7.779, Disc: English rhetoric/composition textbooks

Wed May 29 14:42:33 UTC 1996

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-7-779. Wed May 29 1996. ISSN: 1068-4875. Lines:  159

Subject: 7.779, Disc: English rhetoric/composition textbooks

Moderators: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar: Texas A&M U. <aristar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
            Helen Dry: Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at emunix.emich.edu> (On Leave)
            T. Daniel Seely: Eastern Michigan U. <dseely at emunix.emich.edu>

Associate Editor:  Ljuba Veselinova <lveselin at emunix.emich.edu>
Assistant Editors: Ron Reck <rreck at emunix.emich.edu>
                   Ann Dizdar <dizdar at tam2000.tamu.edu>
                   Annemarie Valdez <avaldez at emunix.emich.edu>

Software development: John H. Remmers <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>

Editor for this issue: dseely at emunix.emich.edu (T. Daniel Seely)

---------------------------------Directory-----------------------------------
1)
Date:  Sat, 25 May 1996 00:43:21 CDT
From:  fcosws at prairienet.org (Steven Schaufele)
Subject:  more dirt on English rhetoric/composition textbooks

---------------------------------Messages------------------------------------
1)
Date:  Sat, 25 May 1996 00:43:21 CDT
From:  fcosws at prairienet.org (Steven Schaufele)
Subject:  more dirt on English rhetoric/composition textbooks

In my entry-level job with a typesetting firm specializing in college
textbooks, my boss occasionally routes rhetoric/composition (`How to
Write a Decent Essay in Standard English'-type) books my way.  I suspect
him of assuming that, as a linguist, i would find this sort of thing
particularly interesting and enjoyable.  Little does he know!

Last week i got one that, after starting out no worse than any others i'd
had to plod through, turned out to have some out-and-out errors in
attempts to explain English grammar.  They were bad enough that i finally
broke down and wrote a letter to the publisher, on my own initiative,
explaining what was wrong with them and expressing the hope that they
could be fixed before the book went to press.  (As a typesetter working
for a typesetting firm, i have no editorial authority, neither does the
firm; there's nothing i can do on my own to fix this kind of thing.
Correcting obviously misspelled words is one thing, but correcting
obvious errors of fact is another.)

I'm summarizing my remarks to the publisher here for the sake of general
interest, and to warn my fellow linguists who may be so fortunate as to
still be in academia what sort of garbage their colleagues teaching
rhetoric/composition in, e.g., English departments may be filling their
students' heads with.  Maybe we need more input from competent linguists
on this kind of thing!

The first, and to my mind most shocking error has to do with that old
bugbear, the definition of the grammatical concept `subject'.  (I
noticed, in passing, that the authors of the book in question studiously
avoided even mentioning such abstruse terms as `aspect', `auxiliary', or
`finite', even though they would have been a big help, stylistically as
well as pedagogically.)  The definition they offered at the beginning of
one chapter was `the subject is the doer of the action or the focus of
the verb.'  (They never explain what they mean by `focus of the verb'; i
suspect, from other evidence, it's something roughly approximating what
we would call `topic of the sentence'.  But of course, in this book `topic'
is a word used to identify a particular sentence within a paragraph, not
a constituent within a sentence.)  Note the attempt to define a
grammatical concept -- subject -- by the conjunction of a semantic and
pragmatic concept.  In the course of the next chapter, on `sentence
fragments' (i.e., strings that cannot stand alone as complete sentences,
including relative clauses), they present the following two examples:

1.(a)	A friend she can always count on
  (b)	The place in the neighborhood where all the tough kids gathered

and go on to claim: `As you can see, "friend" is the subject in (a), and
"place" is the subject in (b)'.  In my letter to the publisher, I
conjured the alternative strings below to demonstrate that this is
clearly not the case (i didn't go into the authors' use of the expression
`verb phrase' to refer to the string `can count on'; i figured that would
be veering too close to the shoals of real linguistic jargon).  I also
used (2) to demonstrate that (1a) wasn't necessarily a sentence fragment
at all; it could be construed as a perfectly good complete sentence, if
given a context that invites its interpretation not as a reduced relative
but as an example of a topicalized object.

(a')	*Friends she always count on
(a'')	Friends she always counts on

(b')	*The place in the neighborhood where all the tough kids gathers
(b'')	The place in the neighborhood where all the tough kids gather

(2)	Among this rather motley crew of eccentrics Alice isn't sure whom she
	can trust.  A friend she can always count on, but she has yet to find
	in this crowd anyone she could comfortably dignify with that title.

I suggested that the closest thing to a simple but accurate definition of
subject in English (apart from the rather obvious, but relatively unhelpful,
assertion that `the subject is what the verb agrees with') would be a
statement to the effect that `the subject is the one word or phrase that
in a simple declarative clause has to precede the verb', a definition of a
grammatical concept (subject) in terms of purely grammatical phenomena
(linear order).  (Granted, this definition would require a definition of
`declarative clause' to go with it, but that doesn't strike me as very
onerous.)

My second bugbear was in a discussion of relative clauses: `The verb in a
[relative clause] must agree with the antecedent [of the relative
pronoun].'  Presumably, this means that English, all evidence (such as
(3)) to the contrary, is a minimal language in terms of the Keenan-Comrie
relativizability hierarchy, allowing only subjects to be relativized.

(3)	Fred can be counted on to buy any orange ties that he sees.

Of course, i have to admit, it's never made absolutely clear in the book
in question that the verb is supposed to agree with its *subject*.
Perhaps i'm jumping to conclusions...

Introducing a discussion of the distinction between simple, comparative,
and superlative forms of modifiers, the authors remark, `Both adjectives
and adverbs have more than one form.  The simple form is used to modify a
single word.'  Over the course of many pages, it gradually became clear
(at least to me) from context that this statement is being contrasted
with statements to the effect that the comparative form is used in
comparing two things, while the superlative is used in comparing more
than two.  In my letter to the publisher, i pointed out that the authors'
`one-word' statement, taken literally, would rule out strings like `the hot
branding iron' or `reluctantly put up with', and suggested that the error
lies in the confusion between the linguistic expression (word or phrase)
and its referent.  What the authors presumably mean is that the simple
form of an adjective or adverb is used to modify an expression referring
to a single entity.

A page later, the book says, `Often [articles] appear in combination with
other adjectives that cannot be used without an article ... The adjective
blue requires an article.'  This is in reference to the (4).  I pointed
out that all of the sentences in (5) include the same adjective, but no
article, and that it was the nature of the noun (a count noun in the
singular), not the adjective, that required a determiner, not necessarily
an article.

(4)	Hermine washes the blue car every Thursday.

(5)	Hermine washes her blue car every Thursday.
	Heidi has blue eyes.
	In general, blue cars irritate me.

So, does anyone out there think we need to offer crash courses in how to
do descriptive grammar to our colleagues teaching English composition?

Best,
Steven
- -------------------
Dr. Steven Schaufele
712 West Washington
Urbana, IL  61801
217-344-8240
fcosws at prairienet.org
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