symbolipoint said:
Learning to read and write will at some point, include studying Grammar and Sentence Structure and identifying parts of speech. Look: We ACQUIRE our first or native language WITHOUT any study. We live in it, and the learning is not formal. Later, in school we (about age 7 or 8) begin to STUDY our language, and then we start to see instruction for spelling, pronouning, grammar, and such. By this time, we had already acquired much of our language. Maybe you or somebody can explain this better.
Thanks for your reply!
You are using "mathematical" to characterize language acquisition in a way that I think is unusual in English and might lead toward misunderstanding (as it already has); if I were to try and paraphrase, more appropriate words for what you mean might be "formal" - or "structured." That is, you are saying that just as mathematics can be taught in a structured way, natural language can also be taught in a structured way; which would especially apply to written language, which tends to be more formal than spoken language. Am I close?
And also, you would be correct in saying that written language can at least
attempt to be more precise, because precision aids its purpose - which is to transmit or store knowledge in a way that can survive long distances or long periods of time. However it gets tricky: Spoken conversation is aided by our ability to hear tone of voice or watch facial expressions; but this sort of additional context is not available in written language; and in addition, whereas we very often are aware of how much a conversational partner knows about a given topic, we very often do
not know how much a reader knows about a given topic! So although it may seem paradoxical in some ways, far greater care must be taken to achieve clarity in written language than in spoken language. In fact, this makes me think this is partly what you mean in your followup comment: Unlike speech, which we learn easily as children, writing benefits much more from formal instruction, so that we can learn to be more precise in just these ways.
At any rate, I would certainly agree with these sorts of statements. The only clarification I would suggest, from my readings in grammar (which are not extensive, but more than most persons do) is that actually, "grammar" can refer to either of two quite different approaches to working with language:
- Prescriptive grammar is what is taught in school; however it is not really "grammar" in a linguistic sense; rather, it is rules for usage, e.g. to give a simple example in English, "Never write ain't, always write isn't." The fact is, ain't is perfectly grammatical from a linguistic sense; however it is out of place in a formal document. So this is the sort of instruction I think you are referring to when you talk about how we can learn language more formally, after having first learned it instinctively as a child.
- Descriptive grammar, on the other hand, is that which linguists practice; it is a scientific look at how language is actually structured and used by native speakers; i.e,. it describes explicitly what native speakers know implicitly. Another way to say it: when persons who aren't native speakers of a given language make a mistake that makes native speakers wince, the mistake is typically better described by descriptive grammar than by prescriptive grammar. A very simple example in English might be consistent failure to use articles in front of nouns that require them. Also difficult for non-native speakers to acquire are idioms; idioms can be very puzzling indeed in terms of literal words versus actual meaning!
Descriptive grammar books can be rather strange to read - very tough going, even though interesting things pop up here & there. I have two books on grammar that I enjoy dipping into - but not often; it is like going swimming in the winter, bracing but sometimes a little
too bracing. These books are
Cambridge Grammar of English, by Carter and McCarthy; very tough going indeed; and
A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, by Huddleston and Pullum, much more friendly. I recommend the latter for anyone interested in learning a little more about grammar in English. I also own a very useful dictionary of usage,
Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage, which I would recommend to anyone with questions about what words to use or not use, and why, when writing in English; the only down side is that it was published in 2002 and thus is beginning to fall out of date.
By the way, another reason I am really interested in grammar & in teaching/learning languages is that although I am a monoglot myself (I speak only English), when I was teaching essay writing to adult students at New York University, I very often had students who were not native English speakers, but who desperately wanted to learn how to write well in English. Typically they would be offered courses in the ESL (English as a Second Language) department at NYU. However, the problem always came up that such persons (at least those who wanted to join my class) were typically extremely smart; were doing extremely well in their other courses, often physics or another hard science; and the ESL courses were much too primitive to appeal to them. They wanted an intermediate course of some kind; but it did not exist.
I found that whether I could accept such a person as a student in my class depended very much on when they first learned English. If they learned a bit as a child, then usually they had enough of an idiomatic grasp that they could make it in my class; I would be able to help them trust their English vocabulary much more than they believed had been possible; often they surprised themselves by discovering how well they could already write in English if they stopped worrying and just wrote. However if they had learned English later on, for example as teenagers, they typically did
not have an idiomatic grasp; they made the sorts of errors that cause native speakers to wince, and that are covered by descriptive grammar. It was painful for me to have to turn them down, but I had no choice; they simply did not have the basic intuitive structure of the language in their head & I was not the person to try and teach them this. This goes back to the common observation that it's easy to learn a second language as a child, but often very very difficult or impossible to do so as an adult; it also suggests that formal instruction in writing when we are older depends very much on whether we had the chance to learn informal speech as a child.
Regardless, I really enjoyed those persons who
did have just enough English to get by in my course and start using what they knew more freely; they were some of my best students.
