Who Needs English Grammar? Part II

English Grammar and Social Class

The unspoken subtext of English grammar is its connection with social class.  Traditionally, "proper English" meant whatever was used in the golden triangle formed by London, Cambridge and Oxford. As Tiger Webb explains, "in socially-stratified and newly literate Georgian England, any guide to 'proper language' would have sold like hotcakes"--which is exactly what happened with Robert Lowth's Short Introduction to English Grammar.  With the democratization of the language, a number of dialects, sociolects, idiolects and sublects emerged (there are a lot of lects out there--each with its own slight adjustments to the grammar).  David Crystal suggests that every Anglophone needs to know at least two Englishs:  one that is spoken locally and a second that is understood and accepted globally (or, at least, more widely).  (The local, more colourful version of English is the one more likely to be used in poetry and literature, by the way.)

With grammar, as with everything else in life:  there are choices to be made.  A pop icon or populist president might discover advantages in gainsaying the grammar of standard English in favour of a local dialect or patois.  On the other hand, scrupulous attention to the rules of prescriptive grammar might be the kind of branding with which you as an individual or your company or institution might want to be identified.

Beyond Fashion and branding, who does need English grammar?

Let us not be too quick to turn up our noses at branding and fashion.  In liberal, egalitarian societies, codes for dress as well as for language are invariably a source of protest. However, linguistic knowledge is stereotypically taken as a sign of general knowledge and intelligence (even if unwarranted).  Passing up the opportunity for respect, confidence and admiration which your grammar might impart (or undermine) isn't a wise decision--unless you are already a pop star or a president. Beyond fashion and making a good impression, there are practical reasons for knowing the grammar of the language which you speak.

Learning a foreign language

One of the strongest reasons for a native speaker to know the grammar of English is that it will facilitate the learning of a foreign language.  This is strictly anecdotal (not empirical evidence) but, having taught grammar to both native speakers and second-language learners, I noted that some native speakers were understandably reluctant to accept and even disbelieving that there were "rules" for something they had done naturally all their lives.  Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker both argue that language is innate, even genetic and instinctive, and that there is a universal grammar of all languages.  However, knowing the distinctive grammatical features of your first language is a huge advantage,  giving you parameters and a framework, as you take on a foreign language and can note its differences.  Conversely, I would add that you really don't know your own language until you have been required to learn another one.

Redundancy and entropy

The principle purpose of most grammar rules is to create redundancy.  Basic communication theory indicates that the greater the redundancy in a message the greater its clarity.  In oral communication, we use tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures to reinforce the message.  In written communication we depend on grammatical features, subject-verb agreement, correct syntax, agreement between adverbs of time and the tense of the verb, and correct word type (see "What Is English Grammar?) to be doubly sure that our message will be clearly understood.  Consider some simple examples:

"I stopped there yesterday."  Here the past tense of the verb and the word "yesterday" are transmitting the same information; i.e., there is redundancy in the sentence.  The adverb "yesterday" makes it clear that the action was in the past.  The rules of grammar, which require the past tense of the verb plus the word "yesterday,  make it redundantly clear that the action was in the past. "I stop there yesterday," though ungrammatical, gets the message across.

"He is here."  The agreement between the third person subject "he" and the third person of the verb "is" is basically redundant.  "He are here" would transmit the same message but, in the absence of redundancy, with a touch of ambiguity.

When the message matters, the grammar matters

Legal documents are notoriously tedious to read.  They use more nouns than most writing, and avoid varying vocabulary, action verbs, adverbs and intensifiers.  In other words, they avoid all the features that make writing interesting.  They will also tend to be repetitive and redundant, strictly following the rules of grammar.  When clarity is of the utmost importance, grammar becomes important, even if (or because) it creates redundancy.

Grammar can change the message

As I pointed out in Part I, I am not partial to the "you're shit" versus "your shit" distinction as grounds for knowing English grammar.  However, there are subtle, refined distinctions in English messages that are transmitted through grammar.  Consider these pairs of sentences:

1. The less people know about us the better.

2. The fewer people know about us the better.

In #1 "less" applies to an uncountable abstract, the implied knowledge.

In #2 "fewer" applies to the countable "people."

1.  I'm going to see her tomorrow.

2.  I'll see her tomorrow.

In #1 "going to" implies a previous arrangement or understanding.

In #2 "will" does not carry the implication of an arrangement, and can be a spontaneous decision.

1.  I've seen that movie.

2.  I saw that movie.

In #1 "I've seen" (the present perfect tense) implies some effect on the present (i.e., "I don't want to see it again").

In #2 "saw" is past tense and neutral about the present. (see The Truth about English Verb Tenses)

Who needs English grammar?

