Bill, are you still concerned that grammar isn't a science?  I thought most of us had settled that.  Yes, a musician can "scientifically" count how many times The Beatles used the word "love" in their songs, but that doesn't make a musician a scientist.  (And I stood in line for 20-minutes this morning to get my fresh turkey and spent the rest of the day and night getting through a stack of papers, so I'm feelin' pretty good and could therefore rate this message with "triple-high importance," but I'm not sure there's much logic behind such a designation.   One thing we do agree on: this is a fun discussion.)

Maybe we should define our terms.  Let's start with science.  How does a grammarian preform an experiment that will make useful predictions?  Or is predicting stuff not an important characteristic of science?


On Nov 20, 2010, at 8:39 PM, Spruiell, William C wrote:

> [If my email client had a category for "double-low importance," I'd mark this message with it. I'm enjoying the discussion (and I'm supposed to be grading), but I doubt this bit will be of much use in a classroom....]
> 
> Susan:
> 
> Regular, observable differences in word usage, etc. are on the "objective" end of the scale. While there will always be exceptions due to language play, etc., when I measure the frequency with which the word "the" occurs with an -s suffix, I get a very, very low value, and when I do the same for "book," I get a very much higher value. Likewise, given a sequence in which the word "about" is followed by a blank and then a period in written English, I can easily say that some words will occur in that blank with almost zero frequency, etc. There is thus a layer of observations that isn't "soft" in the sense you mean (and it's a layer of observation that, among other things, makes a lot of our current information technology possible, so it passes the Widget Test). There are some separate issues for the spoken form of the language, but the same general point holds (and so the growing efficacy of voice-controlled software).
> 
> The variation in terminological systems is "above" that layer, and it's driven at least partly by the fact that there's no truly objective way to say that Distinction A is fundamentally more important than Distinction B, and so how an analyst ranks different distinctions determines what categories one ends up with. But that issue isn't specific to grammar (and the problem we're discussing has been around for well over two thousand years; I'm largely recycling an argument stolen from Aristotle here).  Biologists have been having all sorts of fun arguing about whether a taxonomy based on shared ancestry is better than a taxonomy based on structural characteristics, or more precisely, whether the range of things the first kind does for us is more interesting than the range of things the second kind does (the two kinds don't produce the same categories, and neither is particularly useful if what you're wanting to know is whether something is likely to be delicious with garlic butter).
> 
> As I argued earlier, you can even see this applying to physical sciences. If I have a bunch of chunks of different substances, I could (within limits) verify that some are within, say, ten miles of me, and others aren't. And I could verify that some are composed of a substance with an atomic weight of 34, and others aren't. For what chemists do, the distance of the chunk from me (or anyone else) is massively less important than the atomic weight, and atomic weight is a top-level characteristic for a chemist's taxonomy. Almost no one would care how far each chunk is from me, so that wouldn't make it into any taxonomy (except, maybe, my own taxonomy of What I Might Run Into Soon). But "importance" is always defined by importance *for* something. There may, in fact, be a "true" taxonomy of phenomena, but there's no way anyone would be able to access it directly; we can only say that for what we're trying to do, some distinctions matter more than others. Social sciences rub our noses in that point more often than physical sciences do, but (pardon all the meta here) that's a difference in degree, not kind.
> 
> 
> 
> Bill Spruiell
> Dept. of English
> Central Michigan University
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Susan van Druten
> Sent: Fri 11/19/2010 6:54 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: grammar term definitions
> 
> On Nov 19, 2010, at 2:32 PM, Marie-Pierre Jouannaud wrote:
> 
>> Susan,
>> 
>> When you say that grammatical categories are inherently subjective,
