Bob, Craig, et al.

 

I’ve yet to see a discourse-vicious grammar, but I’ve seen a number that are discourse-apathetic. It’s hard to talk about discourse if you’re restricted to individual sentences, and many grammar theories  do take the sentence as the maximum unit of analysis. That’s not necessarily a problem for a grammar in its role as part of a linguistic theory (it all depends on what the theory says elsewhere; the issue is internal consistency)…but it is a problem for a grammar text for  English courses.  

 

But then, even authors that are committed to a “sentence maximum” theoretical position usually don’t confine their classroom texts to individual sentences. It’s perfectly possible (as Bob and others on this list have demonstrated) to talk about in inter-sentential patterns (? Polysentential?) even if you don’t think they’re fundamentally the same kind of thing as intra-sentential ones (or that a subset are different, etc.). I suspect that discourse-apathy in a classroom text is a problem of audience awareness more than anything else. The fact that few  grammar texts don’t start at a discourse level and move inward may result simply from our inherited tradition and from publisher/purchaser inertia. If it looks too weird, schools won’t buy it.

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

 

 

 

 

Bob,
    I have no problem with your suggestions. Many people on this list have been trying to heal the split between the study of language and English as a discipline, so I expressed the wrong tone.  I was trying to say that English as a field has not adequately valued the study of language and linguistics as a field has not always presented a description of language that can be easily applied. The word "blame" doesn't have to be a part of that. I'm hoping that  my own efforts can be a small part of the solution.

Craig

Robert Yates wrote:

I have several observations about the following line in a recent post.

Craig Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 04/17/09 8:08 AM >>>

. . .  . And it may very well 

be that linguists are much to blame for not giving us a discourse 

friendly grammar to work with. . .  .

****

First, it is always interesting to blame people in one discipline for failure to provide what a person needs in their own discipline.  To blame linguists for not providing a person with what that person needs implies that linguists need to pay attention to that person's needs. Perhaps, linguists' concerns are not that person's concerns.  If that is true, then it seems strange to "blame" people for not caring about what you care about.  

Second, the phrase, discourse friendly grammar, suggests that there are discourse unfriendly grammars.  I wonder what one might find in a discourse friendly grammar that is not in a discourse unfriendly grammar.  I wonder what is discourse unfriendly in a grammar that describes what is possible in a language.

Third, and perhaps most important, in the volunteer organizations I belong to, if you think something needs to be done, you have just volunteered to do it.  I think this same principle applies in academic disciplines.  If you notice some kind of work is missing, then perhaps you should provide what is missing instead of "blaming" people for not giving you what you need.

Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri

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