Herb,
   With apologies, since you are not at all the target of my passion on
this one.
   It's interesting that Omar mentioned "Ivanhoe", a book I loved as a
child, not least of all because I identified with its "common folk"
heroes (a bit of a stretch, I know, since nobility is an anglo-Saxon
concept as well, and Ivanhoe is a displaced noble. I remember doing a
paper on "aetheling" and its uses in Beowulf, and I think it bothered
my teacher that someone was pointing out a hierarchy of class.)
   When you talk about register, you are talking about two very distinct
phenomenon, the observation that a community of users shares a language
and the observation that people look down on others whom they believe
are inferior by nature or by group affiliation. I find the second very
distasteful, and I am often embarassed that people believe my interest
in grammar is an interest in "improving" the language by weeding out
the wrong usage or the wrong people.
   There is a long history in England of kings and earls and dukes and
knights and princes and lords and so on, who inherit wealth and
prestige and power, and the common working folk, who are expected to be
happy with menial service or labor in the fields, factories, mines, or
offices. That they speak differently is a no-brainer--social
discrimination breeds segregation which breeds language differences,
and these in turn are used as an excuse for continued discrimination.
   As a writing teacher, over the years, I have noticed that the worst
thing a beginning writer can do is try to use those "prestige words"
rather than the words that come naturally. Luckily, we have a wonderful
literature written by unpretentious writers. As E. B. white says (I
can't quote exactly without the book), never use a fancy word when a
simple one will do.
   If you choose words on the basis of nuances of meaning and the desire
for human contact, you win over the audience. Ain't nothing wrong with
good old Saxon talk.
   I don't think grammar teaching can make major inroads (restoration)
until it seperates itself from these class based, discriminatory
traditions.

Craig

Craig et al.
>
> When I used the term "level of formality" I was using it as a paraphrase
> for "register" a term less familiar to many on this list.  Register is a
> standard linguistic term with a long pedigree.  Perhaps the seminal
> treatment of it for English was Martin Joos' The Five Clocks (1967).  On
> vocabulary, Geoffrey Hughes' A History of English Words (Blackwell 2000)
> demonstrates how English vocabulary tends to fall into three registers
> that correlate nicely with historical development.  The Old English
> vocabulary we preserve in Modern English is the common level.  This
> includes not only some of our taboo vocabulary but also words like
> "scared" as an adjective.  Words that came in through Norman French,
> after the Conquest, comprise a more formal, upper class vocabulary.  A
> good example of this is the preference in formal writing from French and
> Latinate borrowings over verb-particle constructions, so "surrender"
> rather than "give up".  The third group is words that came in during the
> Renaissance and Enlightenment, words that have a scientific or technical
> cast to them.  This has nothing to do with correctness and has a great
> deal to do with becoming an effective user of English, knowing which
> word to use in which social and discourse context.  Notice that Hughes'
> lexical registers correlate with both social and educational variables.
>
> Herb
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Craig Hancock
> Sent: Monday, February 19, 2007 10:42 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Linda to RMMedley"to scare"
>
> Linda,
>     My computer has been balking, so I apologize for not replying to
> your
> earlier post. I'll try to catch up here.
>    I was actually replying to Herb's early response to Cynthia, in which
> he said we should shy away from "parts of speech" explanations because
> students aren't aware of them enough to follow the explanation, and
> edge toward levels of formality. I'm sure I wasn't overly clear. Herb
> of course is right in his observbations about what people are likely to
> know, but then I thought about how we may enable this sort of ignorance
> by giving people what they think grammar is all about, rules for use
> that don't trouble them with understanding. I don't mean to imply
> criticism to any of us, especailly Herb, who has been an advocate of
> public grammar as long as I have known him, just an observation about
> how we get caught up in the "you don't need to know about language"
> syndrome of the times. We try to be helpful, but become complicit.
>    Halliday has some neat observations about the reciprocal nature of
> mental processes. When something scares us, we can feel active and
> passsive at the same  time. "I am scared of it. It frightens me." "I
> admire Ghandi. He impresses me." I think the notion of agency shifts
> when we move to emotions and thoughts. It's not as cut and dried as it
> is in a mechanical process. When w elove someone, we are both agent and
> patient.
>    I worry that "level of formality" is just a substitute for "correct"
> or
> "incorrect", with some slight mitigation.
>    This is partly a response to Johanna's post. When we say "wasted" on
> the witness stand, we are not just using taboo words, but insulting our
> audience by using words than may not be "shared". It violates some sort
> of maxim of communication. Academics do it on the other end of the
> spectrum, using technical terms that shut out much of the public, but
> not at the expense of the speaker.
>    It's interesting that "scared" is an official adjective in the two
> dictionaries I consulted. That would be a neat assignment for a class,
> looking through a dictionary to discover which participles have been
> granted full adjective status and which kind of hang on as verbs in
> adjectival roles. How would a dictionary maker decide?
>    "Scare" is a noun as well. We need to find ways to make "parts of
> speech" explorations much more interesting and flexible.
>    At what point does "level of formality" become a euphemism for
> "incorrect"?
>    Sorry to mix a number of comments in a single post.
>
> Craig
>
>    >
>
>
>  Great data, R Michael Medley!
>>
>> And I would say that it supports my point more than not. I'm sorry if
> I
>> was
>> not clear (but these are very involved issues, aren't they? Fun to
> talk
>> about
>> though.)
>>
>> I wasn't really relying on introspection to make an argument about
> data
>> here; I was simply generating sentences that might illustrate my point
>> about
>> lexical semantic structure: that we inform our usage of particular
> verbs
>> with our
>> own understanding of what they mean and how they work. In particular,
> our
>> understanding of the meanings of some verbs includes a stronger notion
> of
>> agency. And this is why some grammatical constructions seem odd with
> some
>> verbs
>> and acceptable with others.
>>
>> Certainly, numerous contexts can be generated to use  verbs in all
> sorts
>> of
>> ways, as your data shows precisely. But I was  trying to explain the
>> question
>> from the instructor about how and why certain  grammatical structures
>> might be
>> 'preferred' , especially in writing.
>>
>> When we say that a photo scares us, we do not mean that the photo
> stood
>> up
>> and took the initiative to attempt to frighten us.  We mean that  we
>> viewed a
>> photo and that viewing caused some sort of reaction in  us.  But the
> photo
>> did
>> nothing. And the photo did not change. The photo  does not act at all.
>>
>> When we say a person scared us, we typically understand that a  person
>> actually DID something to INTENTIONALLY scare us.  While  action,
>> intention, and
>> control are not part of every event of 'scaring  by a person', the
>> potential is
>> there. It is NOT there in the 'scaring by  a photo' event.
>>
>> This difference in the type of scaring events plays out in the
> grammatical
>> structures we use with verbs.
>> I hope this makes my point more clearly.
>>
>> And your data was quite entertaining!
>>
>> Linda Di Desidero
>>
>>
>> (If you are interested in event semantics, I wouldn't turn  to
> Chomsky,
>> but I
>> would recommend people like Beth Levin and a  ton of others I could
> give
>> you
>> off-list if you like.)
>>
>>
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>>
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