Chapter I, Part 4 (and last)
180. reviewing the theories and practices of various approaches to language study, we might examine the theories and practices in those institutions where language is expressly studied, e.g., in the ‘departments’, ‘programmes’, or ‘centres’ of higher education. To stay within my own range of professional experience, I shall only deal with ‘English departments’, since conditions probably vary along with languages. Simplifying considerably, we could model their conventional organisation divided into two distinct
programmes, as
in Fig. 12. The literature programme features lower-division
practical surveys of more accessible literature, such as the ‘modern American
novel’, and upper-division theoretical exercises in literary criticism of more
erudite literature, such as ‘metaphysical poetry’. The language programme
features lower-division practical skills such as ‘expository writing’, and
upper-division theoretical linguistics such as ‘syntax’. A similar dual
organisation has been imported into recently opened English
departments such as I have known in Africa, Arabia, and Southeast Asia, without
serious assessment of which varieties of English are available or needed.
181. Historically, the two programmes were not so polarized as long as the
clientele was small and the history of English loomed large, with literature as
the main source of evidence, and philology as a practical guide to language
change. Skills and linguistics really took hold in the 1960s and 1970s, whilst
the clientele grew large and diverse, and linguistics grew more theoretical, as
I have described. Roughly during the same period, the study of literature also
grew more theoretical and less historical, though not in the same directions as
linguistics.
182. Ideologically, the division shown in Figure 12 mirrors two distinct
projects. The literature programme is a project for acculturation189
to induct learners into the ‘high culture’ of literature and poetry, and
presumably to enhance taste, sensitivity, and intellectual breadth and depth.
The prospects should be bright if literature is approached in a mind-set of
openness and freedom as an accredited domain of discourse for presenting
alternative worlds in order to enhance our understanding of our own world and
the human situation — a principle I called ‘alternativity’ (II.175). If
communication in general tunes the linguistic knowledge of the participants
(I.36), literary communication tunes their cultural knowledge, particularly of
the past.
183. The language programme in turn is a project for standardisation,190
encouraging learners who are native speakers to acquire fluency in
‘Standard Written English’ for strategic use in education and future
careers. The ‘standards of usage’ are mostly just demonstrated in ‘model
essays’ for learners to ‘describe’, ‘admire’, and ‘imitate’ [169];
yet imitation as a method is not well accounted for in theory nor well organised
in practice. Besides, prescription and pro-scription may grow virulent as
pretexts to ‘take off points’ [170] instead of providing a sensitive and
helpful evaluation.
[169] In
each essay, identify one passage/paragraph that you particularly admire,
and be able to comment on its excellence. […] How would you describe
the style: serious/ academic, light/breezy, tongue-in-cheek,
businesslike, satiric? […] What one element could you most successfully
imitate in your own essay?www
[170] [The paper] needs to be
written in a formal style. Street talk, sloppy grammar, etc. is unacceptable. Avoid
the Internet (ycch!). […] Use active voice (not passive). […] Avoid
writing in second person (‘you’). Avoid clichés and idioms. Avoid
‘his/her’. […] Avoid typos. I'll take off ten
points for each one. (writing
a research paper)www
Websites
like [170] point to the alienating negative orientation, like education at
large, of describing ‘good writing’ in terms of what you must ‘avoid’
(cf. I.60f).
184. Most fundamentally, the two projects view
‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ as straightforward activities in a direct
causality. But our results raise questions about whether the content has been
rendered teachable and learnable: whether we can reliably enable learners to assimilate an
unfamiliar culture and language variety, and how this may affect their
linguistic, cognitive and social development (cf. I.42, 63). Simply bringing
learners into contact with selected texts to be described, evaluated, or
imitated, in order to produce acculturation and standardisation seems to me like
practice running far ahead of theory. As in other areas of education, the
responsibility for relative success or failure rests on the individual learners
(cf. I.57), who confront model texts and are left largely to their own devices
and initiative in learning how to read with appreciation and write with skill.
185. Still, the two projects might function smoothly if the population of
learners are native speakers of English whose cultural and linguistic
backgrounds provide a sound working basis for literacy and fluency. Those
favourable conditions may have held prior to the radical demographic changes
brought on by modernisation and immigration, especially since the Second World
War, when societies requiring a wider range of knowledge and skills sponsored a
drastic expansion of ‘higher education’. As the cultural and linguistic
backgrounds of the learners diversified, the prospects for acculturation and
standardisation turned problematic.
186.
Three options would be open. English departments could simply retain and pursue
the same two projects, disregarding demographic change; or adapt the projects to
changing circumstances; or adopt newer projects.191 To judge from my
own experiences with universities in various parts of the world, especially
where the population is not fluent in English, most departments have favoured
the first option, adapting their projects or adopting new projects only
modestly, sporad-ically, or cosmetically under pressure from social, political,
or administrative agents. No matter what role English might actually play in the
society, the educa-tional bureaucracy soldiers on with the conventional methods
of acculturation and standardisation. In the official theory, the main
determinant of success or failure is still how ‘diligently’ the individual
learner ‘performs’ (cf. I.57). But in the opera-tional theory, the main
determinant is how far the learner’s cultural and linguistic background fits
the conventional methods originally developed for a modest and uniform
population of native speakers. When the fit is unbalanced, the whole ‘English
programme’ resembles a ladder with the lower rungs missing (II.200).
