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AUTHOR Laird, Charlton; And Others TITLE [Linguistic Approach to the Study of the American Language.] INSTITUTION Baltimore City Public Schools, Md. PUB DATE 67 NOTE 83p. JOURNAL CIT Baltimore Bulletin of Education, A Journal of the Public Schools; v43 n2-4 p1-80 1966-67 EDRS PRICE EDRS Price MF-0.65 HC-$3.29 DESCRIPTORS Diachronic Linguistics, Dialect Studies, Language Arts, *Language Usage, *Linguistics, *Linguistic Theory, *Nonstandard Dialects, Reading Proyrams, Structural Grammar, *Teacher Education, Traditional Grammar, Transformation Generative Grammar

ABSTRACT This bulletin reports on condensations of tape-recorded lectures and discussions from a workshop which trained a nucleus of Baltimore City Public School personnel in new apprlaches to the study of the . Desiyned to serve as an orientation, it is made up of six major sections: (1) Charlton Laird discusses the history, nature, and function of language, (2) Robert DiPietro explains the traditional, structural, and transformational approaches to the analysis, study, and teaching of language,(3) Royer Shuy shows the causes of dialect differences and demonstrates how "good" or "bad" usage is effected by historical, psycholoyical, and sociological principles, (4) William Stewart discusses the historical, sociological, and foreign language influences which congribute to the shaping of systems of aonstandard speech, (5) Rosemary Wilson describes the benefits of a reading program based on linguistic principles, and (6) Edgar Schuster offers a structural grammar lesson on modification of nouns. A list of references for language and linguistics is also included.(DD) U S. DEPARTMENT OF NEAE.TEl. EDUCATION INEI FARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS IR ECEVE0 FROM ZHEPERSON 04 ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECES SASSY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF ECK, CANON POSITION OR POLICY

In this issue. .

LANGUAGE 2 CharltonLaird,Professorof English,University Of Nevada

LINGUISTICS 26 Robert J. DiPietro. Associate Professor ofLinguistics, Georgetown University

BOARD OF SCHOOL COMMISSIONERS Eli FRANK, JR., President DIALECTOLOGY AND USAGE 40 J PERCY BON!) Roger W. Sl .ry, Associate Professor of English and MRS. M. FICMIOND EARRING Linguistics, Michigan State University PHILLIP R. MACHT WILLIAM D. McEr...FDY MRS. ELIZABETH MURPHY MOSS NONSTANDARD SPEECH PATTERNS 52 WILLIAM S. S7ONE, M.D. William A. Stewart, Center for Applied Linguistics (MLA), Washington, D.C. JOHN'. SWEENEY, JR. SIDNEY IL TINLEY, JR.

BOARD OF SUPERINTENDENTS LAURENCE G. PAQUIN, Superintendent of LINGUISTICS AND RED. ,ING 66 Public Instruction Rosemary G. `lison. Assistant Director, Curriculum M. THOMAS GOEDEKE. Associate Superim OlTice,Philadelpliia Public Senna! System teneent, Administration VEr.lioNS. V AvkiNA, Associate Superin- tendent, Curriculum and Instruction SIDNEY N. CHERNAK, Assistant Superintend- ent, Secondary, Vocational, and Adult LINGUISTICS AND WRITING '73 Education Edgar IL Schuster, Assistant Professor of English, AMBROSE J. CHLADA, 115., Assistant Superin- Re,,ver college, Penns)ls,ani3. tendent, School Facilities Ilousrem R. JACKSON, Assistant Superin- tendent, Pupil Personnel and Staff S.,rtices WALTER A. MACCUbBIN, Assistant Superin- tendent, Sleff Personnel and Central Ad- ministrative Services I .:BRARY REFERENCES 77 SAUL M. PERDUE, Assistant Superint ndent, Business Management Emus V. WALKER, Assistant Superintend- -PEFINUSSION TO PEPROCYJCIE THIS COPY ent, Elementary Education 5151110 MATIRIHE HAS SEEN GRANTED sr ..; 4 17,6(

Editi: AngelsM. Bicening,Director, %%SButeall ofPublications, 3 East 2511-, Street, 10 ERIC AND ORGANISATIONS OREPArING UNDER 'SPUMES'S WITH THE 1.15 OFFICE Baltimore, Maryland 2121); ALAI Nos. 2.4 OF EDUCATIONEVIrHEN 14.PPOODCrON OUTSIDE THE (PC 54511M RE051515 REA 1966.57 5005,05 OF THE C0P,AIGH1OHNER Foreword For several years the supervisory staff of the Secondary English Department has been exploring linguistic approaches to the study of the American English Language. This study has been pursued through hearing information-giving lectures by out-of-state consultants, reading of selected references and follow-up discussion in English depart- mental meetings, attendance at institutes conducted by regional colleges and universities, and participation of some staff members in the preconvention workshops conducted by the National Council of Teachers of English in connection with national conventions. From this intensive study, the supervisory staff under the chair- manship of Milton Velder projected a series of workshops for the Baltimore City Public Schools. This series was planned in three phases, the first partially financed with ESEA funds and the third entirely financed with ESEA funds. Mr. Ve lder, with the cooperation of L. Earl Wellemeyer, Josie C. Smith, Charles L. Allen, Elsa R. Graser, Jean B. Owens, and Virginia P. Redd, set up these purposes for the workshops: Phase I (summer 1966) to train a nucleus of informed personnel in the new approaches to the study of the Lnglish language so that they may serve as leaders for future regional city-wide work- shops. Phase II (school year 1966-1967) to study in depth the topics presented in the first phase and to prepare materials for the third phase. Phase III (school year 19674968) to conduct city-,vide work- shops onaregionalbasis opentoallelementary school teachers and secondary English teachers. Each regional work- shop to be headed by members of the English supervisory staff T and by teachers selected from participants in Phase I Workshop, This Bulletin reports con(lensatiors of tape-recorded lectures and discussions in the Phase I Workshop. Vincent D. Malin awl John J, Schreiber of the Bureau of Publications attended the sessions, tape recorded the lectures and discussions, and prepared the condensation. Mr. NIalin and Mr. Schreiber read the transcriptions, made by the secretarial staff in the Bureau of Publications, and drafted the condensation along the lines planned by the editor with Mr. Wider and Dr. Graser and the staff in the Bureau of Publications. Mr. Wider and Dr. Graser read the condensations, as well as thr, transcriptions, and assisted in determining how fully the lectures would be reported, Each lecturer retainscopyright privilegesforthe material which appears in this Bulletin. The Bulletin is offered to the Baltimore City Public School staff and to the profession as a useful orientation to the topic "Linguistic Approach to the Study of the American Language." ANCELi, M. BROENINC. Editor

2 Language

"Here we are with language which we have devised and yet we do not understand the thing," Dr. Laird said at the outset of the Linguistics Workshop, and then he promptly demonstrat'd that he has a thor ough knowledge and understanding of "the thing." Dr. Laird gives us an intriguing picture of Language as it has developed from Chaucer to Chomsky, from to Pennsylvania Dutch, and from primitive symbols to the Oxford English .

CHARLTON LAIRD

I have been asked totell you what isremember God and Adam are supposed to language. We are dealing here with one of thehave started using language at once, discuss. mysteries of the world. Here we are withing relatively difficult subjects the first day. language which we have devised and yet we do not understand the thing. We do not knowMystery of the Mind where it came from and we do not know what it is. We come close to knowing what itis. One reason we don't know how language We do know something of how it works. works is that language is the product of the Language is a mystery in which for a longmind and we don't know how minds work. time we had very little interest. As far as we Neurologists insist that minds work as a re- can tell, earlier, relatively primit:ye peoplesult of an almost infinite number of binary just ignored it. They used language but theychoices, that is, the only thing the mind can asked no more about it than they did aboutdo is to say "yes" or "no." Apparently, our something like walking and eating.It wasminds work like a computer but they deal something one soon decided to do and thewith such great bodies of materials so rapidly ability to do so was just assumed to be there.that comprehending what the mind is dying In fact, in many quarters it was firmly be.as it deals with an unbelievable number of tieved that language was always there. You'llbinary choices is incomprehensible. A comput- er has tanks of knowledge stored in tapes Thi, ,ndensatinn n:sfr by mg e nt Mails of the 11i.arsu Pubh and drums and when it is asked a question, it I mai,. of 11 SAN' tr1.14Ing id I),lair(' ire,. 711.tirm to thr I Sorsi,tir orsbnp tonds led by the Battironre CA! Du blir Ftrboole. A urset 525. just assembles this body of knowledge and 1956. Dr. !Jiff rosins the top)rtgli on this material .n4 hn Olen the gives its answer on the basis of that body of Elsner, of Publir vino, retIlli.iina to print this ron.leetssline in the Pelf Mare ON liffon Of EA.. lion. knowledge. Our minds apparently work in

