Craig et al.:
I'm going to risk being repetitive at this point and bring up an issue
that I and others have made before, albeit several months ago, I think:
we can't much blame linguistic theory for what the "anti-grammar" folks
have done with it. Craig, I know you're specifically addressing the
issue as it has played out in Education, and you're quite right on that,
but I think some contextualization is always useful, esp. since there
may be new readers on the list that didn't see the earlier discussion.
It's true that Chomsky argued that a grammatical faculty is innate and
that children naturally acquire it in the first years of life without
any educational intervention, but the kind of English taught in school
has never really been about the students' pre-existing language use to
any large extent. Instead, it focuses on whatever changes are perceived
as needed to enable the child to use formal written English (whatever
that is).
In other words, one could be the most ardent supporter of Chomsky's
Innatist position, and still acknowledge that kids in school are
learning patterns that they haven't acquired in their home environment,
and that (by the time they're in school) probably require some conscious
metalinguistic knowledge to work with. The anti-grammar position that
emerged in education seems partly based on a failure to distinguish
between "English" in general and "formal written English" - in other
words, some educators took a set of statements that related to
descriptive grammar and then simply assumed that they entailed
acquisition of a prescriptive system would be automatic, or that
acquisition of a new system starting around age six would be just as
automatic as one the child had been exposed to from birth. Chomsky's
remarks about the irrelevance of negative feedback to acquisition were
similarly overgeneralized (many of the formal English "rules" aren't
introduced until high school, and any old-school generativist would say
that by that time, the kids are learning language, not acquiring it).
As someone who really, really doesn't agree with major components of the
Innatist position, I'd love to blame what happened in Education on
Chomsky, but in all honesty I can't (there's plenty in linguistics I can
whinge about, but that's a different matter). I suspect that if another
linguistic paradigm becomes dominant in the U.S., it will be just as
susceptible to being oversimplified, misconstrued, and turned into some
kind of frightening fad ("Well, Connectionism says that we should never
talk about word meaning").
I wholeheartedly agree that there are multiple current approaches with
valuable things to say about teaching grammar, and about the reasons for
teaching grammar - I just don't think we can blame the current state of
affairs primarily on Innatism. It was the handiest tool for
rationalizing what a lot of educators probably wanted to do anyway, and
they didn't much care whether the details of the actual theory supported
what they wanted to do with it.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
Sent: Friday, December 05, 2008 12:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Correct?
Gregg (and all),
The article I referred to below and emphatically recommend is
"Cognitive Processes in Grammaticalization" , author Joan Bybee, in The
New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to
Language Structure, volume 2. editor Michael Tomasello. Lawrence
Erlbaum, 2003.
As I stated earlier, she does a nice job of using "am going to" as a
case study of grammaticalization. (Think of the difference between "I am
going to London" and "I am going to shop"). She also discusses the
expansion of "to" as infinitive marker from Old English to the present.
The fact that we have some verbs that take infinitive without "to" (make
and help would be examples) is because they became entrenched before
"to" expanded.
We originally designated "purpose" in an infinitive in part with a
suffix: "thanne wolde he maken hem to drynken". (Bybee's example).
Eventually, the infinitive marker was lost.
The article summarizes very thoughtful positions on what
grammaticalization teaches us about the nature of language. Here are two
that I find compelling: "Grammar is not a static, closed, or
self-contained system, but is highly susceptible to change and highly
affected by language use." And "Many of the very basic mechanisms that
constitute the process of grammaticalization are cognitive processes
that are not necessarily restricted to language."
These new understandings of language/grammar have serious
implications for HOW grammar should be taught. I would add that it has
implications for the question of WHETHER grammar should be taught. The
anti-grammar folk tend to base their arguments on theories of language
that are being thoughtfully challenged.
Craig
Craig Hancock wrote:
Gregg,
If you think of "have to" as a paraphrastic version of "must" , then
it gives us the advantage (along with be supposed to and be able to and
be going to) of combining a modal notion with tense. "I had to do it."
"I was supposed to do it." "I was able to do it." "I have to do it." "I
am supposed to do it." "I was going to do it." "I am going to do it."
and so on.) Because they are useful forms, it's easy to see why they
have evolved as common patterns. They are a very good argument for
grammar itself as in flux and responsive to functional pressures. I
have seen a very good description of the history of "am going to", but
it's at home. I'll track it down.
