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
________________________________________
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
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
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
NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the
intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information.
Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you
are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and
destroy all copies of the original message.
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:
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/
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/