Craig,
I'm not sure I know what you mean by a production grammar. Generative grammar seeks to describe explain what it is that native speakers know about their language, and more broadly, about language. From a linguistic perspective, a production grammar would be a description of the processes the speaker goes through in converting a thought into speech. We really don't know much about these processes, and even less about how the thought might be represented before it's uttered. What you're looking for, rather, is content that we can teach to students to help them learn to produce effective speech and writing and to interpret speech and writing effectively. I think what you're calling a production grammar is what a lot of us would call a pedagogical grammar. This is in part a terminological distinction, but the term production grammar raises certain issues for a linguist that it doesn't raise for the rhetorician or writing teacher. But those issues arise out of frequent misunderstanding of the generative agenda and of distinctions between competence and performance, distinctions that not all linguists agree on either.
The challenge of a sound pedagogical grammar is one that we've been discussing on NPG, and insights from lingusitic theory do contribute substantively to that agenda, but as our recent discussion about the NPG agenda suggests, there are important non-linguistic issues that have to be sorted out as well, issues that linguists may contribute to more as teachers than as linguists. But as a linguist who is not a writing teacher or rhetorician, I've found myself relying on the writing teachers and rhetoricians on a lot of these matters that I don't command well myself.
I think it is worth distinguishing pedagogy from production, though, because it focuses the orientation on the learner. A lot is known about writing process and rhetorical development, and much of this is not linguistic or at best tangentially linguistic. A public grammar relates to linguistic theory perhaps as public technology policy relates to the development of the Internet. A large part of the technology of the medium is irrelevant to its implementation as a public utility, a point Al Gore assumed and got beaten up for. We found out in the '60s, and several times since, that it does little good to swamp teachers and learners with linguistic theory when what they need is good discipline-specific and task-specific pedagogy.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar on behalf of Craig Hancock
Sent: Thu 3/18/2004 1:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
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Subject: Re: Why SFG categories don't seem particularly useful
Bruce,
The sense I have of it is close to what you are saying: that generative grammar gives us the unconscious rules for the production of structures (forms), but leaves aside the question of how those structures might enter into productive discourse. What Jim is saying, I think, is that it may be possible to use that understanding within rhetorical context. I hope so, and I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to discourage anyone from making that attempt. One question might be what of those unconscious understandings might it be useful to bring to consciousness, not to be grammatical, which seems natural enough, but to make conscious choices in the production of texts. Perhaps we can build a production grammar out of a more natural language, sidestepping the problem of distrust in their own language that is so troubling to writing teachers who feel they have to impose some sort of "correctness" on student writing, but at the expense of fluency.
It's hard not to be impatient when I am told that the true grammar doesn't relate to production and that grammars that relate to production are inherently wrong. For many of us on the list, production is what has brought us here. We're uncomfortable with the notion that we have a scientific grammar and an unscientific public grammar, with no way to bridge those worlds.
I'm proposing that the creation of a new paradigm will involve contributions from a number of different sources, and that what's needed is a new spirit of cooperation.
As is evidenced by Grammar Alive and its acceptance, some of this is very much underway.
Craig
Bruce Despain wrote:
Jim, Craig et al.,
Let's recall that generative grammar is descriptive of language structure, not of its production. I think that it has been said that the rigidity of the lexical insertion rules would be a problem. Certainly it would describe the sentence in question as non-grammatical. Of course, the lexical entry for "decay" could always be adjusted to make it transitive, hence allow the sentence in question to be characterized as acceptable. Some versions would assign a probability to each entry, from which value the likelihood of production might be derived. However, as I understand the theoretical basis, generative grammar in general is not designed in such a way as to describe blends -- the combining of multiple structures -- as anything other than either grammatical or non-grammatical; acceptable or not.
It would seem that what we need to describe structural blends, whether made in error or intentiionally, is a theory of production. Anything like lexical insertion would have to be based on semantics initially. The syntactic harmony of the sentence would be a later construct -- a metamorphosis occurring after the major lexical items are selected on the basis of meaning. The major items would bring with them syntactic structures filled with default values, as it were, to be molded and adjusted by the composer. If blends result, these are evaluated for more than their syntactic non-conformity. Their rhetorical force sometimes outweighs their grammatical inconsistency.
Reading Chomsky's early works one will discover that generative grammar from the start was never meant to describe performance of the speaker/author. I am not at all sure it is the best place to start to address such issues.
Bruce
>>> [log in to unmask] 3/17/2004 1:05:26 PM >>>
Bob,
I don't want to get into the middle of a very rich and interesting
theoretical talk by thoughtful linguists, but I do want to say that
comparing Molly Ivins wonderful coinage to the kind of things kids do
when they haven't evolved an adult grammar is not productive. Somehow,
we need a view of grammar that helps us all become better at using the
language, a way of differentiating between accident and orchestration,
between awkwardness and genius. She may have lucked upon the construct,
but she liked it and kept it and used it, and whether or not it works
has everything in the world to do with its real world (rhetorical)
context. I would like to be able, in a classroom, to talk to students
about it as an extension of the usual transitivity of the verb and ASK
THEM what they think it means and whether they find it effective within
its context. I would also like them to understand th! at writers stretch
the language in order to carry out important purposes, and I would like
them to admire writing that accomplishes that in creative and
interesting ways. Whether we use SFG for that or not is a secondary
question.
