David Neyhart writes,
"I was wondering if there are any
grad students on the list or profs that perceive these tensions about "who
knows writing and language best" across majors in English departments."
I think we see such disagreement right here on this list! I'm sure that
such disagreement is common, cutting across lit., rhetoric, comp,
linguistics. I guess it's a kind of turf war.
I believe the source of disagreement is in the history of the
disciplines: our culture (as do many literate cultures) mixes study of
language with study of 'great literature'. I suppose this originates in
'great works' being taken as models for 'good language' in the 17th and
18th centuries (Samuel Johnson, for instance, in the preface to his
dictionary, names particular authors whose vocabularies provide
'sufficient' words for various domains -- science, religion, etc. He
chooses Shakespeare's plays as sources for usage of the common folk! --
Rather than observing what common folk actually say, and never mind that
Shakespeare predated Johnson by some 150 years.)
This tradition has placed scholars of literature and rhetoric in the
position of the 'language experts' for our culture. Along comes
linguistics in the early 20th century, taking an observational approach
to language (not 'what SHOULD people say/write', but 'what DO people
say/write'). We now have around a century of linguistic scholarship, and
since linguists spend their whole professional lives analyzing language,
they have a great deal of detailed description of certain languages,
such as English. So they do in fact often 'know more about the language'
-- its structure and internal workings (but not ONLY its structure;
meaning and use also) than literary and rhetoric scholars, who spend
their time on literature and rhetoric (and who therefore know more about
their respective specialties than linguists do). So linguists are
competing as 'language experts'. The fact that linguists take a neutral
approach, assuming that any native speaker of a language is an expert on
what is 'correct', adds a sort of political dimension to the turf war.
People in the non-linguistic disciplines also sometimes see linguistics
as a kind of dissection of language which then destroys it (as you
cannot reassemble and revivify a dissected frog). Linguists, of course,
see it as the best way to understand the full workings of language, just
as dissection enlightens us about the 'workings' of frogs.
The tradition and the competition and the confusion continue, because
our schools still blend language, literature, and writing under the
heading 'English', and because linguists have no voice in K-12 education.
I'm a linguist, so I guess it's easy to guess who I think knows
_language_ best (not writing, not literature -- I would not presume to
know more about these subjects than people who have spent years studying them).
And it's way more complicated than this, obviously. There is
disagreement among linguists and everybody else, I suppose. I'd be
interested to hear about experiences of tensions between literature and
rhetoric/composition folk. That's something that I don't experience directly.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics
English Department, California Polytechnic State University
One Grand Avenue • San Luis Obispo, CA 93407
Tel. (805)-756-2184 • Fax: (805)-756-6374 • Dept. Phone. 756-259
• E-mail: [log in to unmask] • Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba
**
"Understanding is a lot like sex; it's got a practical purpose,
but that's not why people do it normally" - Frank Oppenheimer
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