187. The uneven evolution of English departments has left them uneasily
positioned for integrating their own programmes internally, and integrating them
externally into the whole university and the broader society.
[171] At a time when a good public
image is essential for universities, English is unable to explain itself in ways
immediately intelligible to the outsider, is notoriously riven with doubts and
disagreements that prevent it from having a shared sense of purpose, and may at
intervals erupt into crises. (Exploding English)132
On
the internal front, the staff has routinely been split between the ‘senior’
level teaching the more theoretical studies, and the ‘junior’ level teaching
the more practical studies, with scanty co-ordination between the two levels —
yet another divide between ‘theoreticians’ and ‘practitioners’ (I.4,
23). On the external front, the connections have remained tenuous to other
language-related departments (e.g., speech, mass communication, journalism,
French, German) and still more to the social sciences or the natural sciences.
Such English departments still overlook their potentially vibrant relevance in
providing English for effective communica-tion and education. Some departments
seem instead to be training their graduates just for a profession or career
working in the literature programme of a university English department too,
whereas they need contingent training to teach English in primary or secondary
schools, which gets left up to the faculty of education.
188. The literature programme of today initially confronts a
population of learners with little authentic experience in reading literature.
Lower-level ‘survey’ courses accordingly offer a shallow, more practical
introduction to a broad gallery of literary works. A few students move up to the
deeper, more theoretical studies as ‘English majors’, but most of them are
just fulfilling US university ‘requirements’; acculturation through
literature is evidently regarded as a mandatory service of higher education. Yet
the service can be a meaningful success only in an academic ambience which
promotes creative individual response, rather than just ‘assigning readings’
and using mechanical ‘quizzes’ to check who’s doing them.
189. The centre of the programme is ‘literary criticism’ or
‘interpretation’ as a set of discursive practices chiefly addressed to
resolving putative questions and problems in specific literary works within an
(until recently exclusive) ‘canon’, and expatiating on historical and
biographical issues related to works and authors. Aside from occasional
pioneering studies,192 the ‘theory of literature’ had remained
largely intuitive and implicit in critical practices until the 1960s, apparently
holding that acculturation naturally results from the ‘appreciation’ of
‘great works’ (or ‘high culture’, ‘English letters’, ‘classic
books’, etc.); and that English departments know which are the ‘great
works’, and which ‘interpretation’ is valid for each one — the literary
equivalent of the ‘right answer’, the pro-modern ballast of ‘modern
education’ (I.64; II.192). The latter’s agenda of assimilating to mainstream
culture (II.59, 63) was faithfully sustained as well:
[172] In English classes, […]
‘literature’ [is] a canon of OK books, along with a normative or correct way
of reading them: an official interpretation, authorized by what-ever school of
scholarship or criticism is momentarily in the ascendant. […] The claim to
full cultural American citizenship depends not just on speaking the right
dialect but on distinguishing, as the unlettered cannot, between what is really
‘literature’ and junk, schlock, mere entertainment. (Leslie
A. Fiedler, ‘Teaching English’)193
The
‘authorized interpretations’ are mediated in lectures or textbooks for the
learners to diligently reproduce or using their own devices, in essays or exams
composed in a suitably ‘formal’ style. The outcome is then judged partly by
validity and partly by style, including those lower-level ‘mechanical
skills’ of grammar, spelling, and punctuation, which, though wholly irrelevant
to literature, are the safest issues for telling what is or is not ‘correct’
(cf. II.7; V.37, 40).
190. Problems are heightened by historical distance. Highly respected
literary texts, such as the Iliad or Antigone,
which may seem pre-modern to us, must have seemed modernist to their first
audiences, e.g., in working though the mythical past from the vantage point of
the historical present; or even post-modernist, e.g., in deconstructing the
power relations between the divine and the human and inverting their
hierarchical opposition, as for the ignoble gods versus noble warriors of the Iliad.
But these larger issues tend to be neglected when literary studies gets
distracted by the mechanics of the quest for the single ‘valid
interpretation’ through historical reconstructions, explication of allusions,
and even poor translations.
191. As a matter of theory, this quest has not been supported by any of the
literary authors I have spoken to or read about. On the contrary, their
consensus has been to see the essence of literature in its inclusive openness to
free interpretation, befitting the principle I call ‘alternativity’ (II.175, 182). The literary experience should be
a process of actualisation wherein the reader actively shares the
‘textual work’ of constructing the world of the text, the characters, the
culture, and the historical and geographical setting; for the great work, the
process is never exhausted — a hopeful utopia — which is why it can be
endlessly reread. An interpretation can be rendered more plausible if it helps
to situate the text in its cultural or historical context, e.g., by referring us
to some contemporary notions of astronomy or anatomy reflected in Elizabethan
drama. But to call it simply ‘valid’ implicates a premature closure that
excludes as ‘invalid’ the responses of ordinary audiences, say, to a
performance of Henry VI or All’s Well That Ends Well, even
though Shakespeare’s plays skilfully resist a single reading, e.g., to decide
who’s ‘good’ and who’s ‘evil’.