2

3 LANGUAGE 3

very much this way. They have stored upcan go on to the mathematicians who can results so that when there is a decision to bethink in mathematical symbols.Ihave a made, they don't say, "Well, now, in light offriend, a composer, who, 1 believe, can cc- everything, considering the possibilities of thetually think in tone. Tones are symbols suffi future, I would think this might be good" ciently precise for him so that his mind can they can't do that at all; they say "yes," "no"work directly with them. that's all they can do. When I speak it's But the largest body of relatively precise simply the result of an inconceivably largesymbols and there is no other group even number of "yes" answers. Something in theclose is the symbol or the symbols that brain is being asked to do something and it'smake up the language. And apparently this is saying "yes" or I couldn't speak to you. Thattrue not only of our society but of all socie- is the pattern the way the mind works. ties. That's what language has to be somehow Our job as English teachers then is to help anamazinglycomplexcollectionofpeople use this means of communication, this "yes's" and "no's." It is obvious why chil-means of thinking. I said that language seems dren don't learn to talk any sooner than theyto rest upon symbol. Susanne K. Langer in an do. They have to build up a body of materialexciting little book called Philosophy in a out of which they can get "yes" or "no"New Key' suggests that apparently our culture answers, and obviously some things are easiercame to be because of a symbol, and that at to get "yes" and "no" answers to than others.the root of what makes us human lies lan- And while the children are learning theseguage, because language is the most potent things, they are building up their tanks ofbody of symbols. She thinks of language not knowledge that can be drawn upon and beas sound but as something that happens in concatenated. people. Surely, we can recognize this as true. We seem to be the kind of creatures toMachines can speak, devise , and make which language is native. And as we can'tthem into sentences, but someplace in the have language without human beings,we process human beings have to be involved. couldn't have human beings without languageLanguage has to have thought at both ends. we weren't human beings until we hadIt has to start in thinking and it has to end in language. Presumably it was so much funthinking and it isn't really language working being human that we just had to become,until at least two brains are involved. human and learn how to use :dnguage at the We don't know what happens when people same time. This is the best tvess we have aslearn, but itis obvious that numan minds yet, that this kind of stuff, this capacity andsomehow are of such a nature that they need need, is in us. language, they devise language, and they go on acquiring language and producing it. And Language as Symbol one doesn't wonder that this is a tremendous job that the child faces; he doesn't know he We are, for better or worse, in the middlefaces :1, but gradually he is absorbing the of a popt.lat;on explosion and a knowledgeconcepts of learning what language is goad explosion and both of them demand that wefor, how to use it, and even how it works. In have more ability to use our brains and morea relatively' few months, a child has acquired ability to communicate with other brains. Thea few words. In a few years, he knows all the principal instrument for both of those is lan-most important aspects of the grammatical guage, and not only is it the means of com-system. In a few years the child has learned munication most people use for the most vitalthe essence of how the language works and purposes, it is also the best device to promotelearned this without being told. He has un thinking that man has ever found. Languageconsciously signed a sociolinguistic contract works with symbols, and communication ap-in which he has agreed to use words as parently has to work with symbols. counters and an integrated system, that is, in All of the artsuse symbols. A dancera manner which has already been accepted by comes out and puts one hand up in the air;the rest of his society. this is some kind of symbol although one may This is a pretty complicated business, then, not know what it is a symbol of. This is not a I. Swninne X 1 Polesaphy in A,n Vnfi, very precise symbol but it's still a symbol. I 1S,n4s.TIstNen Ilnerisn 1ihrsry.19521

4 4 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

and it is not surprising that it takes the childSample of Language some time to acquire quite a lot of vocabu- We want totalk about English aslan- lary as well as acquiring ways of using it.guage. We often talk about language as eti- There is another impediment. One reason aquette; I suppose this is the way language is child can't learn to read and to speak anytalked about most of the time. When people sooner than he does is that he has to getget angry about what youngsters are doing ccatrol of one of the most agile and difficultand not doing, it's because they haven't done muscles in his body. just what that person thinks they should do. We talk about language as correct conduct. Control of the Tongue We certainly talk about language as comma nication. And we think of English not as Ittakes a long while to develop sharplanguage, but as a language. English is a control of even the most blundering of ourlanguage and it can be studied as a language, muscles. And if thereisa more difficultbut it can also be studied as a sample of the muscle to control than the tongue, either nature of language. physicallyorpsychologically, I wouldn't know what it Language works most of the To discuss the growth in semantics, the time through sound and thus it has to begrowth of meaning, and the shift in meanings thought of as sound and linguistic phenomrequires some background statements about ena. Language comes into being as a dis-the language as a whole. It may be difficult turbed stream of air, and one of the disturb.to define a , to say what it is, but itis ing agents in this stream of air is the tongue.obvious that we have inherited some meaning What the tongue can do is utterly staggering.and a body of meaning (if you'll allow me to It has to do it, of course, quite unconsciously.say we have somethingIpreviously said You can't talk very much or you can't workdidn't exist), a body of association, and we've very wellif you have to be telling yourinherited also a body of sound. Any of you tongue specifically what to do. The child haswho have studied English in an earlier form, to learn to controlthis extremely difficultOld English or , will know muscle. that there are observable similarities between modern sounds and older sounds. We have discovered that most languages that are extant arerelated to some other The various words we have, even the re- language. The concept of language fancliescoPstruction of these words, show that some had to be developed because we haven't Leensounds haven't changed very much. For in able to trace the ancestry of any workingstance, our word name just about tSat in languages back to a first language, whateverthe earliest form that we have been able to it. was.Al!languages that we know work withreconstruct for it, theis,it started with an linguisticunitsalthough somelanguages,[n]anditdosed with[m] andithad rather than either words or sentences, navesome kind of vowel in between. This vowel what are called syllables or syllable clusters.has changed a little from time to time, but These have value only when they are used inactually it has corm out now just about wk. relationship to something else and when someit was in the earliest reconstruction. Also, way is known to get them into relationship. there must have been some body of associa- tion. Every language has some kinds of linguis tic units, and all languages that we know also The word man, which has changed a little have ways of handling them so that they canin sound but not too much from the earliest do more than they could by themselves. Thetime that we know anything about it, suggest- first of these wet's is what we call vocabulary,eel the species to which we belong and more the inventory of syllable clusters, and theparticularly the male of that species. This is other, of course, is grammar, the way Ian.again a body of meaning or association or guage works. abilitytocall up somethingthathasn't Serious students of dialects in the United Slates seek to reconcile the diverg- ing groups and lo provide the wider understanding of each other that a mature political community must gain to endure. lio,n IM.1..Airi. ir . "tn., An fnn,,r 1 n,11.6, 1,4,) LANGUAGE 5 changed in many thousands of years. to find a forest fire from two fire stations, but Idon't mean to say that sound hasn'twe do see that both words begin with "m," acquired new ability to call up associations orboth have similar endings, both have only that it hasn't lost some. But, at least, we doone main vowel, and there is another similar. have a long continuing set of sound andity which, although spelled differently in the meaning and these somehow associate. two words, is the[t] sound. But you will notice that it is made I.topping the air that is what we call a "" or "stop," Etymology and we know that consonants are made by either stopping the air or disrupting it a little. I've already suggested that language is aIf you disrupt the "tuh" you get something set of symbols. We have these symbols; vepretty close to a "huh." There, sounds are don't know except within certain limits wherecloser to each other than they seem when you they came from, and we don't know how theyspell them. And furthermore, if we were able work. We have splendid etymological diction-to do this a lot of times, if, for instance, we aries, particularly the Oxford Dictionary ofcompared /oh, r and pater, we would see that English Etymology, which has just been pub.even though ti.e English set is different from lished. the Latin set, they differ in a consistent way Another v-,,ry engaging and useful book,You have "tuh" inthe Latin consistently Origins, by Eric Partridge, approaches thewhere you have "thuh" in the English. etymology of words in a little different way By means of progression into the past we than does the Oxford book. The author or-can go back to the English and Latin loots of ganizes material under larger units in a cornthese words, back to the place where they prehensive treatment of a word and its relamust have separated. We can use another fives. The Oxford book, however, handlesexample. The words mother in English, mut nearly 30,000 words, pursuing these words 10ter in German, hound in English, and hued in their origin. In essence it gives an etymologGerman are words that have a relatively sim icalstatementaboutailthecommonly ple similar sound. Also, mutter means the used words in the language. same thing in German that mother means in The Oxford English Dictionary has a stag.English. What we've found out is that we can gering body of information collected in ow assume that English and German have some set of volumes about one language. The edikind of common ancestor. Swedish and Dan. tors of that dictionary undertook no less thanish have a common ancestor, and French, to record the history of every word of anySpanish, and Italian have a common ancestor currency and of every use of that word in the in Latin. Now, according to what we have English language from the time it apneared in already said about mother and "rater, and the English language down to 1900. On thefather and pater, it looks as though we could whole, the Oxford English Dictionary takesgo back and reconstruct ancestors to those. the words back to .It lists theThis isthe basis of modern and reliable first citation that has been found for a wordinvestigation of language. along with what may have been the immedi ate ancestor of this word, what it was like in For a long time we didn't suspect this. It's Proto-Germanic that is, what form can berather curious, looking atit now, that we postulated by comparing Old English with didn'tsuspectit.Every literate personin and Gothic, and the like. But the western Europe for a thousand years knew book didn't go beyond that. The new etymo-that there were languages like French, Italian, logical dictionary is actually the last volumeand Spanish, and that although these lan- of the Oxford because it does for etymologiesguages were different, they came from Latin. what was not done in the Oxford itself. They had the evidence right there before The 19th century showed how these ety.them, everybody knew it, but they did nothing mologies can be traced. We know, for exam-about it. People went right on assuming that ple, that the word mother appears in Englishlanguage had somehow happened and that and the word maser occurs in Latin. We maythe fact that languages were related to one not be able to figure their intersection asanother was something that somehow hap- accurately as we could if we are triangulatingpened and you didn't go beyond that.

