-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Despain
Sent: Jul 27, 2006 5:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Proposed grammar terms

The following from Johanna Rubba:

 

The phrase "word classes" sounds odd to Phil, and probably to many who
are steeped in the "traditional" approaches to grammar. But "parts of
speech" sounds much stranger to people who have little to no background
in that tradition. I think it is safe to say that the vast majority of
people working in the schools today, meaning schoolchildren and younger
teachers, and probably most parents as well, have no deeply-ingrained
associations with the phrase "parts of speech". I'm sure they've heard
it, just like they have heard "direct object" and "verb", but everyone
is attesting to their students' inability to find either of these in a
sentence.

 

We'll have a battle with the _powers_ that currently dictate content
for grammar-teaching materials. "Word classes" will no doubt be much
more understandable to newbies, since it means exactly what is says.
"Parts of speech" could be phonemes, syllables, words, affixes, clauses
... basically anything which is used in building language. "Part" is a
very vague term.

 

Writing is also not just "speech written down". It started out that way
in some cultures (writing down speech was apparently not its original
motivation in the Near East civilizations where our alphabet's
ancestors were invented; commerce was). But writing has been with us
for so long, now, that it has had time to develop its own structural
and lexical characteristics. The difference in _mode_ is crucial:
speech puts severe memory and time limits on planning, production, and
comprehension which are not present in the read/write mode. Also, the
association of writing with "high" pursuits such as religion, law, and
scholarship has encouraged a higher formality level and richer and more
varied word choice. Written language has greater syntactic complexity,
longer sentences, more-varied vocabulary, and controlled ways of
handling repetition, such as use of synonyms and careful attention to
pronoun-antecedent relations. If ! we actually wrote as we spoke
(especially ordinary, everyday talk as opposed to intellectual
commentary), the writing would be nearly incomprehensible most of the
time.

 

Various medical theories, e.g. of humors and so on, were also accepted
for thousands of years. That doesn't mean they were accurate.

 

Phil has yet to respond to any of my posts on either grammar terms or
on my statements regarding the definition of prescriptivism and the
harm current practices do to large segments of the school population.
He has, however, spent plenty of words telling us that we're "not
playing with a full deck". Is it his wish to engage in an open,
scientifically-informed discussion, or to play the naysayer, and not
back up his claims with anything more than "it has been an accepted
tradition for over a thousand years"? He is certainly altogether
correct in saying that grammarians didn't invent the structure of
language -- they discovered it. But discoveries about much of the
natural world, ourselves included, have taken thousands of years to get
anywhere near predictive accuracy. Past scholars of language have come
up with only partially correct descriptions of it. Perhaps the most
accomplished ancient grammarian was Panini, whose! work on Sanskrit
matched the sophistication of modern linguistics. The medieval Arab
grammarians also had significant insights. I don't believe Europeans
came up with anything that matches Panini until the late 19th-,
early-20th centuries.

 

Dr. Johanna Rubba, Associate Professor, Linguistics
Linguistics Minor Advisor
English Department
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel.: 805.756.2184
Dept. Ofc. Tel.: 805.756.2596
Dept. Fax: 805.756.6374
URL: http://www.cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba

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