192. As a matter of practice, confronting learners with ‘valid
interpretations’ beyond their own scope can distort the literary experience as a process of alienation.
What you ‘learn’ is that your own skills of interpretation are woefully
inadequate, and that literature is too academic and esoteric to read on your own
in later life — a hopeless
utopia. Here, practice not merely contradicts intentions of literary authors,
but does them a signal disservice by alienating their potential readership.
193. Unlike some older colleagues, I favour using filmed versions in
parallel with reading the works, which can bridge an immediacy of experience
that print alone may not provide. Such a film counts as a ‘visual
interpretation’ with its own methods and priorities of meaning-making, with no
claims to be ‘right’ or ‘valid’. Presenting alternate films of the same
text and discussing the contrasts helps to highlight openness, e.g., which
version of a character seems more or less likeable.
194. Or, texts can be selected that motivate creative response. In one project, a first-year US college class
was given texts of pop songs, which brings multiple several advantages. They are
familiar and less intimidating than the poetry of ‘high culture’, which may
have been ‘taught’ in alienating ways in secondary school. They are easily
to obtain, so that learners picked their own as the course proceeded. And some
are quite profound, being the contemporary equivalent of poetry readings of more
‘literate’ (or ‘literary) eras. Songwriters like Leonard Cohen have explicitly made this point, reinforcing it with the
restrained musical environments of his early albums. In the most famous of
these, Suzanne, the song’s heroine has ‘a place by the river’,
which seems to have triggered an analogy to the water imagery relating to Jesus
in the New Testament, when he ascended to heaven [173] or counselled the woman
of Samaria at Jacob’s Well [174].
[173] And Jesus, when he was baptized,
went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him,
and he saw the Spirit of God (Matthew 3:16)
[174] the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life. (John 4:14)
The song text directly invokes the celebrated miracle of
‘walking on water’, recounted in Matthew 14.22-33 as a test of the
disciples’ ‘faith’:
[175] And
Jesus was a sailor
When he walked
upon the water
And he spent a
long time watching
From his
lonely wooden tower
And when he
knew for certain
Only drowning
men could see him,
He said,
‘All men shall be sailors, then
Until the sky
shall free them!”
But he himself
was broken
Long before
the sky would open,
Forsaken,
almost human,
He sank beneath your wisdom like a
stone. (Suzanne)
The
interpretation of my student Dennis Carrillo, working alone and with no outside
materials, included these comments:
[176] He spent a long time paying penance for our sins (wooden tower =
cross). His chosen few were desperate sinners who sorely needed his advice. A
‘drowning man’ is dangerous and avoided by others, could represent
loneliness. […] Jesus died way before he saw his vision fulfilled (almost
human = had a demise). You rationalized him into non-existence. He ‘sank’ as
sailors who lose control do, like a ‘stone’, as we evolved from
the
tablets of the covenant we
abandoned as we advance in science and technology.
This is of course no model of professional (or professorial)
‘criticism’, but it does manifest a heartening creativity and self-reliance
of response. He also drew a link between Jesus and Suzanne in the next and final
verse: ‘Now Suzanne (like a saviour) leads you (like you wanted) to the river
(where you’ll be a sailor)’.
195. The language programme too confronts a
population of learners with little authentic experience, this time in academic
or ‘formal’ writing. Much schoolwork on the primary and secondary levels
involves the English language in episodic and passive modes, such as copying
from blackboards and notebooks and giving short answers or just ticking boxes in
multiple-choice tests. When required now to compose and organise extended prose,
the learners justly feel unprepared. As in literary studies, they may be
alienated by concluding that that their own skills are woefully inadequate and
the required skills unattainable — another hopeless utopia (II.192). The
alienation is strongest if their home varieties of language are mainly oral and
do not equip them for the different media of formal written English. Moreover,
mere orthography may present dire obstacles and expose them to the patronising
and pedantic ministrations of teachers who mistake weak literacy for ‘low
intelligence’.
196. To offset lack of experience, lower-level ‘skills’ courses offer a
practical initiation to ‘composition’ or ‘expository writing’, or, for
‘non-traditional’ learners, ‘basic writing’.197 This latter
group was evidently being admitted on the theory that they should and could
fully adapt to the conventional discourses of higher education. Yet most English
staff were blankly unprepared to facilitate this task, lacking familiarity with
these home varieties, or regarding them as pitifully ‘incorrect’. They had
been expressly trained for ‘teaching literature’ to mainstream learners, and
they tended to reduce ‘teaching composition’ or ‘basic writing’ to the
‘remediation of errors’, among which such technicalities as ‘sentence
fragments’, ‘comma splices’, and ‘subject-verb agreement’ were
painfully belaboured — not because they are vital for communication but
because they are easy to mark. Students justly felt alienated to be channelled
into ‘remedial’ courses (secretly mocked with epithets like ‘bonehead
English’); and to be ‘graded’ or ‘marked’ by criteria implying the
absolute ‘incorrectness’ of their home language varieties.