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Great Discovery Someofthesepeoplewentsoutheast It took an intelligent Englishman serving in through the Khyber Pass into wnat is now India (and maybe one or two others) to getIndia and took over the more fruitful parts of the idea. The Englishman, being an Englishthe subcontinent. The language thatthey public servant, was an educated man; hebrought with them was what we call Sanskrit knew Latin and Greek, and, of course, heand from that has descended the modern knew English. When he got to India he foundIndian languages. evidence of an ancient language, Sanskrit, and to him thesimilarities among Latin,Dialects Greek, and Sanskrit were just too great to be coincidental. Once the suggestion of relation. After they got toIndia, some of them ship had been made, you could just see thecrossed back past the Himalayas to the ncrth. evidence everywhere. It was picked up by theSome years ago, the ruins of cities were dug scholars, Rasmus Rask and Franz Bopp, andup inthe Gobi Desert and archaeologists their work was elaborated by Jacob Grimm,found clay tablets and other artifacts which, one of the Grimm Brothers of the: fairy tales. when compared to reconstructed European or even to early Sskrit, made it apparent that Since that time, in the early 19th Century,the writing c.. the tablets was in a language we have had a soundnderstanding of thedescended from Indo-European. We call this nature of language and we've been able tolanguage Tocharian and it was sufficiently add to that trerneadous bodies of material. distributed in the Gobi Desert to be recorded You can find charts of the family of Ian-in two forms, Tocharian A and Tocharian B. guages in many books on language and in theWhy were there two dialects? Here is one front of most good . thing we mean when we say that lanbuage always changes. If two sets of people speak- We can reconstruct a language which weing basically the same language are thrust callIndo-European, abbreviatedIE. lade-into two sets of places, apparently they'll Europeansisnot, we assume, what these people called originate language variations and in time they themselves. We don't knowwill be speaking noticeably differently with what they called themselves, maybe just "thethe distinct possibility that eventually they people," which is what people usually callwon't be able to understand one another. themselves as though there aren't any other. Placing people in separate areas creates what Rut we've called the language Indo-Europeanwe call dialect, i.e., when languages change as a sort of description of where it existed,enough so that you notice a marked difference because the descendants of this lineage arebut not enough so that people can't under. foundallthe way from India, westward stand each other. through most of Europe. Now, we're in the presence of another con- In some books IE is called Aryan becausecept. I have told you that language always one of the early research workers on thechanges. I have to go further and say that no subject found the word Ar and he rightlyperson ever speaks exactly the same language guessed that this was the same word as inthat another person speaks. An individual's Eire. The word Ar means something similarpattern of speech or language is an idiolect. to preparing ground for growing, and theUp there in the Gobi 1)&.ert, there were a lot researcher assumed that Ar was a plow be.of people like you and me, each one industri cause there was also evidence that these Indo.ously speaking his own idiolect. But they got Europeans had horses. Therefore, he calledbroken up enough so that one group spoke these people the "plow people." Unfortunate.Tocharian A and another spoke Tocharian B, ly, tater we found that although the Indo.and probably there were some Tocharian C Europeans had horses, they milked them in speakerswhowere unfortunate in not having stead of using them as draft horses. Buttheir clay tablets survive. There never was a these Indo-European people did spread outtime, however, when half of the Sanskrit from central eastern Europe and did so quitespeakers decided tospeak Tocharian A and rapidly, carrying their language with them.half of them Tocharian B. Languages change This may have happened around 6,000 B.C.,infinitesimally. So, one would not say that which is a good, rough guess now. IndoEuropean b-came Sanskrit and Sanskrit LANGUAGE became Indian; this just isn't true. We haveto translate the Bible into Burgundian, we some samples of the language as spoken 2,500might know something about the language years ago (quite different from what they'retoday. But I gather they weren't. One Egyp- speaking in India now) but the change didn't tian Ufilas was pious and zealous come in one grand, wild leap of 2,500 years.enough to translate parts of the Bible into the The language kept changing and the peopleGermanic language that he knew and hence, that were speaking Sanskrit were no morewe do know something about Gothic today. aware of that change than we are that weUfilas' translation of the Bible survived in a were talking in a slightly different idiolectunique manuscript in Sweden. yesterday. The Goths were pushed out of the way by There obviously have been hundreds ofthe invading Huns and other people bringing dialects and perhaps languages that we don'tanother kind of language. They were speaking know anything about that died out. We havea Ural-Altaic language from Siberia. These no reason to think that these languages died people went down into the Balkan Peninsula, because the children got :o saying "ain't."over into theItalianPeninsula, conquered The languages died because the speakers died and sacked Rome, went on to what is now or because they were overcome in war, poli-southern France, down to Spain, down in tics,society, o: something else. LanguagesNorth Africa, and, finding they didn't like cannot die of themselves. They die only be-North Africa after all, came back to Spain cause something untoward happens to theand settled in southern France. One branch of speakers of the language. But many lan-these people went north. They lived in the guages have died, of course. We know ofnortheri, part of Europe and up into what is more than 3,000 languages that did exist onnow the Scandinavian Peninsula, and after a earth and there are many fewer than thatwhile they spoke what we call Old Norse. Old now. Norse resembles Old English in some ways The Hellenic languages were another sub-but is distinct. And from Old Norse comes family of 1E. Some of these people movedIcelandic, Danish, Swedish, :hid other tongues east and used what we call Old Slavonic andin that area. that's given us Russian, Polish, and various Some of them came west and from the other Slavic languages. Some of these movedWest Germanic people we get High and Low west and this western division included Ian-German, meaning only that some lived up guages like Celtic and Latin, offshoots ofnear mountains and some lived down near the CeltoItalic. The Celts tended to be in north-seashore. The people who lived up toward the western Europe, on the peninsulas and is-mountains spoke what is called Old High lands, and the Welsh, Irish, and Gaels andGerman which has now become modern Ger- Bretons are remnants of them. Meanwhile, the man. southern movement of the w'tcrn stream Those who lived down toward the seacoast (sometimes called Italic) gave us Latin and,hat somewhat differentdialects and from as you know, from Latin comes the Romancethese have descended Frisian, Dutch, and oth- Languages. er languages. Another group went over to the island of Britain and took with them notably ProtoGermanic Origins different dialects. These resulted eventually into what we call Old English, and from that The 1E language that we're most interestedMiddle English with more dialects, and from in is ProtoGermanic. ProtoGermanic brokethat Early Modern English with still more up intovariousdialects,West Germanic,dialects. North Germanic, and East Germanic. There I hope that you do something with dialects. probably was a South Germanic, too. PerhapsSometime during the year get some dials..ct the greatest of all these , so records and play them to your students. An far as their impact was concerned at the time,ordinary American simply cannot understand were the , but today we don'tthe variety of English dialects unless he hears have awhisper of Burgundian. We don'tsome of them. You know a little about it now. knr,w what it was like except that it mustYou know that some people say ''Balmore" have been a Germanic tongue. If any of ourand others say "Balmer." But this is a small ancestors had been pious and zealous enoughdifference. People hear a Cockney scant and 8 BALTIMORE RULLEFIN OF EDUCATION they assume that Cockneys speak this wayOriental languages. Mary more are not as because they are uneducated people. Whatlarge as these but we've been able to relate they don't realize is that Cockney is by noalmost all known languages to some other means the most distinctive Britishdialect,known languages and reconstruct family trees that there ire many of them and that thesefor them. Here and there you'll find a poor are different enough so that a trained ear canwaif we don't know anything about and tell the difference when he goes from onePosque is one of these. We're beginning to parish to the next one. People from one partguess dew that perhaps Basque descended of England understand people from anotherfrom the Ligurians. part or England only with great difficulty This endeavor to understand language by unlesstheyare moderatelywell-educated. reconstructing the past of language a..d mak- They speak British, you see, and they speak it ing this reconstruction mainly upon the writ- alittledifferentlyin Cambridgeshire thanten record was the job of philologists. The they do in Lincolnshire but not enough sophilologists knew that language was Token, that it really interferes with communication.were quite aware thatthe I-do-European And you, as an American, will be still worsecould not have been able to write. If they had off. I have talked many times to Englishmen,been pinned down they would 1 ave admitted and not only did I not know what they werethat language was sound and that one had to saying, I didn't know what the subject of thethink about it as sound (Grimm's Law is a conversation was. statement of the relationships of the sound of There are a great variety of dialects andthe consonants) but they tended most to think these dialects go right back to Old English, toabout language as written language, concen- the way in which differences were enforced bytrating on the dead languages because these the Danish invasion and eventdally the Nor-were the most interel.ing ones to them. man invasion of England. I do not think the Relatively recently, we have had a different tatter brought. French to England with theapproach based upon the assumption that rapidity that is often assumed, but, of course,language has individual sounds u..d that these it did have its effect, and particularly it hadsounds can be identified. For instance, when its effect because it shifted the capital of the you say the wordtutor,notice that you do not city from Alfred's old capital at Winchester to put your tongue in the same place for the first London, which was much handier for the t as you do for the second t. When saying the Normans. It was a much better port thanword bit, you will find that you put your Winchester, which was not a port at all. Thetongue in still a third place for the t. The r, connections with the Continent were better sothen, has three different sounds at, least. One that French influences began countering inis initial, one is terminal, and another is the London. And as the trade built up, as themedial. And I am sure you could find more I importing of ides built up, d.A as the im sounds in English than that one. porting of goods built up, these came into the This was arevolutionaryidea.Itgot area. people to look closely at contemporary Ian- guage; they discovei'td they could find out all Philology sorts of things about language if they exam- ined it very closely in the way it exists now, This tremendous idea that languages existas a living language, and from this approach ed as they do because they had come intohas come the science of linguistics. I think an being by descent and on the analogy of theacceptable definition, maybe the most useful family, was nearly concurrent with the growthone, of linguis -s is that it embodies all the of the Getman university, and German scholprocedures for studying language in a way are, on the whole, built up this whole familywhich is likely to put the emphasis upon the tree, not only the family tree for Irdoutoworking languages that we know. So this pean but for other bodies of language such asdoesn't mean that linguists deny philology. UralAltaic, that great body of languages inThey recognize thatlinguistics has grown Northern Asia of which Finnish is a languagestraight out of philology, for which linguists of a subgroup called Finno-Ugric; the Semiticnow use the term historical linguistics. body of languages including Hebrew; and the All philologists use the languages that still Sinitic body including alarge number ofexist;all philologists know that the sound LANGUAGE 9 was important; all philologists try to thinkusing the American Indian "pogonip" and the about the ways sounds change and the wayPennsylvaniaDutch"cruller"and"pan- meanings change and the relationships of lan-haus." They are borrowed from someplace guage to human kings, te the users of it, butelse and we have gotten them because we had linguists shifted the emphasis a little more.some kind of contact with people who used They are relatively more concerned with lan-that word and for some reason we thought it guage and they have developed specific tech-would be handy to have the word. So we just niques which were unknown to the philolo-took it. I think it will be interesting to young- gists. For example, you could call linguisticsters and be fruitful for them to know that geography one of the modern techniques. Itmost of our common words come from Old was actually discovered by a philologist but itEnglish and that most of our specialized was pu' to work by the modern linguist aswords are borrowed. If we want to make one of a number of techniques characteristicpeople's backbones tingle, we use a very large of modern language study. part of Old English words because those are l've already pointed out that all languagesthe boneingling words, those are the words presumably come from an earlier languagepeople have lived with. and that these languages may be in a lan- As I have said, English an ludo- Europe. guage family. There has never been a timean language, part of the Germanic branch of when the words that you speak that havethat language. The ancient Germanic-speaking come from Indo-European have not been inpeople had already had some contact with the your language. A word like feet put yourculture that was flowing north. Roman trad- ancestors back at least as far as Indo - Europe.ers worked through them because Roman an. Every one of them called these pedalgoods were much better than the goods they extremities"feet." They didn'tnecessarilyhad, and Roman words began to infiltrate pronounce itthat way but they had sometheir language. For instance, an inlet from the sounds that denoted those objects and thussea into which you could get away from a you have the descent within the language. Istorm, was a harbor or a haven, i.e., it was a emphasize descent because one is inclined toplace of safety. But if this thing was devel- say "comesfrom."Here,"( )1nesfrom"oped with marine facilities by the Romans, it means it comes from Indo-Eur pean and itacquired the Roman name and was called a just kept coming all the time. port and one distinguished between a ha- If you'll look in the dictionary, you'll findyen and a port. A haven was a phenomenon thatarelatively small percentage of theof nature, a place that had always been there; words you use have come to us in that way.a port was manmade, something with wharves They're likely to be very important words and piers that could handle vessels of the size they're "man," "woman," 'house," "home."the Romans used. These are the words people live with; they're More words came from the Continent, par- likely also to be "and," "but," "of," "into,"ticularly when Christianity was imported and "off," and so forth the kind of words wemore or less became the official religion. A speak with. But the words that come fromgreat body of the early import borrowings in someplace else than Indo-European are veryvocabulary were Latinate words involving ec- much more numerous. clesiastical terminology. It is extremely unusual to find a word that has been devised in recent times. New uses Borrowed Words for old words are constantly being devised, Here, then, we are in the presence of thebut the great bulk of the words in ours or any process of borrowing. Anytime a body ofother language, so far as we've been able to people has contact with another body ofdiscover, have eithet descended from arcestial people, some words will leap across this bar-languagesorbeer.borrowed from some rier. lace else. They already existin that Ian This is a different phenomenon. A wordguage, and we just take them more or less like "foot" has come right down from Indowhole. European speakers and there's never been a The major fact of our history is the. most time when your ancestor was not using theof what we have we borrowed and we bor. word "'lot." But only recently have we beenrowed on a line from the eastern Mediterra

