriptive linguistics.

Herb

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: 2008-02-18 09:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Context matters - continued

>
Herb,

    I think I enjoy your posts more when I disagree with them. I get to
become clearer about my own thinking.
   Your first paragraph is very reductive in describing the role of a
teacher. "Levels of formality" can be thought of as a very minor
consideration in the great enterprise of making meaning and of making
human contact. I agree: a great many writing teachers are forced to
rely on taste because of a superficial knowledge about language. We
enable that to the extent that we reduce language to questions of
taste. I see the results all the time, and I do what I can to undo the
damage. Brad may be a case in point; perhaps he asks his students to
avoid past perfect because it doesn't feel right to him. If form has no
inherent connection with meaning, then taste is fine, but if you
constrain form on the basis of taste, you are limiting what someone can
say (and no doubt building a distrust of their own instincts.)
    Meaning is the great equalizer. When the idiom is used well, it
redeems the language for all of us. It's not a fashion show.
    I don't find Huddleston and Pullum at all convincing, but that may
be
because I am immersed in cognitive grammar and a very different set of
perspectives. Tense and aspect in cognitive grammar are thought of as
GROUNDING elements. "The term GROUND is used in CG to indicate the
speech event, its participants (speaker and hearer), their
interaction, and the immediate circumstances (notably the time and
place of speaking). (Langacker, Cognitive Grammar: a Basic
Introduction (2008), p.259). As you know, passive voice gives us a
focal point different from the agent or actor. Progressive "derives a
new, imperfect process type by restricting the profiled relationship
to some internal part of the original, perfective process...And instead
of the verbal process itself, the perfect describes the stable
relationship of that process being prior, but still of relevance, with
respect to a temporal vantage point" (same text, 361).   In other
words, in "have eaten", the process is thought of as a whole (not
ongoing or in progress) and complete in relation (close connection) to
the present time of the discourse. That may be an oversimplification
(too narrow an application), but it is certainly not irrelevant or
trivial.
    Aspect can't be a primary tense in the sense that it can't by itself
ground a question or statement as question or statement. But I think
the primary focus (as it is in CG) should be how these structures work
to help us build a shared understanding of the world.
   Do they show up in elite discourse more than in informal? To me,
that's
a far less interesting question.