197. The upper-level ‘linguistics’ courses hardly brightened the
picture. Follow-ing the tendencies in the field outlined in sections II.C and
II.D, ‘descriptive’ or ‘generative’ studies ranked theory over practice,
treating ‘language’ as an abstract, uniform system. Instruction was mostly lectures on theoretical topics like ‘phonemic features’, ‘syntactic
transformations’, or ‘analytic propositions’. In place of authentic data,
illustrations were typically brief, isolated bits of invented data that do not
reflect natural fluent English, like ‘the man hit the ball’ (II.79).
198. If the literature courses train you to work in literature programmes
(II.187), linguistics courses train you to work in linguistics programmes. Yet
the demand for this latter training is acutely uneven, as I found by surveying all the postings from 1999,
2000, and 2001 of ‘Jobs Topics’ on Linguist List Website.195
Among the 1,896, job openings, applied linguistics plus TEFL and TESOL had 527, applica-tions to computers and
engineering (which may not even be offered in linguistics programmes) had 537.
By contrast, the figures for the mainstream areas were: Phonetics 70, Phonology
137, Morphology 23, Syntax 139, Semantics 92, and Pragmatics 27. Slim pickings.
199. These figures strongly counsel language and linguistics programmes to
concentrate on language teaching and limit or phase out purely theoretical
specialisations. English promises to remain the pre-eminent language of power,
though difficult to learn and patently unsystematic in its Orthography and
Morphology, whilst its Grammar and Vocabulary are littered with inconsistencies,
exceptions, and special cases. All the better for business.
200. Moreover, we might contend with the problems inherited from
lower-division schooling, where ‘English’ is a compulsory subject with
authoritarian teaching and passive learning, such as memorizing samples just to
pass the next ‘exam’ — yet another recourse to the ancient method of rote
memorisation (cf. I.49) — and then forgetting them. As one of my students in
Arabia wrote, ‘I spent nine years learning English without learning it’.
Such students naturally struggle to compensate by cobbling their own English,
e.g. in essays on teacher education [177], literature on film [178], social
classes [179], varieties of English [180], and even Shakespeare [181]. They are
merely befuddled by academic courses requiring them to discuss syntax [182-83]
or semantics [184-85] (native speakers of Setswana).
[177] The right
caring of schooling process by provision all causing of educated generation that
can comply with theirselves.
[178]
Miss Raymond looks smelly [= smiley] face but speaks in pride ways. She collects
her hair in the back. Her teeth look when she talks, and she owns angry tone.
She is a liar person who lied to disappear her ignorant.
[179] If
anyone dressed by the name footman he will be shame that they don’t even want
to wear their clothes. In the US was not respect and tricker man and swindle
person.
[180]
When the British colony found in Jamaica a new of the English language began.
The people there use a Pidgin in a bar named Bar Bados. Those Jamaican people
for strength English when they speaker their language.
[181] Shakespeare considers one of the
greatest writers in the history of English effected on the language. His
vocabulary more than 39 words. He invited many words like in his books and nice
plays like Mutter and Mutter. [= Measure for Measure]
[182] In
linear order, some words belong together with others but not with others.
[183] If
an utterance breaks down it shows it is an acceptable sentence.
[184]
‘My unmarried sister is married to a bachelor’. This sentence may nullify a marriage.
[185] ‘His typewriter has bad
intensions’: The expression is metaphorical. The sentence may be interpreted
to mean that the typewriter has bad attitude of making mistakes.
Such
programmes surely resemble a ladder with the lower rungs missing (II.186).
Successful learners come from the contingent of insiders with access to outside
resources such as videocorders, satellite television, Internet, or overseas
travel.
201. If university departments hope to compete with burgeoning private
schools, significant measures (discussed on my website at www.beaugrande.com)777
should be taken to secure their future: (1)
determine the social, educational, and profess-sional needs for English within
the society; (2) describe any local varieties of English which the learners are
likely to encounter outside the classroom; (3) develop reliable methods to
assess the current degree of fluency among a given group of learners; (4)
develop methods that build directly upon that degree of fluency; (5) create the
conditions for learners to discover English at their own pace and initiative;
and (6) provide easy access to large sets of authentic data.
202. My own projects accordingly make increasing use of concordance
software for browsing large corpora.196 For instance, students get
multiple occurrences of the same term in rich contexts, and infer the meanings,
shown in [186-93] for a task at the University of the United Arab Emirates. They
not merely experience more authentic English but hone their skills for inferring
from context.
[186] he tried to raise her self-respect with fine
clothes and flattery (Wuthering) => elegant
[187] Harriet was short, plump, and fair, with a fine
face (Emma) => delicate
[188] I heard rain strike earth in fine needles of water (Ulysses) => thin
[189] Mr
Elton has not such a fine air and way of
walking as Mr Knightley. (Emma) => dignified
[190] ‘A fine husband
you are!’ said Mrs Glegg scornfully. (Floss) => worthless
[191] Don’t trust them fine-talking
men from the big city. => smooth,
flattering
[192] I shall come and see your mother some fine day.
(Little Women) => some indefinite
future day
[193] we get a fine
day, and then down comes a snapper at night. (Madding Crowd) =>
cool and cloudy
Thinking
a ‘fine day’ is ‘cool and cloudy’ [193] makes perfect sense in
Arabia’s Empty Quarter, one of the hottest and sunniest deserts on earth. And
a ‘snapper’ (i.e., cold snap) makes no sense at all there.