10 10 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION nean, west of the Mediterranean, north acrossthe Middle English period. And it changed Europe, and from the British Isles to thisrapidly, for a number of reasons. country. We have a great body of words that have come to us from France, but some ofReasons for Changes these words got into French in a special way. The word "franc" is a Germanic word. The One is that language is likely to change French picked up a few words from the Ger.when it's fighting for its life. And Old English mans. They were Gauls and the Gauls werewas not only fightingforitslife;it was Celts, so the French picked up a few Celticfighting the underdog fight -- or it looked words. Of course, we borrowed them. Wethat way. All the learned people were speak didn't care or know whether they were Celtic,ing and writing Latin. But it wasn't the Latin Greek, or Latin, or what they were. ihatsurvived. And themore fashionable We have borrowed, then, from French, wepeople, he business people, anybody who had have borrowed from Latin before it got toto get ,noney out of the government, were French, we have borrowed from Greek beforespeaking French. French was the business it got to Latin, and so on. The result is thatlanguage, the languagethatpeople were we have a large body of borrowed words.taught, the thins they learned in school. Or it Those borrowed words can come from manywas French of a sort, developed by whatever sources but by a curious accident we haveteachers they had who had learned French as borrowed most of them from right within thea second language. But the main language IndoEuropean family. was obviously not English. It was something When theGermanicspeaking Norsementhat came in with the Normans and developed came to Britain they brought their dialectsfrom the Normans. And sometimes it devel- with them but some changes which had al.oped a long way. ready taken place in Old English had not Just to show you how far this sort of thing taken place in Norse. For instance, the fk)eventually went, here is a handsome sentence sound which was commoninGermanicpicked up by R.W. Chambers out of the law tongues had become[151 in some (but notcourts: "II jeter un brickbat qui narrowly all) English dialects. You can still attend amissed." Most of this is French. "kirk" in Scotland, but when [1E] became Clearly, during this time things were hap- [tJJ the word became "church." This soundpening to Middle English with its confusion change did not take place in Old Norse. Onewith French. On thing that began to happen modern word that descended from the Oldfairly soon was that Middle English picked English stream is shirt, and if it had comeup a large number of French words. These through Old Norse it would have been skirt.did not come mainly in the AngloNorman That is, the ] in Old English representsdialed. They did not begin to come in any an[s]plus 1,1c) sound whichdidnotnumber at all until a couple of hundred years change in Old Norse. after the invasion, in the Middle Ages so far Theimpact is not very great, as a matter ofas culture was concerned. The Mediterranean fact, because modern English descends mainlyculture which had been building up was now from the dialect of London. And thus it didrolling in heavily. because the English people not preserve so many of these northern forms.eventually conqueredFrance. Many more If it hadn't been for the Norman influence,words were borrowed while the Englishmen which made London the capital, we mightwere running France than there were while very well be using more k, g, and sk soundsthe Frenchmen were running England. Who than we do. beat whom doesn't make very much difference As I've said before, there isn't any breai into language, but who uses whose goods does. language. The Normans came in in 1066, endAnd there's no question that the goods were while historians tend to end the Old Englishgoing mainly in one direction and that the period around the year 1100, this doesn'twords went right along with them. mean that people stopped talking Old English You can find many examples of this. One .n January 1, 1100, and started talking Mid-example is found in Chuck. When Chaucer dle English. There were dialects and thesespeaks of an ordinary clock, the kind ore dialects went on. But language did change might have in one's home, he calls it a clock. English changed at a remarkable speed inThat is,it was an Old English instrument,

1'l LANGUAGE 11 oerhaps not a very good one, but it was suchcontemporary work, Gawane and the Green as they had. But in the passage in the "Nun'sKnight which was probably written in Lon- Priest Tale" in which he's telling how accu.don, too, although by a northwesterner, you rate was the rooster's sense of time, he sayswill find that the language in Gawane and the that the rooster's crowing was more accurateGreen Knight appears to be about two hun- than the hortoge. A hor!oge, of course, is justdred years older. Why? Because the changes a French clock but it was the kind that wasin language were centering in the southeast. imported from abroad and put up in the clockThe grammar was becoming more simplified; tower. So, if you imported goods and ideas,the endings were falling off more; probably you also imported the words with them andsome of ti a changes in sound that are charac- you used your regular vocabulary for yourteristic of Modern English were already de- native stuff veloping as well as a great efflorescence of The greatest body of borrowing, the highestvocabulary and a specialized vocabulary. The percentage of borrowing, that the Englishhorse and his accoutrements were wellnamed; have ever done was in the Fourteenth CFI.they usually carried French names because tury, and the new words came mainly frov..themilitaryequipment was developed in French and after that from Latin. France or on the Continent and came through When London became the capital, a lot ofFrance, and the horse and his rider were Midlanders moved down toLondon.Al.handsomely adorned with fancy Frenchnamed though people were coming from every direc-armor. But any Ind of specialization, and tion to London, on the whole, the great bulkkind of development, was likely to be the of people, the great bulk of culture, tended tocenter of a whole body of importation of be northern and eastern, as against southernforeign terms. The more learned used Latin and western. Because London was makingterms, the less learned used French terms, itself felt throughout the country, this mid-and the good, snug, homey people still used land diatect became the central dialect as farOld English. as the growth of the language is concerned. The great English vowel shiftwas just One handsome old fib perpetuated in thebeginning to move through the language so textbooks is that English grew from the dia-that for practical purposes we can use the lect of London because Chaucer wrote thesame sound system on Middle English that language undefiled and that he was the onewe use on Old English, except that by then that fixed the language for us. But poets arethe dialects were more pronounced. not the determiners of the language. A good poet certainly has more impact upon the lan- guage than a good cabdriver has, but itisdtammatical Changes probable that all the cabdrivers of the world Grammar was changing very rapidly. Most have more impact on the language than allof the fairly complicated endings were no the poets of the world because there are justlonger so complicated. The genitive plural of more cabdrivers. And students are going toa good many Old English words was "ena," do more to determine thelanguage thanbut it doesn't occur very frequently in Middle teachers will. English. Those endings that had been made up of a vet el and a consonant were likely The Dialect of London now to be reduced to a vowel to the "schwa." There was no regularity about this. Modern English descends more than any-Chaucer used an infinitive without any end. where else from the dialect of London justing, he used an infinitive with an "e" ending, because that was where the industry centered,he used an infinitive with an "en" ending, as that was where the commerce centered, thatit was in Old English all depending upon was where the government centered, that waswhichever one happened to fit his rhythm and where the society centered, that was where thehis rhyme scheme. Obviously, he was hearing thinking centered. London rapidly became thethem all on the streets of London and he biggest city, and it was also the exporter ofwould use any one of them just as a poet the language as well as it was the developertoday feels that he can rhyme a.gain with of the language. So that, for instance, if you'deither rain or hen and be entirely respectable. compare Chaucer's Canterbury Tales with the There was obviously great variety of pro-

12 12 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

nunciation. The northerners spoke with manyuniformity began to appear out of necessity. more velar consonants, and if you don't be.Caxton used almost nothing but slanted lines lieve that Chaucer had noticed this, read Theat the end of sentences and this served hrn Reeve's Tale where he introduces a couple ofwell except when he got to the end of a boys who are talking a northern dialect. Soparagraph. But it took the printers to show us far as we can reconstruct the dialect of thehow to punctuate. north, Chaucer was reproducing it quite ac- Printing, however, was not alinguistic curately. And if there is some little difficultyphenomenon. It was an cconomic one; Caxton in applying mod .in sentence patterns to Oldprinted almost alltextbooks, or relatively English thereis almost no difficulty withpopular books of instruction, orreligious Chaucer. You can readit,as far as wordbooks. order is concerned, as though it were Modern Caxton published only one book written by English. a contemporary which one would call liter- Mechanics become particularly interestingary, Malory's Morse d'Arthur, and Caxton in Middle English. In the Old English period,published it because he thought it was his. most people did not write and if they did,tory. they wrote in Latin. :ally speaking, except for a rather With the two prominent dialects of theslight normalization of mechanics, printing Middle English period problems presentedhad relatively little influence upon language. themselves. A westerner would write would, The Renaissance, Shakespeare's time, be- for world, an easterner would write werM.fore and after, was marked by another great One word girl was spelled gyrl or gun/ in theinflux of culture, flowing in from the Conti. west and Berl or girl in the east. The dialectalnent in the 15th and 16 centuries, in fact to differences led to differences in spelling. I'vethe 17th century. But it wasn't a rebirth of seen one manuscript, a publication of thesomething dead. It was a shift in emphasis, Early English Text Society, in which theand it certainty was an acceleration. s.ribe used the same ;.ord in four successive Grammar had gone on changing rapidly. lines of poetry and he did not spell it theBy Shakespeare's time, most of the endings same way twice in any of those four lines.were gone. We haven't been able tolose Scribes obviously didn't have any agreementendings since Shakespeare's lime (we didn't between them about spelling and some justhave very many left to lose) and some of didn't bother. The idea of correctness in spell.those that we kept have been pretty useful. ing simply didn't exist. We wouldn't need to use the plural in a Put.ctuation was beginning to be used alanguage, we could get along without a plu- little althoughit had not been much usedral, but it is a handy device. The fairly obvi- earlier. The oldest punctuation mark is theous changes that were occurring were less use apostrophe.It appeared because when theof inflection, more rigidityin the sentence alphabet from which the Latin alphabet de-pattern, and more development of devices like scends was first developed it contained onlythe subordinate clauses and verbal construc- consonants and just didn't bother with thetions. vowels.Peoplewere supposedtoknow By the 18th century, language was pretty enough to put in the vowels, and they merelyorderly in appearance. Spelling was a little put a little mark at the top of the word todifferent, but not much different. People still indicate the omission of the vowel. This markdidn't know what to do about punctuation. became our apostrophe, which still indicatesThey were using a lot of colons where we an omission. would use semicolons, but ;hey were con- scious of punctuation and they taught it. And Punctuation their idea, apparently, was to let punctuation About this lime the14th and 15thindicate the amount of pause that an actor centuries more use was being found forwould use on the stage counting one !vat punctuation although there was no uniformfor a comma, two for a semicolon, three for a snstem. A dot would appear at the top, or atcolon, and four for a period. the bottom, or in the middle, and, apparently, But there was no agreement as to how to for some people each of these positions had ausecapitals. Some peoplecapitalizedall meaning. With Caxton's first printing somenouns and printed all proper nouns in italics. 13 LANGUAGE 13