Craig


Craig,
>
> Just a quick note on "taste," followed by a longer bit on tense,
aspect,
> and sequence of tenses.  I wouldn't want to make taste a primary
> criterion for grammatical choices; there are obviously too many other
> factors involved.  But the fact is that many decisions we make about
> word choice, grammatical choices, morphological choices do reflect
> taste, or at least a preference for one register over another.  We
find
> colleagues like DD and Scott preferring a more rigorously coded formal
> written English and others working more willingly with fairly wide
> degrees of informality, with the goal of helping students learn to
make
> choices that will allow them to be either more or less formal as the
> situations demands.  Taste comes into it, and for many people it's a
> primary consideration.  I suspect the results for one's writing,
whether
> one is taste-driven or register driven (not really a dichotomy),
aren't
> all that different.  For the writing teacher with no training in
> grammar, I'm not sure how anything other than taste can drive
judgment.
>
> Now on to tense and related matters.  Brad's example, "George Bush had
> been president", is a nice lead-in.  Brad judges the utterance not a
> sentence because he can't assign meaning to it.  Aside from whether
> that's a legitimate criterion for sentencehood, he's right that
without
> a context we can't completely interpret the sentence; we don't know
what
> time in what discourse it's related to.  In the paper you mentioned, I
> deal with tense and aspect as separate but intersecting categories.
In
> fact the relationship is more complex than that in English as in most
> languages.  Tense and aspect interact and overlap in ways that make
> simple dichotomies difficult to follow very far.  For a brief
> introduction to the topic, as I did in that paper, the distinction
works
> well and is pedagogically useful.  For a thorough treatment of English
> tense and the auxiliary, even without modals, the dichotomy breaks
down.
>
> Huddleston&Pullum limit aspect to the progressive.  They treat the
> perfects as secondary tenses.  Their primary tenses are present and
> preterite (past), marked inflectionally, and their secondary tenses
are
> perfect and non-perfect, the former marked periphrastically.  (They do
> comment in a footnote that perfect is frequently treated as an aspect
> but don't say anything further about that.)  The distinction between
> primary and secondary tenses is that primary tenses are deictic and
> secondary are not.  A deictic tense refers to a particular time,
usually
> the time of orientation of the discourse.  In The Scarlet Letter, for
> example, the present tenses refer to a time in the 1670s or so.  In
> Orwell's 1984, his presents referred to a time in the future when he
> wrote, but in the past now.  So perfects, as secondary, non-deictic
> tenses, get their time reference from the time reference of the verb
> with deictic tense that they are in construction with.  This is why
Brad
> finds his sample sentence uncomfortable.  The context (none) contains
no
> deictic tense to define the time of the perfect relative to, and the
> reader does not find that satisfying.  Of course such a situation
nearly
> never occurs in actual language use because a perfect doesn't get used
> without a context that allows time assignment, that is, that contains
a
> verb with deictic tense.  The distinction between primary (deictic)
and
> secondary (non-deictic) tenses turns out to be quite a useful one.
>
> Beyond this, there are quite a few different meanings associated with
> perfects.   "I've just eaten" reflects accomplishment.  "I've waited
for
> you for four hours" reflects immediate past time.  "She may have been
> here" simply marks past, since modals don't have tense marking.
> Examples like these illustrate how perfect bleeds over from tense into
> aspect.
>
> Obviously I wouldn't try to present this sort of analysis to an
> undergraduate grammar class and certainly not to a writing class.
It's
> grad seminar stuff, but it's useful if we are going to talk in
explicit
> ways about how time and aspect are represented in English grammar.
>
> I do recommend the Huddleston&Pullum chapter on the verb.  Their
> discussion of tense, aspect, and modality is one of the most carefully
> worked out that I've found.  It's a demanding read, but very much
worth
> the effort.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: 2008-02-17 16:18
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Context matters - continued
>
> Herb,
>    DD follows the "sounds right" with a question about why. ("Sequence
> of
> tense sort of stuff?")
>    I have a hard time with the implication that perfect aspect does no
> work.
>    Gorge Bush is President for seven years.
>    George Bush was President for seven years.
>    George Bush has been President for seven years.
> For the most part, the third one sounds right to me (in the context of
> our
> current situation) because it conveys the sense of a continuing
reality.
> It sounds right because there's a form/meaning match. We can do that a
> number of ways (He is in the final year of a second four year
term),but
> "taste">leaves me uncomfortable.
>    I don't think you are in that camp, but most people believe grammar
> is
> about what's correct or what's tasteful, and that's one reason it's
out
> of favor.
>    What does perfect aspect do? Don't we need to define that in
> functional
> terms?
>
> Craig
>
>  DD shows us that there is also a matter of taste involve in these
> choices.
>>  And his taste is better than mine.
>>
>> Herb
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of DD
> Farms
>> Sent: Sun 2/17/2008 2:04 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Context matters - continued
>>
>> At 08:01 AM 2/17/2008, Brad Johnston wrote:
>>>In context, do the five 'had's belong in or out?
>>>  "Beyond containment, the major thrust of American Cold War
>>> diplomatic foreign policy was to return the defeated enemies,
>>> Germany and Japan, to the emerging international system as
>>> full-fledged members. This task, unprecedented in respect to
>>> nations on which unconditional surrender (had been) was imposed
>>> less than five years earlier, made sense to a generation of
>>> American leaders whose formative experience (had been) was
>>> overcoming the Great Depression of the 1930s. The generation that
>>> organized resistance to the Soviet Union (had) experienced Franklin
>>> D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which (had) restored political stability
>>> by closing the gap between American expectations and economic
>>> reality. The same generation (had) prevailed in World War II,
>>> fought in the name of democracy."
>>
>> DD: Sounds better with all the "hads." Sequence of tense sort of
> stuff?
>>
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