[log in to unmask] wrote:
> Johanna wrote:
> These comments seem to me to accept the notion that language does
> reflect thought and culture. The implication is clear for the teaching
> of grammar. Students will be unable to think appropriately about their
> content material if they are unable to express those ideas in Standard
> English.
Here, I agree strongly with Susan M. Witt's response. Appropriate
thought about content can be accomplished in any dialect, as Labov's
famous 'The logic of nonstandard English' shows. Also, thought is not
_permanently_, _irrevocably_ controlled by language: _habitual_ thought
is (this was Benjamin Whorf's point). Humans are capable of learning to
view the world in new ways, and learning to express the new view in new ways.
>
> I unequivocally reject the notion that language reflects thought and
> culture. I have no idea how my thoughts are different in English because
> it is fundamentally a Subject Verb Object language and from the thoughts
> of my wife whose language is German, a Subject Object Verb language.
> More directly related to our concerns as teachers of English grammar,
> what thoughts are influenced by a person who regularly mark verbs for
> third person agreement and a person who don't regularly do that?
>
> If Johanna is right, then Rei Noguchi and Robert DeBeaugrande are
> wrong. Both Noguchi and DeBeaugrande have argued that students possess
> a lot of the grammatical knowledge to control standard English.
> However, if "language profoundly reflects thought and culture" then it
> follows that anyone who speaks another dialect of English thinks
> differently from someone who speaks standard English.
We need to sort something out here: not all students who we feel need
grammar instruction are speakers of nonstandard dialects. In fact, most
are speakers of standard English. The little bits of standard grammar
that they are lacking are those that are changing in the standard
dialect: who/whom, subject/verb agreement, less/fewer, infer/imply, etc.
These are aspects of standard English that are changing. Soon there will
be no 'whom' at all in the language, and 'infer' and 'imply' will be
synonyms. These are likelihoods we cannot escape -- you can't stop all
language change. The generations that control 'who/whom' are in middle
age and upwards -- we're on our way out, folks. Our great-great
grandchildren will find 'whom' as quaint and archaic as we do 'thee' and 'thou'.
Many other problems are punctuation problems such as comma splices and
fragments, which reflect lack of knowledge of punctuation, not standard
English grammar. Often, explicit grammar knowledge is needed to remedy
these punctuation problems, so that students can identify what kind of
constituent they are punctuating and follow the rules correctly. And yet
others are in fact problems with coherence and thought-tracking:
dangling modifiers, for example, as well as pronoun/antecedent
difficulties. Subject/verb agreement is probably changing because of the
distance between the head noun of a long subject phrase and the verb --
a processing problem. Also, English has been eliminating agreement
phenomena for over a thousand years; this may be part of the trend. In
addition, many students are most familiar with informal varieties of
standard English, and simply are not fluent in the phraseology and
vocabulary of academic/professional writing -- of the formal variety of
standard English.
Most students _do_ have standard English intuitions that enable them to
do what Noguchi and de Beaugrande are aiming at: identify a complete vs.
incomplete sentence, find the main verb, find the subject, etc.
In addition, dialects of English are recognized as such (not as distinct
languages) because they share a lot of rules and a lot of vocabulary
with standard English. So, speakers of nonstandard English will share
some intuitions with speakers of standard English.
>
> Finally, if Johanna is right and we follow her teaching suggestions at
> the lower grades of providing a lot opportunities to read and WRITE the
> standard, we will be engaging in cultural genocide. That seem to follow
> directly from the following claim.
Right, and this is exactly what some people (some proponents of Ebonics,
for example) object to: the homogenization of American culture;
assimilation to a single culture as the goal of American education. Can
you look at American society and NOT see cultural genocide? I am of
Italian descent, others are of Greek descent, some of Russian descent,
etc. The 'melting pot' has erased most of the cultural differences of
the original immigrants and created a distinctly American culture.