In spite of a lot of variety, people obviouslybe correct. One assumed that this grammar were working toward some kind of regularity. would be Latin because, after all, Latin was By now they were talking about vocabu-what God and the angels spoke in Heaven. lary, and there were those who didn't like The reason one couldn't find as much "newfangle" words, as they called them. Thegrammar in English as in Latin was not that word was from Middle English newe fan- as we understand today because the gel. One should use only English words, theylanguages were essentially different and the said, and not terms cooked up out of Latin.grammars couldn't be expected to be the Another argument was whether to use moresame, but that English, something spoken in Latin words, not more Latin, because by now,the barbarous islands off the coast of Eu- of course, Latin was taught in the schools. Allrope, naturally, would have declined more educated people knew Latin, and they couldthan God's own language, Latin, or Greek, deliberate on these matters. Other people de.the language of the highly respected Aristotle. fended the beauties of the English language.Between God and Aristotle one would find Spanish and similar languages were considthe nearest thing to perfect grammar, the ered effeminate but English had the goodnearest thing to a universal grammar, If one virtues of solid English yeoman. wanted to find out whether an item of gram. mar was right or wrong, he just went back to Policing the Language Latin and Greek; here, while one might not be quite at God's elbow, at least he could be All sorts of people now knew Latin andfairly close to His footstool. they were beginning to write grammars. Ben Jonson wrote a grammar of English on the Cartesian Linguistics, a new book by basis of Latin. He just took a Latin grammarNoam Chomsky published by Harper and and found some English examples to fit theRow, is going to attract quite a lot of atten Latin rules. Such grammars were the basis oftion. Chornsky points out that a man like the English grammar for a good many years.Descartes was smart enough to realize that By the 18th century, grammars were beingthere must be something likea universal written in English instead of in Latin but theygrammar; that is, since we are all human were still based on Latin grammar. kings with somewhat similar minds, if we People had now become concerned withgot deep enough into language, we must come how to behave. Because London had becometo a place where there's something universal a fashionable court, one had to do the rightinit. And by universal grammar Descartes thing,theelegantthing,theappropriatemeans the inevitable relationship everywhere thing. So all sorts of people were policing thebetween language and mankind. But to the language. "This was right, that was wrong."18th century mind, universal grammar meant "This was barbarous and not only was thisLatin grammar. barbarous,buteverything everybodyelse Grammar is not of the earth solid. It comes wrote was barbarous." "I'm the only one whofrom life and is to be understood aslife, knows the language," one of these would say,growing, changing, phantasmagoric. We have "and the others are all wrong." If he couldnot always understood this. We have some find a Latin rule to fit a case, it was right. Iftimes tended to study grammar as we study they couldn't find a Latin rule to fit, it wasgeology, the record of something laid down wrong. rockribbed and ancient as the sun. Instead. The 18th century was sure that Latin waswe should study it as we study zoology, a right and that English was wrong. The 18thsubject order with system, with symmetry, yet century relied on what they considered aone in which change is the essence, not the fundamental principle called universal gram.accident. True, some grammar must be pur. mar. Their notion was that since God gave ussued as we pursue paleontology, the persistent language, he must have given us grammar,remains of old life. But although the paleon- and that whatever grammar we got from himtologist is studying trilobites as part of a now would be divine, perfect, and holy, and thatunalterable record, if he studies them only as any change of this grammar roust be a de.rock he will never understand them. As rec- cline from it. All one had to do was just to goords they are revealing of life and time, and back to whatever God gave us and that wouldas time they are dioramas of ancient life.

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So bits of old grammar can be studied asof things: linguistic units that are associated sounds which no longer seem regular or aswith meaning, and some way of working with spelling problems to trouble the young. Butthem. We can either keep them apart or we as records they reveal time and the humancan put them together. On the whole, our mind in the ancient sea of living language.attention has been drawn most to putting Grammarians have sometimes misread the rec-them togetherbecausethe grammar that ord becauserigidityin grammar hasitswe've tended to venerate has been one that philosophical foundations in the 18thcenturyhas put them together in certain ways. We concept of universal grammar; it recruited itscan guess that units of language tend to get scholars from among the authoritarians, fromtogether in some such way as this. among those who love security and authority more than they love'ife. Even the more Suppose we ha,,e a unit that means "wom- liberal students of language have not alwaysan," and another unit that means "lots of." If been mindful of the zoologic nature of gram-we then have quite a number of these charm. ing creatures we can stick the symbols togeth- mar. The philologists, for example, endeavoreder and we have "lots of women." Likewise, if to study language objectively. They did excel-we have something that means "ducks," we lent work upon which modern linguistics hascan combine it with the "lots of" unit and get its firm foundation. But they sometimes forgot"lots of ducks." Now, pretty soon we have that in language the study of a letter of thesome symbol that means "more than one." alphabet killeth but the sound giveth life. AWe can assume that this is the way plurals word may acquire grammar from its circumdeveloped, that we had a meaningful designa stances as in: "How are you coming?" "Fin.tion which became a classifier, a classifier ished." which could then be attached to anything to Even physical circumstances may supply aobtain some kind of recognized use. sort of grammar. For example, the sign on a Language students tended to notice that store front, "John Bean Jewelry," does notsome two units can be put together and retain imply that the proprie'or's middle name istheir integrity. For instance, we certainty do "Bean." These minor evidences of grammarthis in making vocabulary, what we call com help to define grammar itself, to put limits topounding. The classroom blackboard used to it. Grammar is the elaborate formalized andbe called a blackboard because it was a black highly specialized means with which linguisticboard. Now many people call them chalk. units can be used so that a language becomesboards. Butinanyevent,"black" and adequate for tne subtle and infinite demands"board" and "chalk" are all units and can be made upon it. used without each other for semantic put, poses, but, of course, they can be used for Curious Paradox grammatical purposes, too. Or we can have a unit that has a meaning and which can be We must now observe a curious paradox.used by itself. To it, we can append things Although grammar is universal in the sensethat cannot be used by themselves but still do that all languages have grammar and appar-have a known use, the things we call affixes; ently must have it, no two languages haveprefixes, if they come al the beginning, in been discovered which use the same grammar.fixes, if they come at the middle, and post. No language has ever been discovered thatfixes or suffixes if they come at the end. used only one grammatical procedure.AllEnglish does use this device within limits for languages use some combination of moregrammatical purposes. For instance, suppose than one grammatical principle, and each of invented a gadget and called it a " gipso." these various devices isapparently almostThen ifIattached it to another machine it infinite in its possibilities. would be said thatIhad "gipsoized" that English uses word order as a linguisticmachine. And if you knew what a "gipso" is, device. A "cold head" itnot the same as ayou would know what "gipsoizing"is.I "headcold";"grammar, scienceof the"could adapt this to a television set and there. means nothing except in an index; "grammar,fore have "giixsoized" television. Once a word the of science" means nothing at all. has a meaning, it can pick up the suffix vile In language we're likely to have two sortsand the like. LANGUAGE 15