203. The organisation of English departments sketched here has been
gradually moving away from its narrow conventions, though at uneven rates. In
the ‘literature programme’, studies have migrated toward an explicitly
theoretical plane, emblematically called ‘literary theory’ or ‘theories of
literature’, seeking to define what constitutes a ‘literary text’ and what
characterises the writing and reading of ‘literature’ as discourse. The
repertory has become impressively diverse, covering aesthetics, poetics,
formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, marxism,
and psychoanalysis. The ‘canon’ has broadened to admit ‘non-canonical’
or multicultural literatures, e.g., the works of minorities and immigrants, and
‘mass culture’, as well as English (or ‘Anglophone’) literatures
produced in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Some English departments have
indeed been catapulted to the intellectual forefront of the Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences, whilst the social sciences scramble to keep up.
204. Reciprocally, studies in the ‘language
programme’ have migrated toward a more practical plane, some adopting the term
‘discourse analysis’. Here too, the repertory is impressively diverse,
covering face-to-face conversations, telephone conversations, interviews,
business transactions, labour negotiations, science textbooks, technical
manuals, e-mails, Internet chat sites, and — now programmat-ically treated as
discourse — literature. Instruction features discussions where teachers and
students interact in analysing substantive sets of authentic language samples in
rich contexts, including authentic corpus data (Ch. VI-VII).
205. An incisive concept for the times is critical literacy,200
working in hearty alliances with critical discourse analysis and deconstruction:
[194] Literacy […] is as much about
ideologies, identities and values as about codes and skills. Critical literacy
provides us with ways of thinking that uncover social inequal-ities and
injustices. It enables us to become agents of social change. We deconstruct the
structures and features of texts. […] As we examine the underlying values and
consider the ways in which we, as readers and viewers, are positioned to view
the world, we are able to develop opposing interpretations. (Tasmanian Statement on English)197
An
alliance with ecologism might be equally strategic.
206. These recent developments signal an auspicious opportunity to renew
English departments and to reintegrate us into the university and the society.
We could regain a genuine dialectic between theory and practice by providing
broadly inclusive forums for dealing with real communicative issues and
problems. We would be devoted to helping students from diverse cultural and
linguistic backgrounds to actualise their potential and manage the communicative
require-ments of their education and their desired future careers.
Our approach would be consultative rather than prescriptive, offering
relevant advice rather than enforcing irrelevant rules (cf. II.24, 134).
207. In parallel, we could inaugurate a vigorous programme of substantive
research compiling and assessing authentic practical data from the languages and
language varieties all across the society for which ‘education’ is, in
theory, to be provided. After gauging the prevailing degrees of linguistic
uniformity or diversity, we could finally estimate how the communicative demands of education are experi-enced by the respective groups, and
could implement practical strategies for rendering those demands more inclusive
and appropriate. Also, we could finally achieve a consensus about the practical
strategies for efficient and effective reading and writing, and about our own
methods of communicating with apprentice readers and writers from diverse
backgrounds.
208. By rights, ‘language departments’ belong at the centre of
education as a communicative enterprise. Our most immediate concern should be to
work with the students’ home languages and varieties, and build upon the
skills they already command. So a multilingual region or society requires a
centre co-ordinating multi-ple languages and varieties so closely that fluency
in one supports rather than impedes fluency in another. Inside the university,
the centre should sustain wide outreach into every domain of specialised
education where language skills are essential, e.g., by providing strategic,
data-based modules in ‘language for academic purposes’ and ‘language for
professional purposes’.198
209. Within an ecologist agenda, such language centres could
have a compelling responsibility. If, as I maintain, the process of ‘getting
educated’ consists not merely of acquiring special knowledge but also of
communicating it (I.76, 84), then a language centre should assume the pivotal
role in mediating and highlighting this process, actively supporting the
linguistic and discursive training of ‘educated’ persons to share knowledge
with the people who vitally need it.
1 Compare
Glendon F. Drake, The Role of
Prescriptivism in American Linguistics, 1820-1970 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1977); Edward Finegan, Attitudes toward Language Usage (NY: Teachers
College Press, 1980); and Deborah Cameron, Verbal Hygiene (London:
Routledge, 1995).
2 Pānini,
Astadhyayi, published in English translation with explanatory
notes by S.D. Joshi and J.A.F. Roodbergen (New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1991); compare George Cardona, Panini: A Survey of Research (The
Hague: Mouton, 1976).
3 Al-Khalil
ibn Ahmad al-Farahidim, Kitab al-’ayn:
aw mu’jam fi al-lughan al-’arabiyah,
published in facsimile in Arabic (Baghdad: Matba’at al-’Ani,
1967), but I can trace no English translation. See now Karin C. Ryding (ed.), Early
Medieval Arabic: Studies on al-Khalil ibn Ahmad (Washington DC:
Georgetown UP, 1998).