'Genocide' is perhaps too loaded and suggestive of more intention than
was present, but much cultural knowledge & practice certainly did cease
to be passed on.
>
> > As to minority cultures being 'profoundly' different from the dominant
> > culture, I believe that they may well be.
>
> I don't think teaching the standard is cultural genocide because
> language does not "profoundly reflect thought and culture." Noguchi and
> DeBeaugrande are right. Whether one asks
>
> Am I not a woman?
> Ain't I a woman?
> Bin ich denn nicht eine Frau?
> Est-ce que je ne suis pas une femme?
>
> the cry to recognize one's humanity is exactly the same! The linguistic
> form of the question is irrelevant.
I'm not sure that the major cultural differences are reflected by
syntax, although I know of several scholars who are working on proving
such connections (for example, the connections between fatalism and the
presence of middle voice in some cultures, or notions of relative power
related to case-marking. Sounds farfetched, but I find some of the work
quite solid and deserving of consideration. I've done some on German
case, as has David Zubin; Linda Manney works on voice in modern and
classical Greek; Ricardo Maldonado has done some work on object marking
in Spanish. There is a lot more out there that I am not following these
days). A language is the repository of a culture's vocabulary, which in
turn codes its categorization of all the phenomena of human experience.
Meanings and habits of thought are believed by some scholars to be
stored in 'frames' or 'cognitive models' -- complex knowledge structures
that create our expectations and guide our behavior in all situations
(e.g., how to behave if you offend someone; what happens at a wedding,
etc.) In other words, how we connect the various aspects of our
experience is structured by the culture we are raised in, through the
language we use to communicate. These complex connections form the
meaning base we draw on when we use language.
There are certainly universals of human experience, so certain notions
appear in all cultures; at the same time, there is great diversity
across particular cultures. This gets reflected in their languages:
certainly in their 'frames', thence in their lexicons. Proving the case
for a syntax/thought connection is trickier.
Another reason why Bob might reject a language/thought connnection while
I am more open to it is that the kind of linguistics I practice assigns
meaning to syntactic structures -- syntax is not meaningless and
autonomous from the rest of language, as is posited to varying degrees
in many generative approaches to language. Cognitive and functional
linguists assign meaning and function to syntactic constructions, and
therefore these have a greater potential role to play in reflecting the
meaning structures of the culture.
Can we claim for sure for sure that, for instance, English doesn't
display a 'transitive bias'? English codes certain experiences
transitively: 'I like ice cream. I enjoy beautiful sunsets.' Other
languages code these as 'X pleases me', putting the utterer in the role
of experiencer, not doer. Are we really 'doing' anything when we enjoy?
Or is something eliciting a response in us (acting upon us?) Is it
possible that English speakers favor viewing the world as being under
humans' control? Impersonal constructions (in which the agent of an
action is unknown) are often structured as transitives with 'they' as
subject: 'They tore down the old library' might be preferred to 'the old
library was torn down'. Perhaps this reflects a subconscious bias
towards acknowledging an agent's power. It would be interesting to test
this. (It was demonstrated in the 1960's that English speakers process
active clauses more rapidly than passive clauses.)
It is possible to demonstrate that the probability of choosing one
syntactic structure over another depends on the situation being
described. For example, Zubin made up various situations in which an
individual was on a 'collision course' with something or someone else.
He varied the degree to which that individual would be able, under
real-world conditions, to avoid the collision. He found, across a large
sample of speakers, that Germans were more likely to use a verb that
requires coding that individual as a dative, not accusative object, the
LESS the individual was able to avoid the collision (i.e. the MORE the
oncoming object was in control of the individual's possible actions).
Other studies of dative case in German indicate that a dative-marked
object is often (not always) under the control of another entity. So one
meaning of dative case for German has to do with who is in control of a
situation. Other cultures may not be as preoccupied with who is in
control, and may focus on other aspects of a situation. Such cultures
may not use dative case in such a way, or they may not have dative case
at all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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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