I appreciate Craig providing us with the abstract from the paper. It sounds interesting and I'm in the process of getting it by interlibrary loan. I want to explain why the following statement that does make someone like me angry. And, it is not because it dismisses another understanding of language. ***** I know I get people angry when I say this, but a more functional, emergent understanding of grammar also gives us a better chance of arguing for a much larger place for attention to it in the English curriculum. For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional model, those connections are already there. As Bill put it in a recent post, there is no performance/competence split. **** The first paragraph, "might give us a better chance," reminds me of the joke about the drunk looking for his car keys under a lamp post. Someone comes up and asks, "What are you doing?" The drunk replies, "Looking for my car keys." The stranger asks, "Where did you lose them?" The drunk answers, "Over there, but the light is better here." It may or may not be true that a "functional, emergent understanding" is better for understanding the nature of language, but it fits Craig's purposes (the light is better there). As interesting as the paper he cites is, the second paragraph is key. If it is true that a functional model makes the connections that are already there between formal structures and how they are put to work, and such connections made directly are better for teaching grammar and not a theory of language that posits a competence-performance distinction, then Craig should be able to demonstrate why without reference to this paper. In other words, how does positing direct connections between formal structures and their use assists writing and grammar teachers in the classroom and not proposing a competence-performance distinction? (For examples of how positing a competence-performance distinction can assist writing teachers see the papers that Jim Kenkel and I have in the Journal of Second Language Writing and the Journal of Basic English.) I don't get angry when someone suggests a view of language that I have might be wrong. I was educated at a university that taught me to always consider the data first. It deeply offends me when someone tells me my views are wrong because it doesn't accomplish the goals that person wants to accomplish in the way that person wants them accomplished. And, that person proposes a solution that is so general that I have no idea what he is talking about. Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri >>> Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 2/10/2009 1:13 PM >>> As one happy result of our online discussion, I have been alerted to a very interesting, very current article on these issues. “Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition”.European Review, Vol 16, No. 4, 445-456. 2008. Elena Lieven, the author, is, according to the author note, Director of the Max Planck Child Study Centre in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Manchester and was editor of The Journal of Child Language from 1996-2005. The abstract is as follows: “Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for whether they are psychologically real for young children. However, when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic representations only on the basis of the language they hear and use and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of use only gradually as well—again on the basis of linguistic experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from empirical analyses of children’s early multi-word utterances, the development of the transitive construction and certain types of errors are presented to illustrate this approach.” Some of you may find the article useful for the careful and thoughtful way she presents the dual perspectives of Universal Grammar and the alternative (constructive, emergent, usage-based) approach. In all three of the empirical studies summarized, the constructivist model seems the most in play. Here’s from the conclusion: “The structure of language emerges from language use historically and ontogenetically. Children use what they hear in order to communicate and thus come to share in a language community in terms of the network of form-meaning mappings that comprises their grammar.” She points out that much work needs to be done, including a focus on the role of “saliency, communicative relevance to the child and relationships between items in the network of connections…” “My aim here has been to illustrate ways in which a constructivist accounts would approach these issues and to argue that because these accounts are more psychologically realistic, they are likely to provide a much sounder theoretical and empirical basis for further research.” I think there are major implications. One, certainly, is that the grammar of the language doesn't seem to be already pre-wired into the brain. Acquisition depends a great deal on input, on the kinds of interactions involved. The other implication is that gramamr is not best thought of as a set of abstract, formal "rules". It is, by its very nature, functional in orientation, connected to a shared language community. I know I get people angry when I say this, but a more functional, emergent understanding of grammar also gives us a better chance of arguing for a much larger place for attention to it in the English curriculum. For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional model, those connections are already there. As Bill put it in a recent post, there is no performance/competence split. 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