4 Representative
works include Diomedes, Grammatica for Greek; and Donatus Ortigraphus,
Ars Grammatica for Latin. Ancient
studies were often commentaries on discourses, e.g., Aristotle on Homeric epic,
and St. John Chrysostomos on the New Testament, and hence forerunners of
text linguistics and discourse analysis.
5 Where
needed, data
sources carry author’s name or a short title (e.g. Eyre for Jane
Eyre) explained in a Key on pages 365-68; or else superscripts: BAWC
for my own British and American Writers Corpus, BNC for the British
National Corpus, and www for the Internet. No page numbers can be
supplied for electronic archives. [12] is from Stockport Grammar School
1487-1987 (Congleton: Old Vicarage Publications, 1987).
6
A
Generation of Schooling (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1984).
7
English version cited in Robert L. Cooper, Language
Planning and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), pp. 10f.
8 A
new edition of Dictionnaire de l’Académie is now gradually coming out
in separate volumes, regarding which the Académie says it has ‘hardly varied
in its principles: respect for good usage imposes itself more than ever’ (my
translation).
9 www.academie-francaise.fr.
10 Quoted in Sidney Greenbaum, Good English, his
Inaugural Lecture at University College London in 1984, p. 14.
11 J. Blackwell Glynn, Public Sector Financing Control
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993).
12 Cox on Cox (Sevenoaks,
Kent: Hodder-Stoughton, 1991).
13 By Vincent Foster Hopper and R.P. Craig
(Hauppauge, NY: Barrons, 1986).
14 See S. Greenbaum and J. Taylor, ‘The recognition of
usage errors by instructors of freshman composition’, College
Composition and Communication 32,
1981, 169-74.
15 See William Jones, Discourses Delivered Before the Asiatic Society
(London: Arnold, 1824), whose key lecture was held in Calcutta in 1786.
16 Fundamental works in philology are
Jakob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (Göttingen:
Dieterichsche Buchhandlung, 1822-37); Franz Bopp, Vergleichende grammatik des
sanskrit, send, armenischen, griechischen, lateinischen, litauischen,
altslavischen, gothischen und deutschen (Berlin: F. Dümmler; 1833); and
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus
(Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836). An early survey in English, ‘The History of Modern Phil-ology’,
New Englander and Yale Review 16/63, 1858, 465-511, covers earlier scholar-ship too. A recent survey is Bernard
Cerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology,
transl. Betsy Wing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1999).
17 Fundamental
works in language ancestry include Rasmus Rask, Angelsaksisk
spro-glære tilligemed en kort læsebog (Stockholm: Wiborgs, 1810); August
Leskien, Handbuch der altbulgarischen (altkirchenslavischen) sprache
(Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1886); and Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsche Grammatik
(Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1891). See also Grimm’s
fine work (Note 16) on the ancestry of Germanic languages.
18 See Hugh
Lecaine Agnew, Origins of the Czech
National Renascence (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1994).
19 A fundamental
work was Friedrich Karl Christian Brugmann and Berthold Delbruck, Grundriss
der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Strass-burg: K.J.
Trubner, 1886-1900).
20 Compare the
account in Joseph Greenberg, Indo-European
and Its Closest Relatives (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2000).
21 Fundamental
works in early dialectology include Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-kritisches
Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1793-1801); and
Johann Andreas Schmeller, Die Mundarten Bayerns grammatisch dargestellt
(Munich: M. Hueber, 1821).
22 The
composition dates of both texts are disputed: Beowulf perhaps in the 7th
or 8th centuries, though the sole manuscript dates from about 1000
A.D; the Hildebrandslied perhaps around 770 and then copied over into
another dialect around 820 (II.138).
23 Texts from
Friedrich. Klaeber (ed.), Beowulf (Lexington,
MA: D.C. Heath, 1922); and Wilhelm Braune, Althochdeutsches Lesebuch
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1902).
24 These laryngeals had been postulated by Ferdinand de
Saussure, in Mémoire sur le système
primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européens (Leipzig: B.G.
Teubner, 1879). Fittingly, Hittite has been ‘comparatively’ described by
Edgar H. Sturtevant, Comparative Grammar
of the Hittite Language (Northford, CT: Elliot’s Books, 1957).
25 An overview is
in Martin Joos (ed.), The Development of Descriptive Linguistics in America,
1925-1956 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966);
and in Chs I-V of my volume Linguistic
Theory (London: Longman, 1991).
26 Otto Neurath,
Niels Bohr, John Dewey,
Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and Charles Morris, ‘Encyclopedia and
unified science’, International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1/1, 1938, 1-75. On use for language study,
see Leonard Bloomfield, ‘Linguis-tic aspects of science’, International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science I/4, 1949.
27 As in Leonard
Bloomfield, Language (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1933), and Kenneth L.
Pike, Language in Relation to a Unified
Theory of the Structure of Human Behavior (The Hague: Mouton, 1967
[originals 1945-64]).
28 As in
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966 [original
1916]), and Edward Sapir, Language
(NY: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1921).
29 Bloomfield,
Note 27, pp. 6f, 500, 496, decried the ‘grammarians’
of ‘our school tradition’ for ‘ignoring actual usage in favour of
speculative notions’ and for promulgating ‘fanciful dogmas’,
‘doctrines’, and ‘rules’ that ‘prevail in our schools’.
