----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 1:51 PM
Subject: Re: Linguists' accusations of
pedantry
Like Herb, I have been waiting before
responding to Edmond’s provocative post, and I’ll add a few
observations to Herb’s thoughtful response.
I am both a linguist and a writing teacher,
and I see no conflict between the two. In both roles I am eager for my students
to master the conventions of standard English. Yes, I want them to know
distinctions between “affect” and “effect” and between
“lie” and “lay.” These are standard, useful
distinctions, and literate speakers/writers make them. In both roles, I am also
aware that all languages change over time and that change is determined by the
usage of speakers/writers of the language and is not legislated by experts. For
example, it is clear that “whom” is now rarely used even by
educated speakers/writers, except immediately following a preposition. The loss
of “whom” is almost certainly inevitable and irreversible; neither
does this signify decay, nor is to be regretted. It is a typical instance of
language change.
Like Herb, I know of no linguists who scorn
writing teachers for teaching standard conventions. On the other hand, I
observe (in both roles) that some usages that have often been proscribed in
schools have no relation to the actual usage of literate speakers and writers
(“Never begin a sentence with a conjunction” “Never split an
infinitive” “Never end a sentence with a preposition”), and I
tell my students they can be safely ignored.
It is the role of linguists to describe,
not prescribe, language. If there is one distinction between my roles as
linguist and writing teacher, I suppose it is that as a writing teacher I am
free to make private subjective judgments about writing quality that I might
not make purely as a linguist.
Dick Veit
________________________________
Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 12:03 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Linguists' accusations of pedantry
Ed,
I read your interesting posting
yesterday and decided to give it a day
and then reread it. I'm
trying to understand what has spurred your
remarks so that I can get a
better grasp on your argument.
You make the point that English
speakers are dropping such lexical
contrasts and sensuous/sensual,
etc. As a linguist I have to declare
that I haven't read
denunciations from my colleagues of teachers who
insist on teaching these
contrasts. Rather, much of it strikes me as an
important part of vocabulary
building, a task that goes on well beyond
the BA. I would correct in
the writing of my students many misusages of
the sort you list. While
it is a truism that language changes and there
is little we can do about it, it
also remains true that there is a
variant of English, call it
standard if you will, that we expect
educated people to be able to
read, write, and speak, at least in
appropriate social contexts.
I don't think all of these
contrastive pairs have the same status. The
"lie/lay" contrast is
a contrast in transitivity. Since the transitive
meaning ("lay") becomes
clear as soon as the reader/hearer comes upon a
direct object, the redundant
marking of transitivity means that the
distinction between
lie/lay/lain(laid) and lay/laid/laid carries less
functional load and so is at
risk of the forces of language change. The
fact that in Modern English the
strong past participle "lain" has
already been replaced by the
weak past participle "laid" indicates that
this change has been in progress
for some time. In contrast, the
difference between the
adjectives "disinterested" and "uninterested" is
not one that is redundantly
marked in the structure of the sentence, and
so I expect careful users of
English to make the distinction when it
needs to be made. I don't
know of an academic linguist who ignores the
conventions of Standard English
in his or her own writing or in that of
their students (and I used
"their" intentionally, since it goes back
about 400 years in this
usage).
You don't give a citation for
your second quote below, "Educational
resistance to particular changes
is futile," so I'm not sure what the
writer meant. Is
"particular" used in a generic sense "any particular"
or in a specific sense
("certain specified changes"). If the former,
the writer is clearly
wrong. My use of "his or her" above reflects a
socially driven change in
usage. Many of us continue to use "refute"
and "deny" to express
the relevant distinction without having overtly
been taught it. Even
though I recognize the inexorableness of language
change, there are changes I
resist and correct when I see them. I
personally can't abide
"hone in on" for "home in on", a usage that goes
back only to the mid-20th c.
I do take exception to your
claim that language undergoes decay. I take
decay to mean irreversible
entropy. Signals undergo decay, as do all
other physical objects.