Goldberg's "Constructions at Work" is first rate and very recent
(2006).
Construction grammar is a strand of cognitive linguistics. I highly
recommend Langacker's "Cognitive Grammar: a Basic Introduction (Oxford,
2008). He is probably the most seminal figure in the field.
Craig
Gregg Heacock wrote:
Herbert,
I raised a question about the possible evolution of usage for "have" as
in "I have to do this." Might this have developed from "I have this to
do"? Do you believe Beth Levin's book would cover this? I went to
Amazon to check out her work. This led me to other works you or others
may be able to comment upon:
Argument Realization (Research Surveys in Linguistics)by Beth Levin,
Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language by Adele
Goldberg,
Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure
(Cognitive Theory of Language and Culture Series) by Adele E. Goldberg
All of these sound interesting. I am curious to know what you or
others have to say of these works.
Much obliged,
Gregg
On Dec 3, 2008, at 11:18 AM, STAHLKE, HERBERT F wrote:
From a lexical semantic and syntactic point of view, let me once again
recommend Beth Levin's English Verb Classes and Alternations (Chicago
1993) as the most detailed published analysis I know of of how meaning
and form work together to classify verbs in useful ways. Of course, her
overall classification, with about 330 classes, might be a bit much for
an undergrad grammar class, but as a reference work and as an
introduction to the subtlety and power of the concepts, it's a great
piece of scholarship to have on your shelf. And she is pretty much
neutral when it comes to theory, at least in this book. You don't have
to be a linguist to read 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 Craig Hancock
[[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 3, 2008 11:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Correct?
Bruce,
If I want a problem to go away or want my refrigerator to fill up,
then I don't expect the problem or the refrigerator to do anything. But
that only becomes a problem when we want to define the construction in a
narrow way. If the construction builds from the ground up, then we need
to expect these anomalies in the same way we expect word meanings to
grow and change.
Is wanting X to Y the same as expecting X to Y? How about
encouraging? discouraging? Helping? Ordering? Making? The more abstract
the classification pattern, the further it drifts from the real world of
meaning.
Each of these verbs uses these constructions in unique ways. The
patterns build from use, not independently of it.
Craig
Bruce Despain wrote:
Your pattern, "If I say that 'X V-ed Y to Z' am I saying that it's Y
who will be doing the Z-ing?" looks like what might be described in a
constructional grammar (CG). These folks are averse to describing the
relationships of constructions as built up of other constructions. They
like to contrast the usage construction meaning vs. the grammatical
construction meaning.
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell, William C
Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 7:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Correct?
Dear All:
I suspect that one of the reasons that many modern grammars use what
seem to be simplistic structural pattern definitions (e.g. [S V DO INF]
for both "We wanted him to be hired" and "We wanted him to go home") is
that the differences among those sentences are differences in what the
various participants are doing - the relationships among them - and we
don't really have a theoretically agnostic way of talking about that.
The minute a term like "underlying subject" is used, the description is
locked into a particular model.
This is true of all descriptions, of course (simply by using a label
like "infinitive," I've committed to a kind of model), but cases like
these bring up major points of contention among current models. Almost
everyone who works on English is happy with the term "infinitive," but
there is nowhere near the same level of consensus about the idea that
infinitives are really, truly, made out of full sentences, etc. I have a
knee-jerk reaction the minute I see a phrase like "underlying subject,"
and I'm sure I use phrases that others on the list would have an
immediate negative reaction to as well. One way authors of grammar
books can try to dodge the entire issue is simply to omit any references
to this type of material at all, and thus we end up with [S V DO INF].
Older grammars, like the ones Herb mentions, did something that I think
we can still do: we can all agree that there are different patterns of
relationships among the participants, even if we don't agree on why
those differences exist. To some extent, the differences among the
patterns can be "anchored" by relating them to native-speaker reactions
to questions about implications of the structure (e.g. "If I say that 'X
V-ed Y to Z' am I saying that it's Y who will be doing the Z-ing?"). In
other words, we can adopt ways to probe for differences that there will
be wide consensus on, even if there is no such consensus on what the
differences mean for a theory of linguistic structure (this is what I'm
trying to get at with the term "theoretically agnostic").
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
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