We have theterm "synthetic," puttingunits is analytic, keeping them apart in vari- things into a whole, for the kinds of grammarous ways. One of the most obvious things is that I've been describing and other terms,to change the order; we can have a fairly "inflectional,"forexample,areusedforrigid order for things if they go together one these. way and a different order if they go together One assumes that there's a kind of a pro.another way. We can build up fairly rigid gression here; that we start by sticking to-patterns. Once we hear the syllable "the" we gether meaningful units, roughly keeping thehave started a sequence which has to end in a meaning that they had, and then doing this soname for something. We may say, "The very much that we get to using a unit just for thatcantankerous, longnosed, objectionable.. ." purpose even though itstill retains some ofbut we've got to get to "man" or something its old life as a meaningful unit. And then,like it; we can't just keep going. finally, it goes on so much that it doesn't any Obviously, other sorts of things can be longer have this life. done. We can use some kind of word to This, of course, is all postulation becauseindicate a relationship. Say "of ducks" and we have no language that we have been ableeveryone knows that the ducks are now relat- to trace through this whole sequence. But ited to something else.It can be dozens of seems plausible that if we start sticking thingsducks. It can be a number of things, but together, when they are linguistic units, weducks has now been introduced into some can't go any further than the time whenkind of sequence in which modification is they're reduced to no meaning at all but ainvolved. The word of which nobody can use, probably as some kind of classifiers. And define indicates relationships. And, obvi- mostof theseclassifiersare quitesmall.ously, English has gone on using this device. Sometimes we get them with several syllables,It's clearly one that we have been developing. as ena in Old English, a genitive plural whereIn earlier Old English, even where we can we probably have the remains of two classifi-find some order we can't translate it with any ers run together, one indicating plural andcertainty unless we know the paradigm sys- one indicating something like possession. tem that had descended more or less from Another aspect of combinationis some-IndoEuropean. And as English changed, the times called incorporation. This is a deviceorder became important; the inflections be. which Erglish uses a little. If somebody says,came less important; the inflections became "Get out!" he needn't include the subject, butless important until now we do not have we would assume that the subject is includedmany of them anymotz. At the same time, in the verb. these other devices were developing. Indo- You know that Latin uses incorporation toEuropean had verbs but no use for what we a considerable extent. It can put any of thecall auxiliaries because the verb carried with. pronouns that can be used as the subjectin itself classifiers which indicated how it was within the verb. Some American languagesbeing used. not only incorporate the subject in the verb; We find more complex verbs in Old Eng. they also incorporate the object in the verb solish, but, relatively speaking, not very many, the verb shows who's doing what to whombut we now have great streams of them. "I and why. could not go to the concert last evening but I It is possible for even one of these prin.should have liked to have been able to go." ciples of combining to become quite complex.We can build up extremely exact words. That Indo-European had more than a dozen differ-process obviously has grown in English. Old ent classes of nouns. And Indo.EuropeansEnglish, of course, had no specific future. It had three different classifications of modifiers.used the present for the future and maybe it So there was one set of endings on the nouns,wasn't very much interested in the distinction another set of endings on the modifier and inbetween what is going on now and what is Anglo -Saxon even the article was declined. So not quite yet going on But, if it had to make you could get the article declined one way,that distinction, it had ways of making it with the modifier declined another way, and theother words, devices to indicate time. noun declined still a different way. These Old English did, however, have a few things can become complicated. words that were turned to this purpose, al The other way of handling the linguisticthough presumably in Old English they were

16 16 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

not yet used to this way. It had the word The grammar that got started when we first "sculan" which meant "ought to, should havebecame self-conscious about grammar was an obligation." based upon Latin grammar, and based to a We can say now, "Mary is going to get mar-remarkable degree on an elementary Latin ried."If this sentence had been said longbook, of all things. There were better ones enough ago, the assumption would have beenbut they were hard to come by. The one book that Mary is undergoing transportation. She'sthat was readily come by, and the one that afoot or she's on horseback or she's in ateachers knew and used, was the one that buggy. And when this movement stops, shelabeled the eight parts of speech. And that's will be at the point at which matrimony willthe reason we have eight parts of speech, occur. That's not what it means any more.because, in the simplifying manner in the That is, the semantic meaning of "is going" isMiddle Ages, it was decided there were eight almost completelylost, andit'sobviouslyparts of speech in Latin. If Latin was the becoming a future. universal grammar, there must be eight parts There is no one language so far as weof speech it English. So we conjured up eight know and there never has been a languageparts, and there've been eight parts ever that can be described by one principle insince. This is the assumption that the Ian. grammar because languages always use moreguage will be best described by identifying than one. But if a language uses one kindthe parts of speech. dominantly, for convenience we call it by that If we examine English, it's pretty hard to principle. And on that basis we would charac-determine what the parts of speech are except terize modern English as an analytic lan-as we find a word in use. But in an inflection. guage. For grammatical purposes, we useal language if the word carries within it a word order. We use the words that we haveform, and this form means that this word can taken from elsewhere and make them intowork in only certain ways, the part of speech auxiliary kinds of things. We clearly use thisidea becomes applicable. If we learn Latin, device more than we use inflection. we scrupulously learn that certain forms can But since there will always, so far as webe this, or this, or that, and we check to see know, be more than orx grammatical prin.which one will make sense in this sentence. ciple at work in any language in any givenWithin limits we can describe the grammat. time, there is no such thing as the grammarical properties of any given form in the Latin of English or of any other language, if youlanguage. In English, however, form is not think of grammar, as most people do, as athe best approach, although it certainly has body of grammatical statements. its us,, for English operates under more than All modern grammarians now quite franklythe one principle inherited from Latin. agree that it's possible to accept not only one This was, on the whole, the approach to of several fundamental principles of languagegrammar in the 19th century: defining the but also one of several secondary decisions.parts of speech. People through the 19th cen- They apply the principle of parsimony andtury tried to be scientific. And the grammat- adopt whatever gives them the simpler andical theorists called themselves scientific. That better ordered statement. is, they had found a way to study language objectively to an extent it had not been stud. Grammatical Sta te men t ied before. They had found a way of express- A grammatical statement is a human edi.ing me history of a word and how that word lice. It's something thrt we raise in order togrew. They called this being scientific and promote our understanding of the language.compared to the irrespOnsible thinking about It's not what's there. It isn't possible to saylanguage that had gore on before, it was what's there. We may come close enough to itscientific. Etymology was more scientific than so that most people will agree, or at least wegrammar because it was relatively easy to may come close enough to it so that we gettrace the development of a word, but how an ordered statement. But all we can hope iscould they measure grammar? They could, a that once we halve established our assumplittle, by naming the parts of speech and tion, we can come to something like an agree.defining them but this wasn't very scientific ment as to what the statement about theparticularly since many words just wouldn't language would be. fit the definition.

17 LANGUAGE 17

Valid Grammar is a little book of a little more than 100 pages and it is one of the toughest little books that I Early in this centuryin trying to find ahave ever encountered. I read it again and way of being more scientific about language,again tillI knew what he was saying. But he people realized that languages could be ap-gets only just barely past the simple sentence proached from one point of view sound.and I can tell you that so far as I'm con- We're assuming now that we will get a validcerned the major problem in grammar is not grammar by starting from sound. And wheth-to be found in the simple sentence. But any- er or not it's the most useful grammar, theway, you will hear more about that and more most nearly valid grammar, at least this ap-about its uses, if it has uses, and it now looks proach is legitimate if it develops as a wayas though it has great uses. It's being used in that is consistent within itself. many schools and with quite a lot of apparent The starting of language study with soundsuccess. was combined with another idea, that is, ti.at We should, however, develop a different sound will always have some kind of order ofgrammatical statement. Are we to start with appearance. Languages have some kind ofthe assumption that function is primary in rigid structure and you can, by definition,English and develop our description centrally reduce any language to its units of sound andupon function, using other grammatical con- then determine theorderin which thesecep's only when we need them? As yet this sounds can occur, what the structuralists callhas not been done with entire success al the "privilege of occurrence." They analyzethough great progress was made by the Dan- the language on a structural basis by firstish grammarian, Otto Jespersen. breaking it down into all of the sounds and When ! said that no satisfactory grammar then finding out which can occur with othersof English inis as yet been based upon func and in what order they occur. And when theytion, I was not at all implying that the present get that they have an objective description ofstatement would be satisfactory. If it is any the language on a fairly simple basis. This isthing at all,itis a pioneering work, and what is called structural analysis or taructural.pioneerscharacteristicallymakeblunders ism, or more commonly structural linguis-which become laughable inlight of later tics. knowledge. As Sapir put it, all grammars leak. The structuralist works on existing lan-And I shall be happy if this one proves only guage and tries to extract the grammar frommoderately sieve-like. And even if it should it but we've lately decided to work on theprove to be essentially sound, it will be too language that is coming into being and findbrief to be adequate as a description of the out how it comes. Because since this is Ian.working of the language. I mike my observa guage in process of generation, we call it thelions about previous functional grammatical generative grammar of the language as it isstatements only to justify my attempt. Previ developing.GenerativegrammarianshaveGus efforts to write a functional grammar of tried to write out the laws that would describeEnglish have not been sufficiently successful the way the English language comes to be. toprecludefurthersimilarcontributions. This gets pretty complicated unless you useAndI'dsaythatthis does grow out of another device called "Transformation." ForsomethingIhave already saidin astill instance, the sentence, "The dress is red," canmore elementary wayintheAfiracle of be transformed into the phrase "red dress." Language.2 Conversely, adjectives can all be transformed I should admit that my grammatical state- into one of several types of sentences. Thisment will not be scientific. Most grammars allows you to make a much simpler statementere not scientific in any great sense. Exact description of the whole language, but I'mscience requires exact measurement, and no not going to go into that at this time. It canone has yet been able to measure all aspects get elaborate and, as far as I'm concerned,of language exactly. that's the difficulty with it.It rapidly gets Structural linguistics makes some pretense elaborate. to scientific accuracy and is more exact than You'll findthat Noam Chomsky'slittle book, Syntactic Structures, is the foundation T Chariton I eird, The Crorte 4 1 anoNee Vorlt. F.,rit R °rid of this abuse of generation in grammar. This lilxO 19651.

lb 18 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION the grammar I shall propose because it restseven agreed as to the word that was "under- upon sound, which is measurable. But it canstood." Bt.t they were assuming two different maintain even rough accuracy, at least at thisorders,thatis,two different positionsin time, only by ignoring the larger aspects ofwhich the word "is" was tc occur. The sender language. meant Now oldisMark Clark? butthe receiver assumed flow is old Mark Clark? The Main Use of Language Transposing old and is gave different mean Ishall endeavor to be as objective as Iings to the statement and different uses to all can, but that will not be very objective. 1 shallwords in the sentence except Mark Clark. The in part use meaning. Many students of gram-two sentences have different grammar be. mar have demonstrated that meaning does notcause with the change of order the various provide an adequate means of measuringwords worked differently. grammar. But most students have found it reliable if it is used with restraint. Even in Grammatical Sense structural study it is used in deciding whether To determine what function is, I shall have two locutions are or are not equal. I shallto rely upon something which is called gram. assumethat,forgrar..naticalpurposes, matical sense. Admittedly, grammatical sense the main use of language is to express oris not uniform or objective. And it has some convey meaning. It can be used for other ofthesamesortofobjectivitythatthe purposes, to make an impression, to relievestructuralist claimed for the phoneme. Liter- one's feelings, to produce musically pleas.ate users of the language would recognize it ant sounds. But these minor purposes ofand agree upon it. For example, most users of language do not much involve grammar; the language would agree upon the subject of consequently,Ishall assume that sentences most sentences once the subject has been havedifferentmeaning.Havingdifferent pointed out to them. Now, of course, we shall meaning, theyhaveadifferent grammarfind areas in which we're not certain of the unlessthe differenceisaccountedfor byfunction, but such uncertainty occurs in all the meanings of the words.Ishould saygrammatical statements about English, and that She is happy and She is sad have the probably in all other languages. And at worst same grammar becausethedifferencein we are likely to know when we are fairly sure meaning between the two seems to be acof the function and when we are not. My counted for by the difference between hap. grammatical conviction differs fundamentally py and sad.But Sheisspankingher from the belief of others who have written on daughterhasagrammarwhichdiffers the subject in that I am making more allow from She is ashamed of her daughter and ance than they have for the now welrecog She is shamed by her daughter. Spanking nized fact that English is, to a large degree, a her daughter seems to have, no equivalent distributive, isolating, or analytic language. in the two other sentences and is seems to isolating and distributive mean the same work differently in the three sentences, as thing as analytic. does daughter. Little study has been made of distribution Here's another insight, handsomely illus.as a device. I am nct sure how generally true trated by a tale which, however apocryphal itmy assumption may be, but I am assuming may be, reveals grammatical distinctions. Ac-that distribution as a grammatical principle cording to the story, an American journalisttends toward fluidity in grammar. At least, I working abroad needed to know the age ofam convinced it does so in English, particular. General Mark Clark. He wired his homely in the more elaborate structures, and this office: How old Mark Clark? The recipient,fact has been insufficiently recognized, partly finding this query facetious, replied, Old Mark because of the way in which grammatical Clark fuse. flow you? statements have been evolved. The grammar. This tale is revelationsl for the nature ofian often starts with a sentence, like Adrian English grammar and for the sense in which I hates girls, and notices that the subject is am using meaning as a measure of grammar. Adrian, the verb, hates, and the object, girls. In the sentence, flow old Mark Clark? both It can scarely be denied that the subject is, all the sender and the receiver recognized all the subject and nothing but subject, the verb all words and knew their possible uses. Theyverb, etc. Having e

