As long as we’re
commenting on linguistic approaches, allow me add a few words about “generative
grammar.”
I believe that generative
grammar was originally concerned (as many linguists still are) with the
structures (in the brain, like the CG linguists) that enable language. For
example, Chomsky, in his 1965 Aspects of Syntax pointed out five
primitive structures, as it were, that characterize human language syntax:
nesting, right-branching, left-branching, multi-branching, and self-embedding.
These devices of language may be imitated by generative algorithms, but I have
yet to see any other approach characterize them in any other way. In that
sense, perhaps all approaches have a generative base.
1.
I called the man who
wrote that interesting book up. [nesting]
2.
That man who the boy
who the students recognized pointed out is here. [self-embedding]
3.
Tom, Bill, John, and
several of their friends are coming. [multiple branching]
4.
John’s brother’s
father’s uncle died. [left-branching]
5.
The uncle of the
father of the brother of John died. [right-branching]
There must be structures or switches
in the brain that help us keep track of these relationships. Is that
simply part of our general cognitive ability? Perhaps. I need to
see some examples of other behavior that uses these structures. That
might settle the argument for me.
Our general cognitive ability seems
much easier to map to the structure of a neural network. The structure of
the syntax of a string, which is characterized by generative rules, is perhaps part
of, but mostly quite distinct and specialized from that of a neural
network. Such a network allows associations and connections of a great
variety and at varying strengths and “distance.” When we
express the ideas and concepts of a neural network, we are obliged to stringify
it, i.e., map parts of it into a one dimensional string of symbols. Each
one of these symbols (“clumps of concepts”) has associations that
can in turn be mapped to new strings.
My impression is that Grammar is
involved principally with strings of symbols and must relate to syntax in the
above sense. On the other hand, the linguistic approaches of SFL and CL
take a few steps back (higher?) and create other kinds of structures that do
not have the syntax of a string. These structures move away from the
constraints that language syntax has on the form of our expression and
concentrate on the effects of other aspects of the neural network.
From: Assembly for the
Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Spruiell,
William C
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 11:48 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Quick note on SFL and Cog. Grammar
Dear All:
I’d like to address one point in the recent debate
about developmental phases of grammar – but I want to be careful to
emphasize that it’s a very focused (in other words, it doesn’t have
a large impact on the debate as a whole, but hey, it came up). And I
think I may be able to address it noninflammatorily (Word just red-lined that,
but I have a deriving license).
Halliday is quite clear about his grammatical model being a
statement about social practice, rather than about cognition. In a sense,
he’s recapitulating an old trend in linguistics: we’re much more
confident with statements about what we observe going on than we are with
statements about what we think might be going on in people’s
heads, unless we have some way to measure the latter directly. He’s also
from the “hocus-pocus” approach to linguistics rather than the
“god’s truth” approach, for the same kinds of reasons. In
other words, if the grammar describes what’s going on well, and acts as
an explanation insofar as it lets you predict the kinds of things
you’ll encounter, why go out on a limb and claim Full Truthiness?
Cognitive grammar, a la Langacker and others, is a
“god’s truth” model, and does make claims about
what’s going on in people’s heads. It would thus seem at first to
stand in opposition to Halliday’s – and it does, if the only
dimension we’re organizing along is the internal/external-phenomena one.
There are, however, other dimensions along which CG and SLF
tend to “cluster” together. Both acknowledge that social context
directly affects what is produced, and more importantly, both consider the
social environment to have a *direct* effect on the basic structure of
language. In most Generative approaches I’m familiar with, any kind of
selection effect due to social context is outside the scope of
“grammar” – the grammar defines the set of what is within the
realm of possibility, and that set has nothing to do with social interaction.
In a particular social situation, a speaker might choose a subset of that set,
but that’s not an issue for the grammar. There’s a sense in which
sociolinguists, to generativists, are looking at something fundamentally
different from what “core linguists” look at.
There’s an additional reason for CG/SFL clustering,
but it’s one that exists “outside” either theory. CG,
by its nature, must also acknowledge that cognitive processing constraints
– short term memory limitations, etc. – have a direct effect on the
structure (and structures) of language. SFL theorists have spent a fair amount
of time describing what Halliday terms the “textual metafunction,”
which among other things is concerned with maintaining new vs. old information
contrasts, and cohesion. The kinds of constructs one needs for the textual
metafunction happen to dovetail fairly well with notions of processing
constraints – in other words, part of CG may be quite useful as a kind of
backdrop to SFL and vice versa. In generative models, the *basic*
structure of language has nothing to do with more general nonlinguistic
processing constraints, so there isn’t that kind of “contact
point” between the theories.
Sincerely,
Bill Spruiell
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