>> perhaps you mean that the boundaries between them are blurred, so that
>> it's sometimes hard to know how to classify a word ("fun", for example)?
> 
> No, "fun" seems easy enough when plugged into a sentence.  I'm thinking of "crying" in "She is crying."  
> 
> 
>> 
>> If you define categories as a cluster of properties (semantic,
>> morphological and syntactic), then you can explain that some words display
>> all of the characteristics of the category and are thus core members,
>> whereas other words display only some of them, and as such are more
>> peripheral members. Uncountable nouns, for example, are less prototypical
>> than countable nouns because they don't have a plural form. It's the same
>> in biology: penguins are birds even though they can't fly, and naked mole
>> rats are mammals even though they are cold-blooded.
>> 
>> Perhaps this is nothing new to you, but I am trying to explain why I don't
>> think grammatical categories are especially subjective.
>> 
>> Marie
>> 
>> PS: Your reference to "the awkward "he or she"" made me smile, because in
>> EFL, we TEACH our students to use "they" in these cases (tag questions:
>> Someone knocked, didn't they?)
>> 
>> 
>>> On Nov 17, 2010, at 8:52 PM, Spruiell, William C wrote:
>>>> It's the *denial* of subjectivity that inheres in the OctoDogma that's
>>>> the objectionable part.
>>> 
>>> Yes, grammar definitions are incredibly subjective.  That was my point
>>> about grammar being a soft science.  There is no objective reality out
>>> there to uncover.  We will fight forever about how to categorize.
>>> 
>>> It is fine for adults who go on to study and teach grammar to contemplate
>>> the fight between the OctoDogmarians and, for fun, let's call the
>>> opposition the Octogenarians.  I am going to place myself squarely with
>>> the OctoDogmarians when I am in my classroom (but you should know that my
>>> heart is with the older, smarter crowd).  We OctoDogmarians know there
>>> aren't 8, but we teach it to young people because it is practical, and
>>> your warning that it is damaging to teach it because it's a kludge is
>>> rather circular.  Why is it clumsy and inelegant?  If we don't teach the
>>> Eight, what would you have us teach?  How much theory do we want to throw
>>> at students?
>>> 
>>>> There's no real logic to saying that the distinction between "modifies
>>>> noun" and "modifies verb" is more important than the distinction between
>>>> "modifies verb" and, say,  "modifies whole sentence."
>>> 
>>> No, the logic is not on the side of this soft science we call grammar.  I
>>> don't like some of the dumb stuff I have to teach, such as how to get
>>> around the awkward "he or she."  And the reason we need a category that
>>> distinguishes between "modifies noun" and "modifies verb" is so I can
>>> explain to my students why they shouldn't tell a prospective employer that
>>> "they did really good in school."  If you could wave a magic grammar wand
>>> and remove the OctoDogma of the educated class, do it.  Until you get
>>> around to that, I need definitions that will make sense to my students
>>> without bogging them down in theory.  I do love your color-coded idea for
>>> the younger grades, but at some point we have to branch out to explain
>>> some of the Latin-forced stupidity that is the snobbery with which we
>>> live.
>>> 
>>>> As it's implemented in K-12, the OctoDogma prevents teachers, and
>>>> students, from *thinking* about language.
>>> 
>>> Yes, I agree.  But some other trendy people all point to studies that say
>>> grammar study doesn't improve writing.  So any grammar we can sneak into
>>> the curriculum must be simple, simple, simple because we don't have much
>>> time and little is reinforced from year to year.
>>> 
>>>> What I can't take is a response that boils down to "I don't care what
>>>> you say, I'm going to say my taxonomy is better than anything else and I
>>>> don't have to have reasons." What I actually hear most often goes past
>>>> that and straight to "N'uh-uh. I'm right."
>>> 
>>> I agree.  I dislike those who shut down debate and will not defend their
>>> positions.  But that is exactly what I have felt from some people (not
>>> you) on this list.  What I head most often is putdowns meant to silence,
>>> such as  "What a naive argument!" "I have no idea what your background is,
>>> but you need to have a wider...bla bla bla. I will now spew names of
>>> famous people I have read in an attempt to shut you up."
>>> 
>>> Thank you for a great post.
>>> 
>>> Susan
>>> 
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