30 Compare
Benjamin F. Elson of the Summer Institute, ‘Linguistic Creed’.www
31 Saussure, Note
28, p. 184.
32 Saussure, Note 28, pp. 13, 232, 9, 14.
Roman Jakobson, in Main Trends in the Science of Language (London:
Harper, 1970), pp. 20f, noted that the Saussurian dichotomies ‘reflect’ ones
made around 1880 by the Kazan school, such as Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołai Kruszewski, who are credited with
originating the concept of the phoneme (Note 38); Jakobson cites Baudouin’s
‘jazyk’ and ‘reč’.
33 Saussure, Note 28, pp. 104, 67.
34 Modelling
language as verbal behaviour was strongest in Pike’s Unified Theory (Note 27). On the feebler model in B.F. Skinner, Verbal
Behavior (NY: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957), see my Text Production
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984), pp. 57ff.
35 Bloomfield,
(Note 27), p. 33, who forcefully advocated the ideology of mechanism.
36 Compare
Saussure, Note 28, p. 120: ‘in language there are only differences without positive terms’.
37 Compare Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie
structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958); Josué Harari (ed.), Structuralists and
Structuralism (Ithaca: Diacritics, 1971); and Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997).
38 Phonology
probably began with Mikołai Habdanc Kruszewski, Über
die Lautabwechs-lung and Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay, Otryvki
iz lektsii po fonetikie i morfologii russkogo jazyka both published by the
University of Kazan in 1879 and 1882 but little known in
the West, where the classic work has been Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Grundzüge
der Phonologie (Prague: Czechoslovakian Ministry of Education, 1939).
39 The foundations of phonetics were laid in Alexander Melville Bell, A new elucidation of the principles of speech and elocution (Edinburgh: self-published, 1849); his inventive son Alexander Graham Bell offered the world Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1867).
Compare also Kenneth Lee Pike, Phonetics: A Critical
Analysis of Phonetic Theory and a Tecnic for the Practical Description of Sounds
(Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1943).
40 For me the
classic work is Eugene Nida, Morphology:
The Descriptive Analysis of Words (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1949).
Pike’s work cited in Note 27 was a landmark too, but its publication as a
whole was rather delayed.
41 For a more detailed account, see my New Foundations, cited in Note 13 to Ch. I, pp. 42f.
42 Compare Dieter
Kastovsky, Old English Deverbal Substantives Derived by Means of a Zero
Morpheme (Tübingen: U of Tübingen
PhD thesis, 1968).
43 See now Paul
Newman and Martha Ratliff (eds.), Linguistic
Fieldwork (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001).
44 See previous
Note, and the section on ‘Field techniques’ in Nida’s work (Note 40), pp.
175-91. Pike was a master of the practice, but his Unified Theory says
regrettably little about it. Compare also Alan Healey, ‘Handling
unsophisticated linguistic informants’, Linguistic Circle of Canberra
Publications, Series A, No. 2, 1964.
45 Juba data
reported by Richard Watson in Robert E. Longacre et al., Storyline Concerns and Word Order Typology in East and West Africa (Los
Angeles: UCLA Dept. of Linguistics, 1990), pp. 160ff. The source describes them
in somewhat different terms.
46 See Olga Akhmanova (ed.), Lexicology: Theory and
Method (Moscow: Moscow State U, 1972); Julie Coleman and Christian Kay
(eds.) Lexicology, Semantics, and Lexicog-raphy (Amsterdam: Benjamins,
2000). Books on Lexemes are rare indeed.
47 On
Lexicography, see now Iurii Derenikovich Apresian, Systematic
Lexicography (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000); Reinhardt R.K. Hartmann, Teaching and Researching Lexicography
(London: Longman, 2001). My views are in ‘Text linguistics, discourse analysis, and the discourse of
dictionaries’, in Ad Hermans (ed.), Les
dictionnairés specialises et l’analyse de la valeur (Louvain-la-Neuve:
Peeters, 1997), 57-74.
48 On descriptive
Syntax, see Zellig Sabattai Harris, Methods in
Structural Linguistics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951). Books on Syntagmemes are
also rare, at least in English. The Tagmeme was curtly defined by Bloomfield,
Note 27, p. 264, as a ‘minimal meaningful unit’ which sounds the same as the
Morpheme; Pike’s own definition of the ‘tagmeme’ was sometimes obscure:
‘a verbal motifemic-slot-class-correlative’, Note 27, p. 195.
49 Opposed by
Pike, ‘A problem in the morphology-syntax division’, Acta
Linguistica 5, 1949, 125-38.
50
Zellig Sabattai Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951); and ‘Discourse
analysis’, Language 28, 1952, 1-30
and 474-494.
51 The standard overview is John Lyons, Semantics
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977).
52 ‘On sentence-sense
word-sense and difference of word-sense’, in Danny D. Steinberg and Leon
Jakobovits (eds.), Semantics
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1971), p.
20f. For a thorough deconstruction, see my ‘Linguistics
as discourse: A case study from semantics’, WORD
35, 1984, 15-57.
