ThinkingOne of the traditional arguments for teaching grammar was that it was good mind-training for the elite. A degree in the classics, with the grammars of Greek and Latin as a major component, used to be considered an excellent training for the higher ranks of the civil service. This argument is still just as valid as it used to be, except that we can now generalise it beyond the academic elite. Some experience of grammatical analysis is probably good for any mind, so long as it is pitched at the right level. Unfortunately there is very little research evidence to support these claims, but equally there is no evidence against them. Grammatical analysis is very similar to mathematics in terms of the mental demands that it makes. In both cases the learner has to learn a tightly-interconnected set of concepts such as: noun, subject, object, verb, modifier, adjective; these concepts all help to define one another through statements such as “A verb’s subject is a noun”, “A noun may function either as a verb’s subject or as its object” and “A noun may be modified by an adjective”. In both cases the key concepts are relations between entities rather than simple entities (e.g. ‘squared’ rather than ‘5’ in mathematics, and ‘subject’ rather than ‘noun’ in grammar). And in both cases it is essential to be able to apply the analytical system to concrete examples, preferably examples from real life; so just as the mathematician ‘thinks mathematically’ about some scenario, the grammarian ‘thinks grammatically’ about a sentence or some other kind of text. Moreover, both mathematics and grammar may be quite abstract, so mathematicians consider the properties of the (non-existent) square root of minus 1, while grammarians consider those of the missing subject in a sentence like Come here! As in mathematics, a grammatical conclusion may lie at the end of a long chain of arguments and assumptions, so grammatical reasoning can be very challenging; and any step in the argument may be challenged on either theoretical or factual grounds. The glory of both subjects is that it is possible – in fact, very easy – to be wrong, and to be shown to be wrong. Grammar, then, shares with mathematics the fact that it is a complex, abstract system that can apply to concrete pieces of real or imaginary experience, and both the system itself, and its application to a concrete experience, are subject to rational debate. The most obvious difference between the two subjects is that mathematics is taught at school, but grammar isn’t. Both subjects can be difficult to grasp and to teach, so both need teaching methods tailored very carefully to the needs and abilities of the learners. But nobody would argue that mathematics might be dropped from the curriculum because of these difficulties or because some learners may not immediately see their relevance. If we can find ways to teach mathematics to all, why not grammar? Indeed, grammar arguably has an even better claim than mathematics on time in the school timetable. After all, grammar is about the basic organisation of language, and language is our main tool for thinking and learning. Grammar isn’t an abstract Platonic system like mathematics that exists ‘out there’; it’s part of our minds, the product of thousands of hours spent, during childhood, listening to people round us talking. English grammar is different, in fundamental ways, from French grammar and Chinese grammar. It forces us to make distinctions, hundreds of times a day, that French doesn’t force at all – e.g. the difference between it rained and it was raining – and vice versa – e.g. the difference between tu and vous, or between voisin and voisine (meaning ‘neighbour’, male or female). Some things are much easier to express in one language than in another, such as different degrees and kinds of uncertainty; and the associations embedded in two different languages may be quite different (e.g. cycling is associated by the English verb to ride with horse-riding, but by the German verb fahren with driving a car). This is not to say that our language locks us into an intellectual prison from which we can’t escape[16]; on the contrary, language is only one source of influence on our minds. Another source is, as we all hope, education. Take the distinction which English forces on us between humans and everything else by making us choose between the interrogative pronouns who and what. If you ask me: What broke the window?, I could reply The wind, A falling slate or A bird, but not John – or at least, not without some comment. In contrast, if you ask: Who broke the window?, I could blame John but not the wind. This distinction lumps living creatures such as birds together with inanimate things such as the wind and a piece of stone, in contrast with humans. But we all know – thanks to education – that this classification obscures a lot of similarities between humans and other living creatures, and a lot of differences between either and non-living things like stones and the wind. A more ‘scientific’ classification would cut the cake very differently, so we have two very different ‘ontologies’ (ways of classifying things) to choose between, one basically driven by language and the other by education and science. However worrying this may seem, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, as every adult lives with both ontologies, and applies them on different occasions as needed. But this ‘double-thinking’ is something we should all be aware of, and where would we learn about it other than in grammatical analysis of English? Thinking goes beyond mere classification, and the most important questions are those concerned with how things (or people) are related to one another. Is this an example of that? Does this cause that? Is this an alternative to that? Did this happen after that? The more abstract and complicated the reasoning, the more likely it is to depend on language; and if we want to share it with someone else, we need a symbolic medium such as a technical diagramming system, or ordinary language. Seen from this perspective, it is essential for all of us, however academic or non-academic we may be, to understand this basic tool, so that we are in command of the tool, and not the other way round. And in particular, it is the general patterns of grammar rather than the minutiae of vocabulary that we need to understand because the general patterns are not only more general, but also harder to be aware of. Fortunately I can finish this rather speculative section with some concrete evidence that ‘doing grammar’ uses high-level thinking skills. The evidence comes, once again, from the Linguistics Olympiad in which children as young as 12 years old struggle to understand how some unfamiliar language works, with grammar underlying most of the questions. I argued earlier that grammar requires very similar mental skills to mathematics, and this claim is confirmed by the fact that most of those who do best in our competition are also studying mathematics; indeed, some of the champions in the International Linguistics Olympiad are also champions at the International Mathematics Olympiad. The next section will explain what it is in grammatical analysis that gives it this hard, mathematical challenge. However, I shall also explain why it is also a ‘soft’, humanistic and personal challenge, so that it combines the best of the two very different worlds of mathematics and literature.
[1] Nunes and Bryant 2006 [2] Bryant and others 2004 [3] Myhill and others 2010 [4] Andrews and others 2004b [5] Chipere 2003 [6] Keith 1999 [7] Wason and Reich 1979 [8] Perera 1984, Hudson 2009 [9] For guidance, see the website produced for BT by Julie Blake and Tim Shortis at http://www.btplc.com/Responsiblebusiness/Supportingourcommunities/Learningandskills/Freeresources/AllTalk/default.aspx?s_cid=con_FURL_alltalk [10] See Peter Trudgill: Standard English – what it isn’t, at http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/standard.htm [11] Macaulay 1975 [12] Trudgill 1975 [13] Krashen 1982 [14] Norris and Ortega 2000, Spada and Tomita 2010 [15] Ellis 2008:452. [16] This idea of language as an intellectual prison is the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, named after the two American linguists who most famously expressed it. Most linguists and psychologists reject the strong version (Pinker 1994), though it survives in some versions of Post-modernism. However, a weak version of the Hypothesis, in which language is a major influence on thinking, though not the only one and not necessarily on all areas of thinking, is widely accepted Levinson 2003.
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