Words change, but when complexity is lost in
one area of a language, complex
normally increases in another. The
history of English illustrates
this nicely. Old English had a rich
system of case endings, six cases,
on nouns, adjectives, and
determiners. That system
virtually disappeared in Middle English
because of normal, regular sound
changes and some resulting analogical
changes. One might say
that case marking decayed during this period,
but what actually happened is
that the relationships and meanings marked
by case endings in Old English
came to be marked by word order and
prepositions in Middle and
Modern English. The complexity shifted from
morphology to syntax and
lexis. Languages have a necessary level of
complexity since they are a
product of the complexity of human
cognition, but that complexity
can show up in very different ways from
language to language. The
deny/refute distinction may well be one that
colloquial usage doesn't generally
need and so is not made. However,
more formal English does find it
necessary to make the distinction, and
so learners are obligated to
learn the distinction if they don't already
know it. That's not so
much a matter of language change or decay as of
difference in register.
I do agree with you rather
strongly that Standard English has very
strong social class
implications, many of them deleterious to those who
don't master that particular
dialect. A huge part of our educational
system is devoted to maintaining
these class differences.
I hope I haven't misread you.
Herb
It is exceedingly common to find
academic linguists who pour scorn on
teachers' attempts to correct
students who confuse words, saying that it
is
pedantic to try and stem the
inevitable onrush of language change. For
example, they have in their
sights anyone who would point out to their
students the semantic difference
between such pairs as 'refute' and
'deny',
'sensuous' and 'sensual',
'uninterested' and 'disinterested'. Another
pair
is the transitive verb 'lay' and
the intransitive 'lie' -- over here in
England it used to be
comparatively rare to hear someone say 'Lay on the
bed' or I've been laying here
half an hour', instead of 'Lie on the bed'
or
'I've been lying here half an
hour', but it is becoming increasingly
common
(I notice, for example, that
Americans say 'the lay of the land' and not
'the lie of the land').
Some linguists, however, are
straying from the scientific compound. A
scientist should be examining
the changes happening in the corpus of
words,
regardless of their
causes. Even a sociolinguist, interested in those
causes, does not take
sides. It is not for the linguists to lay down
rules
about what should or should not
be preserved. If educators in some
society
find that it aids community
feeling to inculcate a 'standard' speech and
are
concerned to produce the results
they intend, that is just one of the
historical factors that a
linguist would have to acknowledge, not a
feature
that he or she should be
condemning out of hand as 'pedantic'. They
have a
tendency to move from a
statement like 'Change in language is a normal
process' (David Crystal, 'How
Language Works, 2006, p. 483) which is
undeniable, to 'Educational
resistance to particular changes is futile',
for
it might be perfectly 'normal'
in a society to resist such changes.
They
say that one should not be using
a word such as 'decay' of a language:
no,
not at the level of scientific inquiry,
but yes, if one considers that,
say,
the distinction between 'refute'
and 'deny' is valuable. The continual
use
of 'refute' (which means to set
out a would-be conclusive, carefully
argued
disproof of something) for
'deny' (which is merely to contradict
something
someone has said) might lead to
a double loss -- the simultaneous
disappearance of the useful word
'deny' and of the meaning of 'refute',
for
which there is no adequate
synonym. Confusion of the two indicates
someone
who can have had no training of
any kind in the rhetoric of argument,
surely
a necessity in a
democracy. Would it not be an instance of decay if
that
should come about?
I detect a neo-romantic ideology
at work here: its dream is of a
childhood
innocence as a delicate fruit
the bloom of which must not be touched.
There
is also a mistaken class element
that reads the attempt to teach
standard
English as elitist, interfering
with the natural dialects of the
working-class. I have
found many students of working-class background
who
readily outstrip their
middle-class schoolfellows in learning about
language, and end up being able
to move from dialect to Standard English
and
back again without any loss of
local colour in their pronunciation.
Among
their peers, of course, there
are many who obstinately distort their
speech
to signal conformity with and
loyalty to 'us' rather than 'them'. Is
that
determination to be blessed as
irresistible because it is 'normal'?
Edmond Wright
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