Rules and "Rules"

Dr. Chuck Campbell 
Office: Cramer 131C. Office hours: 3:30-5, MW 
Tel. 835-5284 (office), 1-881-2861 (home) 
email cpc@nmt.edu 

Course Objectives

• To develop analytic competence in using the tools of grammatical analysis to improve abilities in other areas, such as critical thinking, writing, and editing. 
• To understand something of the cognitive processes underlying language.

If you are a native speaker, of English or any other language, you have been a competent user of its grammar since you were about six--by then you had mastered the basic sentence patterns and could form sentences recognized by other native speakers as valid sentences. Being a competent user of a language is like being a competent user of a computer with Windows95--as long as the system is working well, you can manipulate icons and menus and sail along with your work, oblivious to the file calls, memory shunts, disk saves, and binary translations that are going on underneath that graphical interface. But when something goes wrong, you need analytic competence in file structures, address codes, error messages, and registry editing--or you need to call in an expert. 

Or to use another analogy, using language is like having an athletic skill such as running. You probably learned to run by watching others do it and then trying it yourself, practicing until you developed some speed and endurance. If you wanted to become a serious runner, though, you probably called in an expert--a coach, who could analyze your physiology and your running style, and who could show you how to analyze your own performance. Thus, you were able to progress beyond where your own native abilities could take you. 

For this course, we'll assume solid native ability. That is, you've done a lot of writing and do it reasonably well, perhaps even having developed a recognizably personal style. We'll also assume that you have a great deal of grammatical knowledge, though that knowledge may not be systematically organized or available for analytic use. 

Approach

We'll begin with a diagnostic to assess the state of your grammatical knowledge. Then we'll move on to doing grammatical analysis within the framework provided by structural linguistics. As background, we'll read a book by a prominent language-development psychologist, and you'll have a chance to do some very limited research on issues of language acquisition, language development, comparative grammar, grammar systems, etc. 

Grammatical analysis can be fun (and I hope you'll find it so in this course), but it is not an end in itself. In basic writing, for example, some people continue to write sentence fragments or comma-spliced sentences long after their composition teachers have brought these habits to their attention. Why? Is it that they haven't mastered the rules of punctuation? Perhaps, but it's as likely that they don't apply the punctuation rules because they have trouble recognizing word functions and structural patterns in sentences. 

Grammatical analysis can also help with reading. Sometimes, as reader or editor, you run across sentences that just don't seem right--you can't make sense of a sentence because it doesn't seem to parse, or because it's long and convoluted. Here's an example: 

Visual observation of the waterflood displacement mechanisms after asphaltene precipitation are shown to be similar to the mechanisms of displacement of the unprecipitated crude oil. 

That's from a PRRC report. It's not often in real life that you have to mount a full formal analysis of a sentence, but it's helpful to be able to do so. And the more you practice grammatical analysis, the easier it becomes to spot problems in sentences without actually having to diagram them. 

There are two required texts: 

• Max Morenberg, Doing Grammar, 2^nd ed. (New York: Oxford, 1997).

• Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995).

Rules and "Rules"

Books such as Dennis Baron's Grammar and Good Taste (New Haven: Yale, 1982) and Edward Finegan's Attitudes toward English Usage: A History of a War of Words (New York: Teachers College Press, 1980) argue that most of what we think of as the rules of the language are actually the dicta of self-appointed authorities. Some rules were invented by schoolmasters for the sole purpose, as it sometimes seems, of tormenting schoolchildren. (See Theodore Bernstein's Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971].) Some of these rules are of dubious provenance, such as "Thou shalt not split infinitives," but any dubious rule followed long enough gains the force of a rule--especially when prescriptive grammarians or verbal critics such as William Safire, Edwin Newman, and James Kilpatrick pillory "misuses" of the language in public discourse. 

These "rules" of English are not in the same class with commandments written in stone by the iron finger of an angry god. In Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Joseph Williams calls such "rules" folklore, and distinguishes them from rules that separate standard from nonstandard speech and both from the real rules. ("Standard" speech, according to a commentator in Pinker's book, is just a dialect with an army and a navy.) Real rules describe how most users of a dialect actually use it--and these are the rules you internalized as a child. But these rules you follow unconsciously. Our analysis aims at raising these rules into consciousness. 

In doing grammatical analysis in this course, we will for the most part follow the rules of Standard Written English. But we'll be interested mainly in the real rules--that is, the structural principles that help us know what is and is not Standard English. 

Grading (weights to be decided at an early class meeting) 

Attendance/participation/homework: __%

Research assignment: __%

Tests: __% (If a quiz has a hypertext link leading to it, it has already been given and is now available for study purposes only. Quizzes may be made up only if completed and returned to Dr. Campbell before the next class meeting.)

Final exam:  __%. 

Extra credit can also be earned by writing extra research papers. Before writing such papers, you must submit a brief proposal describing the scope of the investigation and explaining how such investigation may be beneficial to you or to the class as a whole. Then you must negotiate with the instructor a possible maximum point value for the project. Such projects may involve making presentations to the class.