The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

Sat Feb 10 15:22:02 UTC 2007

All:

Thanks to all who responded to my critiques; I can't possibly address all
the fine points raised at this moment, but maybe later I can sift through
them.  It's a huge issue!

The thing I started out to say, and wanted to address more fully, that of
how we TEACH about ideologies, how we try to debunk them, etc. is that
when we have students who are would-be teachers, they tend to think of
themselves as defenders of "truth", i.e. good grammar, good
English/French/whatever, and they often feel beleaguered: they are on the
barricades, fighting back the forces of corruption, sloth, ignorance, etc.
etc. and we want to strip them of their defenses?

When you take away from them their only armor (grammatical "correctness")
they are left without any defenses, and they feel bereft, helpless, and
therefore they tend to cling to the ideology of "good grammar", and reject
the whole argument.  We've got to give them other tools, other arrows for
their quiver, or we will not have reached them, and they will dig in their
heels and go off to their jobs disgusted with us academics.

[I've been a language teacher, too, and know what this feels like: I
taught Tamil for many years, and I would occasionally get heritage
students in the class who either spoke a non-standard dialect of Tamil at
home, or had an idiolect of Tamil that was not what their parents spoke,
and since I was just some veLLakaaran teaching *their* language, why
should they accept what I was asking for? My problem was that I was
supposed to have some criteria for what was an acceptable, comprehensible
form of the language, and couldn't accept something that's clearly not.]

Maybe the question is really about what is "grammatical" in the end. I try
to use the example of how 'gonna' is becoming grammticalized as an
auxiliary verb in English, and how some uses of it are clearly
UNgrammatical (e.g. using it with direction, as in *"I'm gonna London",
which ought to be derivable from "I'm going to London" but isn't) whereas
others are acceptable and used even by English teachers in colloquial
speech, i.e. "I'm gonna do it" (from "I'm going to do it").

The problem is, teachers etc. even if they admit that "I'm gonna do it"
differs somehow from *I'm gonna London" they don't see it as a
*grammatical* issue, because they still cherish the notion [ideology?]
that 'grammatical' means "correct, acceptable, formal, good" English, the
variety they are supposed to teach their students, failing which, they
fail as teachers.

So somehow we gotta get around this; I'm not sure how.  (Note that 'gotta,
sposeta,' and 'hafta' also fit into this category, and close behind them
are 'shoulda, woulda, and coulda')  If teachers are aware of anything,
it's pedagogy, and our pedagogy on this may not be adequate to the task.

Hal

On Sat, 10 Feb 2007, John McCreery wrote:

> On 2/10/07, Alexandre Enkerli <enkerli at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > This is getting very interesting, IMHO.
>
> Indeed, it is. Allow me to offer a proposition that is, at least,
> researchable: "Ideology" is the kind of term that Chicago sociologist
> Andrew Abbott identifies as a syncresis, a term whose ambiguity is
> essential to its meaning and also accounts for its popularity in
> academic and other discourse. Let me go further and suggest that
> "language deficiency," the term from which our discussion began, is
> another example.
>
> I am, serendipitously, reading Abbott's _Chaos of Disciplines_, whose
> primary  theme is the role of fractal oppositions in defining academic
> quarrels and, thus, the social organization of academic disciplines.
> The terms involved in fractal oppositions (quantitative vs.
> qualitative, for example) are used indexically. Their meaning shifts
> from situation to situation, but the contrast they draw is
> intelligible in the situations in which they occur. Thus, at one
> level, sociologist divide themselves into quantitative and qualitative
> branches. A generation later the same distinction reemerges within
> each of the two camps, with "pure quantitative" sociologists
> distinquishing themselves from other quantitative sociologists who
> pollute their models with narrative and qualitative description and
> "qualitative" purists, who never saw a number they didn't hate,
> distinguishing themselves from those who incorporate quantitative data
> and simple quantitative models into their narratives, whenever they
> seem useful.  What precisely, the original distinction means varies
> depends on who is contrasting "us" with "them" but the contrast works
> as an index of distinction wherever it is used.
>
> It is having introduced this notion of fractal oppositions that Abbott
> goes on to distinguish the terms used in such oppositions from what he
> calls "syncreses." The meanings of terms in this category aren't just
> slippery, tending to vary across situations, the contrary ideas they
> embody are inextricably part their meaning; ambiguity is their essence
> and, thus--here is a test linguists will like-- they are not used
> indexically, as fractal oppositions are. Instead they recur as topics
> that never fail to arouse interest,  posing questions that are never
> resolved because any attempt to define their meanings as restricted to
> one of their constituent contraries immediately evokes the response
> that points to the other as another important consideration.
>
> Abbott's type case is the term "stress," in which two ideas "damage
> caused by society" and "failure to adjust to society's demands" are
> both omnipresent. So who is to blame for stress? Society? Or the
> individual? The question is endlessly debated, on Oprah and Dr. Phil
> as well as in the massive academic literature Abbot reviews, but the
> problem remains unresolved. "Stress" is an endlessly fascinating topic
> for discussion, but, if Abbott is right, no resolution is possible.
>
> Now, I first thought of this analysis in relation to "linguistic
> deficiency," which, it seems to me, poses exactly the same problems as
> "stress." Who is to blame if children graduate from school unschooled
> in the language that the national or global economy makes a condition
> of success? Who is at fault here? Society? The individual who failed
> to learn? The nation that wants one thing? The minority group that
> wants another? Insofar as the discussion is framed in terms that
> assume a blame game and evoke sides whose positions are both implicit
> in that frame...the game goes on. No progress is made.
>
> It takes only a little thought, however, to recognize that "ideology"
> is another syncresis. Here the history of the term ranges from one
> extreme, a clearly articulated, consciously held set of ideas that
> motivate a particular political program, to the other (by way of
> Gramsci and Foucault) in which the ideas are assumed instead of
> articulated, acted upon subconsciously, and, indeed, only arise into
> consciousness when they are challenged, typically in fragmented or
> distorted forms  (more like neurotic symptoms than the Summa
> Theologica) .  The debate over which view is right oscillates back and
> forth, with various twists and turns in between. At the end of the
> day, however, we arive at the situation that annoys Hal Schiffman so
> much, the muddle that Richard Senghas finds, instead, promising.
>
> The critical point though is that, if ideology is, indeed, a syncresis
> and works like "stress" the muddle will not be a step on the road to
> enlightenment. The muddle will be interminable.
>
> Thus, one fears, undergraduates, the majority of whom need to get on
> with their lives and will not be able to stay in the ivory tower
> playing the glass bead game forever, will mainly get headaches from
> hearing their teachers try to valiantly sort out the latest variations
> in a game that appears to go nowhere. Their teachers will continue to
> complain that the students just don't get it, but if someone rudely
> asks "Get what?"...What will their answer be? Fifty-three possible
> definitions of ideology? That and four bucks will get you a cup of
> Starbucks coffee.
>
> The kind of discussion of ideology provided by Terry Eagleton, when he
> contrasts an obviously ideological statement, "Prince Charles is the
> handsomest man in England" with a mere matter of fact, "Prince Andrew
> has the brain of a chipmunk." Or observes, noting the need for common
> ground in political discussions that, "If we are discussing
> patriarchy, by which you mean a system of social domination in which
> men are superior to women and I mean a small town in upstate New York,
> we are not having a political discussion." This is, at least,
> entertaining.
>
> The method of minimal contrasts and a clear sense of how a small,
> finite set of basic elements can generate an infinite range of
> combinations that conform to some rules but not to others? An
> appreciation of the fact that syntactic theories describe languages as
> if they were shiney new erector sets but that actual languages are
> more like old erector sets, with some pieces missing and others
> replaced with odd bits of bubble gum and rubber bands or whatever else
> it was that the last generation had in its pockets when it played with
> the set. That's very useful stuff, indeed.
>
> John
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> John McCreery
> The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
> Tel. +81-45-314-9324
> http://www.wordworks.jp/
>