For the most part I second Bob’s
remarks. TG, through no fault of its own, has gotten blamed both the
decline in teaching diagramming and in teaching grammar in general, and much of
this blame is associated with the truly awful Paul Roberts series, which was a
combination of poor TG and poor pedagogy. The decline in the teaching of
grammar is a social and philosophical phenomenon well laid out in David Mulroy’s
The War against Grammar and has
been the result of social forces independent of any particular theory of
grammar. Bob’s precisely on point when he argues that any approach
to grammar that doesn’t make explicit what native speakers already know
implicitly fails pedagogically. Bob and I probably differ on the amount
of formalism we include in our grammar courses, but probably much less in the
sort of content we cover.
I make my plea once again for a careful
traditional grammar of the sort presented in the major reference grammars like
Jespersen, Quirk et al., Greenbaum, Biber et al., and
Huddleston&Pullum. These are demanding works to read, but they
describe the language well and make the necessary distinctions both between
form and function and within form and function. One of the goals of a
college grammar course ought to be to orient students to one of more of these works
so that they have a sense of what a reference grammar is and how to use one,
and so that they may even have one on their shelves as an antidote to the watered-down,
often inaccurate grammar that gets presented in too many course texts.
Herb
It is tiresome to read about the shortcomings of a
transformational-generative grammar approach without understanding why it
remains an important perspective for many who study the nature of language as
their academic discipline. Here is an example of what I mean.
Diagramming is especially useful for visual learners. If it fell
out of favor, I suppose that was due to the influence of
transformational-generative grammar, but TG grammar is especially focused
on "deep" structures, not on the surface structures that get
diagrammed.
Consider two famous sentences that are used to argue
for the importance of an abstract representation for purposes of
interpretation.
1) John is easy to please.
2) John is eager to please.
In (1), John is the one being pleased, but in (2) John is the one doing the
pleasing.
My understanding is that a concern for SURFACE STRUCTURE would not be able to
show this. Conventional diagramming (and I may be wrong on this) would
diagram (1) and (2) the same.
Conventional diagramming could show this difference, but that would require the
addition of some "abstract" form to capture that John is the
underlying object of please in
(1) but is the underlying subject of please
in (2). Such an addition would destroy the "advantage" of
diagramming as showing "surface" structures.
This example is important for any teacher of English (L1 or L2) to
understand. There are any number of examples of L2 learners interpreting
(1) as John doing the pleasing (in other words, just like (2)), and Carol
Chomsky has shown that many L1 learners of English until about the age of eight
also interpret (1) like (2).
There is room for both approaches.
This may be the case, but
I don't understand the need for an approach which does not accurately describe
the knowledge that all competent speakers of the language know.
Bob Yates,