20 20 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION grammar need so name them or make muchto break the constructions do,in further, we of them. can attack the problem better after we have Looked at largely, an English sentence canconsidered the whole question of subordina- be broken down into subject and its modifiers.tion and modification. And what I do there, This seems_ to be the way English works of course, is to suggest that we have preposi that we name a subject and then modify thetions all right, but we also have postpositions concept involved in this subject. The girlsand we'd probably have interpositions. If you aretalking.The girlsarelivelytakers.want to describe these things by their posi The girls, talking about their dates, daterlion, then of is an interposition between doz- likestripped gears.The girlswho haveens and girls, and what it does is to show the dates talk more than those who have not.relationship between them within the subject, Inthesesentences,allthe words exceptnot identify one of them as the subject and girls can be thought of as modifying ourthe other the modifier of it. concept of the idea involved in girls. Of Being verb is the second of these func- course, this statement is inadequate, but ittions. The verb occurs second in most normal may be suggestive of theessentialspiritEnglish sentences. Actually, we may do better and thecorepatternof English. Englishhere to borrow a concept from the structural. communicates largely by choosing the sub-ist and recognize zero in grammar. The con- ject and modifies our concept of that sub-ventional statement, of course, postulates in ject. The next sentence will provide a difsuch constructionsas 1 have shown that ferentsortofmodificationof the samesomething is understood. This concept would subject oritwill provide another subjectserve moderately well, but it presents difficul- relatedto thefirst and modify that. Theties. What is thought of as missing is not resultis connected discourse with enoughnecessarily missing and it may not be very grammar betweenthesentences, althoughwell understood. In Janet swallowed, nothing most of the sense is provided by the func-is missing or understood, but there may be. tioning of the words within the sentence.Consider the following: "Janet," father said, Frequently,asinthesentences I men"this is silly. You are going to swallow that tioned, the grammatical subject of the senoyster." Obediently, Janet opened her mouth. tence is also the semantic subjtet. But, asFather dropped the oyster into it, the mouth we shallsee, any assertionof thissortclosed. Janet blinked a few times. We sat cannot be pushed very far. entranced. Janet swallowed. Presumably, the Usually the subject is the first word in aoyster went down. sentence that can function as subject unless There is enough grammar between the something is done to signal that it is not thesentences so that we should probably guess subject. In certain fixed patterns the subjectthat Janet swallowed the oyster. And hence does not come first: Are those girls as silly asthe oyster as complement is understood. But they sound? There are good reasons to conthe oyster may not have gone down. Janet's cider those girls silly.In at least one patternnext move may have been to lefty,the table the grammatical subject is not the semantichastily so that she could spit out the oyster in subject. This pattern requires a verb in pas-private. The fact seems to be that we are here sive : You were depressed by the silli-dealing with two words or two uses of swal- ness of the girls. lowed one of which in the conventional We have noticed that words become sub-terminology is transitive, that is, it requires a jects only if they can function as subjects. Wecomplement, not zero, and one which is in have here a sort of parts-ofspeech distinction,transitive and hence requires a zero comple but the structure is called "privilege of occur-ment. rence." Sometimes the subject may be ob- We might, of course, employ another con. scured. In the sentence Dozens of girls werecept of grammar incorporation. That is, we chattering on the schoolyard the conventionalcould my that in Janet swallowed the com statement would identify dozens as the sub-'dement is incorporated within the verb, ex ject, modified by of girls, but surely the girls,cept that we do not know whether there is not the dozens, were doing the chattering.anything to be incorporated. Janet may not Perhaps one might treat the whole sequenceeven have swallowed any saliva. In a sentence dozens of girls as the subject. But if we wishlike Help! the concept that parts of the basic

21 LANGUAGE 21 sentenceP re understoodorincorporatedbecause they are essential in the working of works miller better,If helpispart of athe verb-like portion of the sentence. We sentence sequence, we are probably justifiedshould observe also that this is a definition by in assuming that I and want are understoodfunction. Certain words have the privilege of or incorporated. But if help is an imperativeoccurrence that allows them to function as part, we cannot be sure. Presumably, then,verbs; words like have, off end shall have the subjectis you or somebody, and thethe privilege of occurrence within the verbal complement is probably me or us. function, mite is, they can work with subjects and complements in predication. Normally, they participate in no other function. Many Subject-Verb-Complement words, however, may function as verbs and Thus we shall probably describe more ofhave privilege of occurrence in verbs but may the constructions in the language if we recog also participate in other functions and have nize that the basic sentence in English followsother privileges, such as subject,train, and the subjectverb-complement (SVC) pattern,ucter. and that in most sentences in adult discourse We could, of course, define each use of a all three parts are represented by spoken orgiven sound and its associations as s separate written locutions, anyone of which may beword. But to do sn would complicate our represented by zero. problem and probably would not clarify it, as we shall see when we come to complements Like the subject,the verb is not veryand modifiers. As I am using verb, then, I difficult to recognize although it may be diffi-mean whatever functions as the verb in a cult to define, particularly in the etymologicalgiven sentence, and not necessarily a word or sense in which defining is putting limits to thewords which can be recognized by form or by defined object, as ona defines a country byany other device outside the grammatical se bounding it. We, base already seen that inquence within whichitoccurs. Of course, most sentences of two words the verb can beform both actual and hypothetical can be readily recognized, as in h rained, Ile shout-useful as a practical key in recognizing verbs. ed. But most sentences contain more than two We should ask ourselves now whether the words. And we have seen also that in many offunction of being verbs can be divided into the longer sentences the line between the verbsubfunction-. In inflectional languages, verbs and the complement becomes obscure, as incan usually be divided into classes recogniz You ought to try to get your father to signable by form, and these classes can be associ your report card while he is still sober. Inated with certain uses. Shat is, the verb can this sentence, the verb begins with ought andbe arranged in what we call paradigm: era, card is surety involved in the complement.eras, eras, erarnus, eratis,erant.On this anal- But saying just where the verb stops and theogy, paradigms have been made up for the complement begins might occasion an extenmodern English verb, also, but they are obvi- sive argument. ously inaccurate and inadequate; and they Perhaps we may postulate a wcrking defi-have been so oftenproved that we need nition something like the following: The verbspend little space demolishing them. In the works with the complement to complete thesentence I go to school, gois said to be the predication started by the subject, This state-simple present, but in most contexts it obvi ment will presume some other assumptionsously is not The speaker probably means to and conclusions which we have already ac-imply I hate been going to school for some cepte-d: that the normal order, SVC, is not thetime orI am going to schoolnou and I only possible ord "r, that either the subject orexpectto continuegoingto school for some the complement may appear as zero, and that timein the future. A comic book Indian may the verb need not be limited to one wordbe expected to say Me go now, but this is which is verb and nothing else. Remember,scarcelythe exclusive, the used American I'm using verb here not as a part of speechform, or even native American English at all. but as being verbs. Whatever works in this On the other hand, go can also be a future way I would call verb, and eventuallyI'llform Fs in the sentence I go tomorrow. Simi- have to get to the place where I'll call somelarly, the imperfectis not the imperfect in things that you call nouns part of the verbTorn Sawyer 11 hiteuashed the fence. The verb

