I've been reading the Yates/Diamondstone exchange with interest. Some
thoughts:
1 - On developmental progress; what students know and when they know it --
HOW is also important
I'm glad for all the references on children's syntactic development, esp.
on their speech/writing differences. This information will surely be of
major importance in determining scope, sequence, and standards for
teaching grammar and writing. There still seems to be confusion about the
nature of the knowledge children bring to the classroom.
As to why children's writing sometimes doesn't reflect the complexity of
their speech, what could be going on is the extra cognitive load of
writing: children have to control spelling and punctuation, and then there
is the extra attention that has to be paid to coherence in a written
piece. Students aren't used to dealing with an absent audience and editing
their work. One might also consider the influence of topic: are the
students being assigned topics that they have enough knowledge and
motivation to build complex messages about?
But there's another thing that some posters seem a little confused about:
knowing something subconsciously -- such as how to maintain topic
continuity in conversation -- is not the same as knowing you know it, and
being able to _consciously_ manipulate it. Children's subconscious
knowledge of grammar is large at age 5; their subconscious knowledge of
how to handle interpersonal discourse evolves greatly during the school
years. Writing for an absent audience is most challenging in this respect:
in order to write informatively, you need to manipulate information flow
expertly. This is aided if you are conscious of information flow
management techniques, but few people are conscious of these -- even
skilled writers and editors, many of whom grasp this intuitively, but
can't talk about it in discourse-analysis terms. I see teaching
information flow management as part of teaching grammar/writing.
2 - terminology
It is becoming ever clearer to me that linguistics has much to contribute
on this score. It may be becoming clearer to other posters, as it is to
me, that we cannot teach any of the three levels upon which language
functions apart from the others; we have to find ways to coordinate them
within a reasonable scope and sequence given children's developmental
progress. (Those three levels are: semantics, or representing the world,
i.e. the intrinsic meanings of words and constructions; interpersonal or
register/genre, which is the adjustment of vocabulary and grammar to fit
the social situation and personal relationship between sender and receiver
of the message; and textual -- the need to maintain coherence and topic
continuity within the message.)
'Case roles', such as 'agent' or 'actant' are part of semantics: the scene
a sentence encodes has participants doing or experiencing various things.
AGENT
PATIENT
EXPERIENCER
GOAL
ABSOLUTE
BENEFICIARY
LOCATION
This is a nearly exhaustive list of the participant roles that linguists
have found useful for describing HUNDREDS of languages.
How do these case roles line up with grammatical roles? There are
prototypical (subject=agent) and nonprototypical (patient=subject,
i.e. passive) ways that they line up, and many gradient phenomena that
muddy the waters. Let's return to the possibly most difficult case: subject.
The default choice for languages of the type of English is agent =
subject. Hence our tendency to make even nonspecific agents subject, as in
-They're gonna cut down that tree on Main St. (Who are 'they'?) vs.
-That tree on Main St. is gonna be cut down.
The default choice more broadly is also theme = subject ('theme' in SFG
terms, that is, a scene-setter or cohesive opener for a sentence). E.g.,
in a chapter from a history of English textbook entitled '1970-1770' (book
published in 1970):
"_The past two centuries_ have witnessed greater changes in the structure
of the speech-community, of the audience and experiende of
English-speakers, than any period in the history of the language." (Strang
1970:73).
But plenty of nonsubjects are themes. This is an irritating aspect of
current journalistic practice -- the opening of the first sentence is not
the topic of the article (nor does the specific topic emerge until
sometimes very late in the article).
In terms of discourse considerations, subject=topic is prototypical, but
this is frequently violated. For example, in a New Yorker article about Robert
Redford that I am analyzing, expressions referring to Redford himself are
subject 500 times. No other single referent comes close to this statistic
for this article of ca. 12,000 words, although there are hundreds of
non-main-topic subjects.
We can't, ourselves, develop a comprehensive understanding of any language
unless we consider all three levels. So much work has been done on this in
linguistics that we should take advantage of it -- no point in reinventing
the wheel.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Johanna Rubba Assistant Professor, Linguistics ~
English Department, California Polytechnic State University ~
San Luis Obispo, CA 93407 ~
Tel. (805)-756-2184 Fax: (805)-756-6374 ~
E-mail: [log in to unmask] ~
Office hours Winter 1999: Mon/Wed 10:10-11am Thurs 2:10-3pm ~
Home page: http://www.calpoly.edu/~jrubba ~
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