Excuse me, but would someone tell me what KISS stands for. Thank you, Christine Gray -----Original Message----- From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Edward Vavra Sent: Monday, February 16, 2004 3:31 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Rigid theories Bill, Thanks for the explanation, and for the preface that notes that it has "little direct application." I do, however, wish that explanations provided on this site could regularly be so prefaced. We often get explanations that require a ton of the background linguistics to make them comprehensible. As I have noted before, in themselves they do not bother me, but they probably confuse the pedagogy more than they help. I have, by the way, been considering advertising KISS grammar as "the only honest approach to teaching grammar." By that I mean that it is clearly labeled as one approach to grammatical analysis, with a clearly defined set of terms. Anyone who is interested can look at other grammars, other definitions, etc., but KISS itself keeps its terms systematically clear. As you noted, various theories of grammar come with complex philosophical and linguistic assumptions, most of which are never made clear, yet the proponents of them claim that they are simply teaching "grammar." To the general public, and to practicing teachers, I think that that is very unfair. Thanks again, Ed >>> [log in to unmask] 02/16/04 12:49PM >>> [This one is primarily theory-wrangling, with little direct application to pedagogy] Ed, I probably wasn't very clear in that initial statement. What I meant was that quite a number of theories would hold that a given non-ambiguous sentence has exactly one correct structure; syntactic argumentation in those theories thus takes the form of a discussion about which possible structure is the correct one. For example, given a basic transitive sentence skeleton like [S V O], there are at least two possible groupings: 1. (S V) O 2. S (V O) In what I'll call "monostructural" theories, practitioners take as a given that they have to pick one of those two (this is in part driven by some initial assumptions in how to "count" simplicity in a theory). Each has benefits - the first one provides a very convenient domain for talking about subject/verb agreement, while the second accounts much better for the observation that knowing the kind of verb you have lets you predict the kind of object, or whether there will be an object or not, better than it lets you make predications about the subject (and besides, it fits the traditional subject/predicate distinction). In all the monostructural approaches I'm aware of, practitioners pick the second; the price, of course, is having to go to some extra lengths to deal with subject/verb agreement. "Multistructural" theories would allow for *both* 1 and 2 to be potentially "correct" simultaneously, so the question of "which one is correct?" isn't really relevant. This kind of approach can (but doesn't have to be) motivated by a different way of counting simplicity. Both mono- and multistructural theories can be deployed in "God's Truth" and "Hocus Pocus" forms - in the first case, the practitioner claims that the underlying reality of human language is such that sentences really do/don't have single structural descriptions (whether we know what they are or not); in the second, the practitioner claims that there is no way of knowing for sure, but that assuming that they do/don't have single structural descriptions is useful for practical reasons. A position of "agnostic humility" (which I happen to regard as quite healthy!) is possible in all four combinations of the two distinctions. Bill Spruiell Dept. of English Central Michigan University To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/