Molly Ivins makes me laugh and makes me think. Much can be gained
by looking at how she does that and how the grammar of her text helps
carry out those wonderful purposes. In order to do that, I need to work
with a grammar that acknowledges that those questions MATTER, not a
grammar that tells me they are unimportant and irrelevant.
I would love to see generative grammar extended into those realms.
What I am usually told, instead, is that generative grammar was never
intended to be a pedagogical grammar, that it tells us what native
speakers know unconsciously but not how to put a conscious understanding
of that into useful practice. It has, in fact, ! not advocated that the
grammar be brought into a conscious understa nding.
What are we left with if the only ACCURATE linguistic grammar is
fundamentally disinterested? Are we left with a choice between a
dysfunctional traditional grammar and nothing at all?
Are you at all surprised that some of us would find answers to
these questions in SFG, even value SFG because it seems to address our
interests and concerns?
I hope this doesn't come across as argumentative. I don't think
these problems will be solved by the triumph of one camp over the other.
We need, in fact, to open up to each other and learn from each other.
Craig
kaboyates wrote:
> I find Bill's last post interesting about SFG (systemic functional
> grammar). Remember that this discussion is about the following
> observation:
>
>> My point, I guess, is that we run into trouble if we think of=20
>> ! complements as dictated by the nature of the verb (like indirect
>> object=20
>> or beneficiary, which only certain verbs will support) and as
>> occurring=20
>> in the predicate, precisely because that doesn't allow us to
>> acknowledge=20
>> the flexibility available to us as we construct meaningful discourse.
>
>
>
> Bill's example from Molly Ivins can be accounted for in other ways.
>
>> We need at least $10 billion in new taxes to fix this without harming
>> the schools. The alternative is a $2 billion fix patch on the old system
>> that will further decay the schools.
>>
>> Now, 'decay' isn't really supposed to be a transitive verb, but she's
>> using it as one, and it flows rather naturally (creating a rather nice
>> parallel structure).
>>
> Notice the specially pleading here: "it flows rather natural! ly."
> There is a large body of research on
> causatives ( in other words, indicating that X caused Y). In fact little
> kids, have difficulty in figuring it out.
> For example, such statements are not at all unusual in first language
> learners of English.
>
> 1) Mommy, I felled the milk. (I caused the milk to fall.)
>
>
> The example from Ivins is along this line. If little kids want to
> create causative constructions, then we should not
> be surprised that adults do the same. However, this example does not
> show that discourse "dictated" this particular
> construction.
>
> I have no idea what this means without example.
>
>> If the argument structure of a clause is determined by
>> its verb, it's hard to account for anomalous argument structures
>> (shouldn't it cause a problem? A kind of thetastrophe?).
>&! gt;
>
>
> One has to be very careful about overgeneralizing from very particular
> examples.
>
>> Halliday has been very careful to link his
>> distinctions among process types to specific characteristics of
>> structure. For example, what in traditional grammar are called direct
>> objects of a number of cognition and locution verbs behave differently
>> than the direct objects of physical action verbs:
>>
>> 1.a I ate a sandwich.
>> b ?A sandwich, I ate.
>>
>> 2.a I said, "Hello."
>> b "Hello," I said.
>>
>> While 1b is certainly possible, it's far more marked than is 2b, which
>> is actually a rather common pattern in narrative dialog. This ! is one of
>> the features upon which Halliday bases his disti nction between "material
>> processes" and "mental processes" - the latter are realized by V X
>> constructions in which X is a frontable complement which is usually
>> clausal; the former are realized by V X constructions in which X is a
>> non-frontable complement which usually isn't clausal.
>>
> I am bothered by phrases such as the following "rather common pattern."
> There are some very interesting constraints
> on when (1b) is possible. (See the discussion of Birner, Ward, and
> Huddelston in The Cambridge Grammar of English).
>
> Halliday's distinction as reported by Bill is not quite accurate. The
> complement of the "mental process" verbs is restricted to the
> actual speech or thought. The preposing the reported speech or thought
> is as decidedly odd as 1b.
>
> 3a Throckmorton said that he is com! ing tomorrow.
> b) ?That he is coming tomorrow, Throckmorton said.
>
> This is the claim supporters of SFG make.
>
>> The system is, however, useful to many analysts, and it's
>> internally consistent.
>>
> Several years ago Jim Kenkel and I looked at this claim and found that
> SFG is not internally consistent. Send me a note off-line and I can
> send an
> electronic version of it.
>
> Bob Yates, Central Missouri State University
>
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