Most English speakers will use these grammatical variations correctly without being aware or able to explain them.  I began these posts on "Who needs English grammar?" by pointing out that we impose grammar most on people who need it least.  At some point in the learning process, language learners will benefit from instruction in grammar, but that point is late in the process (See The Ball of String Theory).

My own rule of thumb for when to teach grammar in an ESL or EFL context was whenever a student asked a question about grammar.  Teachers of English need to know the grammar.  I'll go one step further and say that anyone who teaches anything in English needs to know English grammar.

"Yes, no, toaster"

I still remember watching a documentary series in Quebec entitled Yes, No, Toaster.  The expression "yes, no, toaster" was a typical comedic response from a young Quebec francophone to the question "Do you speak English?"  The documentary, which investigated the relative ineffectiveness of English language instruction in Quebec, was provoked by Audrey de Montingy, a finalist in Canadian Idol in 2003, who confessed that she couldn't understand a word of what people were saying to her during the show, even though she had had six years of ESL instruction.  The Yes, No, Toaster  series took cameras into various English-language-instruction settings.  The one that sticks with me (sticks in my craw, I should say) was an advanced class in which a student asked her teacher "What's the difference between 'will" and 'going to'?"  The teacher not only refused to answer but used the occasion to mock the student by saying "You're not ready for that level yet?"

The Moral of the story

The moral of the story I've been telling is that we should ensure that the right people are being criticized, and the right people are doing the criticizing.  Teachers mocking inquiring students; unilinguals criticizing polyglots--these are just plain wrong.

The Postmodern Hoax

Beyond the Hoax

Reading Alan Sokal’s Beyond the Hoax brought back the question that haunted my university teaching career:  How much of postmodernism was intellectual fraud?

"Transgressing Boundaries" and Social Text

Sokal is the physicist who submitted a deliberately bogus article entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries:  Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” to the cultural studies journal Social Text.

Post-structuralism as Mummery

After it was accepted and published (Spring/Summer 1996), Sokal announced that the article was nonsense, a parody of postmodernist half-baked arguments and verbiage. Sokal and the Belgian physicist/philosopher, Jean Bricmont, subsequently published Impostures Intellectuelles (1997) in which they systematically unmasked the mummery of leading lights of post-structuralist theory such as Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva.

Jacques Lacan as Charlatan

The most compelling essay I have read on Lacan is Dylan Evans’ “From Lacan to Darwin.”  Evans spent at least a decade studying Lacan, first in the context of psychoanalysis as a dedicated Lacanian disciple in Buenos Aires, then in Comparative Literature at UNY Buffalo, and finally in London as a psychologist and adherent of “evolutionary psychology.”    Evans confesses:

“As I became more familiar with Lacan's teachings, the internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation became ever more apparent. And as I tried to make sense of Lacan's bizarre rhetoric, it became clearer to me that the obfuscatory language did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacan's own thought.”

Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Paradoxically, Evans offers the closest thing to a justification for Lacanian psychoanalysis  (and the whole of Lacan’s work for that matter) I’ve ever read.  The process is one in which the analyst is a fraud, and when the patient finally discovers that his psychoanalyst is a huckster then he is cured.  (Consider the possibility that the whole of postmodernism/post-structuralism was a hoax, and we are now cured because we can say so.)  Evans concludes by questioning the legitimacy of the process, but his preamble shows a degree of coherence that is rare in discussions of Lacan: 

“Lacan did not believe that psychoanalysts should think of themselves as experts, able to reveal the hidden meaning of the patient's speech, but he did believe that the patient should think of the analyst that way. The analyst, in other words, did not really possess a secret knowledge, but was merely 'supposed' by the patient to possess this knowledge. In the course of the treatment, the patient would come to 'de-suppose' the analyst of this knowledge – that is, to lose his faith in the analyst. That, in fact, was the whole point of psychoanalytic treatment.”

Fashionable Nonsense

How is it possible that this “fashionable nonsense” (to quote the American title of the Bricmont & Sokal book) became so widespread and firmly, even dogmatically accepted in the arts and humanities programs of Anglo-American universities?  The answer is fairly obvious and often repeated with allusion to the fable of “the Emperor’s new clothes.” What I can add, perhaps, is some of the detail of how university professors and students aspiring to become university professors were compelled to show an understanding of; that is, to pretend to understand, the nonsense underpinning post-structuralist theory. 

How Scholarship Becomes Dogma

The same requirement that we put on students writing theses applies to professors submitting their work for peer review:  “show that you have done the reading.”  “The reading” in the postmodern period is, of course, the post-structuralist theorists:  Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Foucault, etc, and to make matters worse, everyone who makes use of this Tel Quel cabal, which turns out to be just about everyone who is getting published.  For professors, the cliché is still fully functional: it’s publish or perish.  If you want to get published, which is what you do to get tenure and promotion, not to mention funding so you can go to conferences at juicy locations like Hawaii and Paris, then you better know your post-structuralist theorists, or at least be ready to pretend you do.  

