Language, Grammar, and Communication [antikvár]

Teachers of English require knowledge and skills in many areas, including literature, writing, and language. In this book, we approach the last of these areas not simply as a means for teaching the first two, but rather, as a topic worthy of serious study in ítself. We have attempted to provide future teachers with the fundamentals that they will need to explore, along with their students, the nature of language and the nature of the English language, particularly its grammar and its meaning systems. Any further extension of language study to literature or composition, we believe, will be successful only insofar as it rests upon a deep understanding of language in its many forms. The title of this book indicates its major points of focus. By "language" we mean primarily the system of rules that exist in the minds of speakers as a result of acquiring English in the first 6 to 10 years of their lives and largely independently of their schoolmg. Chapter 1 examines this notion of linguistic competence, the central concept which the rest of the book develops. Secondarily, the term "language" applies to those domains of knowledge that are learned in the classroom. Chapters 12 to 14 in Part Three address such issues under the headings of the relations between speech and writing, régiónál and social variation, and usage. The grammar component of this book is presented in Part Two. Although somé texts simply catalog facts about language and thus are useful for reference purposes, they require a great deal of memorization. Language, Grammar and Communication, in contrast, presents the study of language in terms of an ongoing critical process of analysis and discovery. While facts may be important, they take a secondary place to the principles that guide students' and teachers' encounters with növel and often open-ended problems. In the process of applying these principles, students will encounter both broad patterns and details and will internalize them without conscious memorization. In many cases, students will discover independently exactly what many textbooks present as facts or as appropriate analyses. This situation is not only inevitable, it's desirable. One who reinvents the wheel is as much a genius as the originál inventor. Our approach to grammar, moreover, is synthetic. That is, it blends the three views of grammar that a teacher should be prepared to encounter in the classroom. Traditional grammar, with its roots in Greek and Román culture, provides an extensive vocabulary for talking about grammar. American structural grammar refines traditional practices by basmg them on exacting and clearly articulated analytic procedures rather than on the haphazard intuitions that traditional approaches depend on. Transformational-Generative grammar, the dominant paradigm in linguistics in the latter half of the twentieth century, establishes language study as a quest for an understanding of the humán mind. While losing none of the rigor of structuralism, it raises issues that would concem Plató and Aristotle were they reincarnated as contemporary philosophers. Finally, our treatment of "communication"--i.e., the communication of meaning-is focused in Chapter 2, but in fact, circulates throughout the book. Grammar isn't appropri-