53 By James Hurford and Brendan Heasley, (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1983), pp. 28f.
54 Bloomfield, cit. in Note 27, p.
264, called ‘sememes’ the meanings of morphemes’, but didn’t elaborate.
Nor did Louis Hjelmslev in his 1957 paper ‘Pour une sémantique structurale’,
finally published in his Essais
linguistiques II (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1973, 96-112). On the
semantic features for ‘bachelor’, see Jerrold Katz and Jerry Fodor, ‘The
structure of semantic theory’, Language 39, 1963, 170-210. A rebut-tal
is in Dwight Bolinger, ‘The atomization of meaning’, Language 41,
1965, 555-73.
55 The major papers are handily
assembled in Steven Davis (ed.), Pragmatics: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991).
56 Notably, John Austin, how to do things
with words (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1962); on the Performative,
see p. 69.
57
Lyons, Note 57, p. 738.
58
See the UNESCO Red Book
On Endangered Languages at the website of The International Clearing House for Endangered
Languages, maintained by the Department of Asian Languages at the University of
Tokyo www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo. ac.jp/ichel/ichel.html.
59 For the link
to 17th century idealism, see Noam Chomsky, Cartesian
Linguistics (NY: Harper & Row, 1966); and for the link to logic, see his
Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory
(Cambridge: M.I.T. dissertation, 1955).
60 The ‘standard’ works are by Noam Chomsky (who is pleased to call them so), i.e., Syntactic
Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957) and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).
For a thorough deconstruction of this ‘research’ and its subsequent
evolution, see my treatise ‘Performative speech acts in linguistic theory: The
rationality of Noam Chomsky’, Journal of
Pragmatics 29, 1998, 1-39.
61 Perhaps
generative linguists equate ‘language’ with grammar’ because they show
little interest in the rest of language?
62 Chomsky, Structures,
Note 60, pp. 13ff.
63 See
my paper ‘Sentence first, verdict afterwards: On the long career of the
sentence’, WORD 50, 1999, 1-31.
64 Detailed in my
paper in Note 60.
65 Quoted now in
‘Brainy baboons tackle the PC’, BBC World News 15/10/2001.
66 Noam Chomsky, Knowledge
of Language (NY: Praeger, 1986).
67 I found just
24 sentences cited or ‘transformed’ in Aspects.
68 Note 60, pp. 149 and 152.
69 Chomsky, Aspects, Note 60, pp. 18f.
70 Chomsky Structures,
Note 60, p. 17.
71 Chomsky Structures
and Aspects, Note 60; yet the conception originated with his teacher
Zellig S. Harris, e.g., ‘Co-Occurrence and Transformation in Linguistic
Struc-ture’, Language 33/3, 1957, 283-340. Compare also his paper on
‘The transformational model of language structure’, Anthropological
Linguistics 1/1, 1959, 27-29.
72 Chomsky Structures,
Note 60, pp. 46f.
73 Chomsky Aspects,
Note 60, pp. 16, 135, 141.
74 Teun van Dijk, Text
and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse
(London: Longman, 1977).
75 Chomsky, Aspects, Note 60,
pp. 3f.
76 E.
Dresher, and N. Hornstein, ‘On some supposed contributions of artificial
intelli-gence to the scientific study of language’, Cognition
4, 1976, p. 328.
77 Chomsky, Aspects,
Note 60, p. 201
78 Chomsky, Aspects,
Note 60, pp. 25, 47.
79 Compare Emmon Bach, and Robert Harms (eds.), Universals in
Linguistic Theory (NY: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1970); Bernard Comrie, Language Universals and Linguistic
Typology (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1989); Dietmar Zaefferer (ed.), Semantic
Universals and Universal Semantics (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992).
80 Compare Louis
Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. (Madison: U of Wisconsin
P, 1969 [original 1943]), p. 18: ‘linguistic theory’ ‘cannot be verified — confirmed or
invalidated — by reference to existing texts and languages’.
81 Chomsky, Aspects, Note 60,
p. 8.
82 As in G.
Webelhuth and D. Lightfoot (eds.), Government
and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
83 Chomsky, ‘Language, politics, and composition’
(interview), in Gary Olsen and
Irene Gales
(eds.),
Interviews: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and
Literacy (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1991), 61-95, here p. 88.
84 Even just in linguistics proper, citing works on functionalism
is tricky because diverse approaches have appropriated the term, including
formalist ones seeking camouflage. My own surveys are ‘Function and form in
language theory and research’, Functions
of Language 1/2, 1994, 163-200; and ‘On history and historicity in modern
linguistics: Formalism versus functionalism revisited’, Functions of Language 4/2, 1997, 169-213. On bridging the linguistic
concept with social research, see now Phil Graham, ‘Widening the context for
interdisciplinary social research: SFL as a method for sociology, anthropology,
and communication research’, Paper delivered at the University of Queensland
for the Annual Conference of the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics
Association, 1-3 October, 1999.
85 Formalism is also associated with studies of language in poetics and the narrative; see now Andrzej Karcz, The Polish Formalist School and Russian Formalism (Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2002). For critiques in other domains, see Morton Gabriel White’s classic, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (NY: Viking 1949); and Jay F. Rosenberg, Beyond Formalism: Naming and Necessity for Human Beings (