The Trickle-Down Effect on Pedagogy

The idea that a couple of hundred specialists might gather at a conference to spout this turgid, empty language at one another, playing verbal puzzle games, didn’t really disturb me all that much.  Though it did seem a terrible waste of time and brainpower.  What did disturb me was to see students chastised for failing to “theorize” and “problematize” as if these terms signaled an accomplishment.  It disturbed me to see students struggling to understand theories which didn’t hold water and being forced, like their professors, to pretend they made sense and were being grasped;  or, worse still, simply being turned off the study of literature and culture because it had been transformed into the study of obtuse theories.

Negotiating Postmodern Dogma

Then, of course, there was my dilemma of how to negotiate the hypocrisy:  teaching theories I really didn’t find credible.  In my research and publications, I think I did alright:  showing that I had read the post-structuralists while signaling that I wasn’t really buying the theories they were selling (citing Sokal and Bricmont for example).  Teaching undergraduates, I could cherry-pick concepts and vocabulary, acknowledging their soi-disant origins, but spinning them, à la Rumpelstiltskin, into something that made sense; that is, that made sense to me, and could be transformed into something that made sense and was even useful for students.  I could explain deconstruction, as Ellis does in Against Deconstruction, in terms of the many challenges to essentialism (the idea that words get their meanings from one-to-one correspondence with the “essences” of objects in the world).  While acknowledging that the un-readable Kristeva did the earliest work on the important and useful concept of intertextuality, I could quickly turn to Graham Allen’s accessible description of the idea (in Intertextuality) that “meaning [. . . .] exists between a text and the other texts to which it refers and relates” rather than within an independent text.  The ubiquitous concept of “the subject” as an unstable site of consciousness, so typically associated with Lacanian psychoanalysis, is what the philosophy of mind is all about and could be explained in that context. 

The Imposition of Postmodern Dogma on Students

Dealing with graduate students and graduate theses was more problematic.  It was disheartening to see students being led down a garden path, into dead ends, on wild goose chases--all the clichés applied.  I tried to be frank, but I also recognized that if students wanted to get on in the academic world, they could not afford to be dismissive of post-structuralism. Even if you knew the emperor wore no clothes, there was no advantage and significant risk in saying so.

Postmodernism Versus Enlightenment

Perhaps the most important part of Beyond the Hoax is its preface.  There Sokal concludes, from the surprising attention which the hoax received (though I always felt it didn’t receive enough), that “a not insignificant cohort of adults recall having endured, as undergraduates, an English, cultural studies or women’s studies course overly filled with Lacanian or deconstructionist verbiage, and who may have doubted their own intellectual competence as a result.”  On a broader, political level, Sokal quotes Noam Chomsky’s complaint that postmodernist intellectuals, while claiming a leftist agenda, have actually deprived working people of the tools of emancipation by claiming “that the ‘project of the Enlightenment is dead,’ that we must abandon the ‘illusions’ of science and rationality -- a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use.”  To substantiate Chomsky’s point, consider the fact that we have been told ad infinitum by postmodernists that “common sense” and “binary thinking” (the only kind of thinking that the human brain is capable of) are evidence of right-wing, conservative ideology.

Postmodernist Abuse of Language

What I have most appreciated of Sokal’s work (though odd since he is a physicist) is his critique of postmodernist abuses of language.  What Sokal observes most often relates to how postmodern academics use terms from science which also exist in common language but without ever clarifying the sense in which the words are being used.  Instruction number one which I would typically give to graduate students approaching a thesis was “define your terms,” but it was a tough sell considering the postmodern scholars they were reading rarely, if ever, did so.  The postmodernists’ solution to the ambiguity, obfuscation and incoherence in their own writing was to celebrate ambiguity, polysemy and indeterminacy as if they were positive features in expository writing.

Science and Scepticism

The Sokal hoax provided a healthy revelation of what we were allowing to happen inside academia, but I’m less sure that the revelation has made its way into university classrooms.  As much as I admire what Sokal has accomplished, as he clarified his objectives in perpetrating the hoax and clarified the terms of the debate between postmodernist constructionist and empirical scientists, I found myself sliding back to where I had come from among the phenomenologists and skeptics.  The question, which is as old as philosophy itself, boils down to: “Is there an objective reality, uncontaminated by our perceptions and intentions, that we can have access to?”  Science must answer yes because the study of that reality is its defining objective.  Cultural-studies academics like me, unimpressed as I am with post-structuralism, are destined by discipline, like the ancient Greek philosophers of the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, to remain skeptical.