2 22 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

whit':washed isnotimperfect; presumablyguage, and, accordingly, we should not expect Tom thought he was done. On the other hand,to findit characteristic of modern English, the perfect is not usually used for perfected orwhich preserves the ancient inflectional sys- completed actions, as in 1 seem to have been tem of IndoEuropean only partially and has whitewashing fences all my life. The speakernot tended to develop inflectional devi:;es in presumably expects the whitewashing to con.recent times. That is, this may be what it tinue. One can say 1 have punched him in the means to have a distributive grammar or a jaw, which employs the supposedperfect synthetic grammar. form, but a native speaker would not usually use this form in such a sentence. He would more likely say I punched. In the l-gotoObjective Description in Grammar school sentence, if the speaker really wanted to say he was on his way to school, he We have afluid grammar, aflexible wouldn't say 1 go to school; he would say / grammar, ahighlyadaptable andsubtle am going to school. grammar, but not a grammar which readily Similarly, the future is difficult to distinlends itself to objective description. So far as gtiish from the conditional.I shall go iswe know, however, order and system :re simple future but the future always involvescharacteristics of all languages even though condition. When General DouglasMacArno languages are entirely orderly or systemat- thur said in the Philippines, I shall return, heic. They allreflect conflicting grammatical was intending presumably to utter a simpletendencies and they may reflect just plain future. And his statement presages a futureaccident. They certainly seem to in the pres- action which became reality. But he could notent state of our pitiful ignorance. Then .e know this The war might have dragged onmust seek such order as may be found. We until after he had retired. He might have beenshould remind ourselves that the order and shipped to another theater cf war. A Japanesesystem of a language may not accurately sniper might have shot him the next instant. reflectthe order and system of the same If the paradigms of the English verb con-language at an earlier date, particularly in structed by a partof-speech approach, usingEnglish, which has shifted from a strongly the analogy of the tenses of Latin, is unsatisinflected language to a strongly distributive factory, can we devise a better? I suspect thatlanguage. We need not be surprised if the we are not likely to be able to devise a verybasis as well as the details have altered. satisfactory set of paradigms for modern Eng. And here we need to be sharply on our lish. 1 believe it is the nature of the languageguard. Grammatical devices are likely to be- that we should not be able to do so. I take itcome so overwhelmingly imbedded inthe to be the nature of an inflectional languagethinking processes of the users of the lan that its verb forms constitute a relatively rigidguage that an observer of language readily system, and that this system can be describedtends to set the familiar when he should be by devising paradigms and fitting forms intodiscovering the unfamiliar. Thu,-,I immedi them. These paradigms send toward comeately become suspicious of myself when 1 pleteness and regularity within the pattern ofobserve that a sense of time or tense which the language. If the language declines thewas deeply imbedded in IndoEuropean seems verb for person, there will tend to be distincalso to be strong in the modern English verb, tions for persons in a manner tending towardeven to provide the basic classification. This regularity. If a language tends to cast verbssort of thing has worked to hamper a good into the form of actions, you may expect tom.oy grammatical statements. The people we find something like a tense system labellingwell- grounded inLatin tended to see the these actions, but actions that are essentiallyworking of that kind of grammar wherever it timeless will be expressed in verbs hayingcould be applied at all, even though they had certainirregularities. This is, although all endeavored to be objective. languages will evince irregularity as well as To return, then, to the basic subdivisions regularity, inflectional grammar tends to proof constructions which function as verbs,I mote regularity, and even rigidity. suggest tentatively that tense may stillbe I suspect that this is not the character h.primary for English verbal classification.I an isolating or synthetic or distributive Ian.should propose a basic division into ( I } point

23 LANGUAGE 23

tense verbs, (2) spread tense verbs, and (3)ments as in the example above, and they may tenseless verbs. The form I had gone is usual-indicate continued past action, as in I did ly point tense; it refers to a designated timelave her. Most point tense uses with do are al. prior to another time in the past. So, too, is Imost unthinkable, as in I do chap this chicken's shall have gone and usually I shall go. Thehead off. Many of our very complex verbs so-called historical present (which might bet-result from the need to reduce a past action to ter be called narrative prescrit) is also a pointa point. At least one difference between I tense form as in the following: He goes quiet-should have liked to be able to go and I ly to the closet, dray s out an old Ji..ng piece,should have liked to have been able to go is tiptoes to the window, and points the muzzlethat the lane'represents point rather than 0,4.5i,ie. Now we might Wilke that thesespread tense, although it is so involved that it constructions cannot be certainly identified byis not much used and so precise that most form. Takes is simple or narrative present,speakers would not want to bother with it. but it seems to have a broader spread in He A good many verbs involving the future takes his time about ii, doesn't he? and wouldare spread tense verbs. They involve all the be tenseless in Ile always takes his time. future, and they may involve the present, as in Don't clean your nails in public. They may even be mainly concerned with the immediate Verb Tense present which includes the future, as in Be Large numbers of modern American verbscareful of that radioactive waste. evince what I have called spread tense. They Tenseless verbs are extremely common in cover a considerable spread of time, but thisEnglish. They appear in objective and inform- spread is firmly limited. For example, Pimpleative discourse: Patriotism is the last refuge verbs involving the past do not usually inof a scoundrel and The scorpion is an arach dude the future or the present. They tend tonid.Tenseless verbs are probably the corn- be perfect, although this supposed perfectedmonest in ordinary speech. I like ice. Jimmy action may be whatiscalled progressive.is devoted to what he calls science. Two and That is,it may have continued over sometwo are four. Presumably, since these verbs time. I shot Pry old grandmother is presuma.involve both the past and the future, they take bly point time and perfect, but I shot birdsthe tense form that historically is the present. all afternoon is perfect although clearly notThe verb is usually simple. A form like I am point time. The theoretically perfect forms going can be tenseless, but it usually is point those with have tend to suggest continuedtense. And even if it is spread tense, which it past action and may even imply present andcan be, some modifier usually indicates this future, as in I have been flunking courses allfact, as in At the moment I am going to my life. school, which, of course, does not mean at the Most progressive forms tend to be imper.moment at all bat indicates that the action, in fect and to imply a continuous action as in Iaddition to being present, extends only briefly was shoveling off the sidewalk. This charac-into the past and probably will not extend far teristicis to be contrasted to the so-calledinto the future. present progressive, of course, which usually These applications of form to function are indicates point time in the present. The simnot very sharp, as we have seen. The imper. ple past may be used as a point tense infeet can be imperfect but usuallyitis not, narrative, as in Braddock crossed the riverbeing frequently point tense and frequently and marched blindly into an ambush, but it istehseless. Similarly, the future, which is often also used to indicate customary past action;point tense, as in I shall return, can also be that is, it is a spread tense as in the follow.spread tense, as in Henceforth, I shall devote ing: The IndoEuropcaru domesticated horsesmy life to my children. and drank their milk but apparently did no Of all the so-called tense forms, perhaps use them as draft animals to plow. the pluperfect is most frequently a poir t tense The forms with do, commonly called theand used for this tense only to indicate a time emphatic forms, are usually spread tense orprior to a past time. Even this form, however, tenseless verbs. They can be emphatic, ofmay not he sharply point tense. And it may course, as in I do love you but usually arebe almost interchangeable with other past not. They are often used in negative state-farms. I shall not pursue the possibility fur.

2.4 24 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION ther, however. To do so would involve extentime: the next time. We may or may not wish sive study which, as far as I know, has notto say that this sentence, which conventionally been made. Even if it had been made, wewould be called a verbal, modifies the verb. would not have room for the results here. It seems to modify the subject, 1, as well, but We can, however, make some observationswhatever it may be, we can agree probably to which may be reliable. (1) As between formwhat it is doing: it is determining that 1 sate and function in modern English verbs, thereconcerns the point action. In the same sen- is no consistent onefor-one equivalent, thattence, however, told, although comparable in is, it is not to be expected that one form inform to scw, probably does not refer to a modern English will have one function norpoint action; if it does, the fact is not very that one function will be expressed by onesignificant. Told is prc.surnably spread tense form. If this is true, paradigms will probablyor tenseless here. And all assume that it not be very useful in attempting to order andis. The 1 of the sentence has been thinking understand tt e English verb. (2) The Englishthis for a long time. lie still thinks it while he verb system has undergone extensive changes.tells her, and he presumably thinks so at least These changes include t:ie formation of nu.as strongly after he has fixed the opinion in merous new forms, I have not been able tohis mind by telling her. Of course, the verb go, I shall expect to go. They include also the may not be tenseless here. But told is so strongly adaptation of old forms to new uses. Forsuggestive of a tenseless verb that ifitis example, the old preterit may now be used asanything else, and if this difference is impor- a point past verb, a spread past verb, or a tant,thecareful speaker would introduce tenseless verb. (3) In spite of these changes,some sort of modifier to suggea tense in the English verbs can still be classified rough.which the verb is being used, as in I told her ly on the basis of tense in the point tense,what I then thought of her, 1 told her what I spread tense, and tenseless verbs. To say thatthought of her at the moment. English verbs can be classified roughly insofar as their function in revealing is con- Complements cerned is not at all to say that time cannot be accurately expressed in English. Verbs can be I want to talk now about complements. used very accurately to reveal time but onlyTraditionally,acomplementacquiresits within limit= isthis expression of time inname becauseitcompletes the predation volved within the verb itself. Apparently, weabout the subject which is started by the verb. rely upon the form of the verb to reveal tenseAnd this concept will probably serve us if we if the form alone will reveal tense adequately.add that we should probably consider as If not, the verb form is used within the rangecompleme,its whatever is needed to complete of tense for which it can function. And it isthe verb, granted the purpose of the sentence, refined to a point or spread to an area of timeprovided it cannot be identified plausibly as to whatet r extent may be necessary by theverb. We should remind ourselves, however, addition of modifiers. Notice the following:that we have already recognized the principle The next time 1 saw her, 1 told her what Iin this distributive grammar that any word thought of her. Saw here must be a pointmay be expected to function in more than one tense verb, but it is not so always. Notice theway at a time Functionally, complements are following: 1 saw her jab her neighbor with a perhaps best divided into two sorts: those that hat pin.ff henever I went to the monies, Iuse copulative verbs and those that do not. saw her jabbing her neighbor tcith a hat pin. The second sort of complement is more 1 saw something deeply Freudian in her pro-varied. It introduces an idea or ideas not as clivity to ptb people it ith hat pins. Sat(an beclosely associated with the subject. The pat. appropriately a point tense verb (first examtern i3 something like 1 lore Lucy in which I ple), a spread tense verb (second example),and Lucy are separate individuals. In a sen or a tenseless verb (third exarnple). tenee as simple as this no problems appear. Let us return to a previous example sinceLucy is complement, the so-called direct ob- saw unmodified is likely to be a spread tenseject. Some complications of this pattern cause or a tenseless verb, It requires a modifier tono difficulty; in / said I toted tor, the com identifyit as point tense. Accordingly, theptement has become a clause and has its own clauseincludes anidentificationof pointSC patient, but I loin! her is still a clearly

2i LANGUAGE 25 delineated object. The construction becomesthese sentences which contain a complement complicated in /gave Lucy my love,in whichrelated to the remainder of the sentence. For the complement becomes , the twoexample, in the last sentence the sense re- elements playing somewhat differentrolesquires that himdenying me and complicity witl^ch being nonsense without the other. Imust all be part of an interdependent comple gave Lucyand Igave my loveare bothment. Now, are all these elements what would sentences, but not the sentenceItried tobe called nouns? In Imade him uncornforta write. We have avoided thinking much ut thisble, uncomfortablewould normally be called construction by giving it a name. We call aa modifier and it does seem to be modifying. word likeLucyan indirect object. This is not But the complement is incomplete without it, a very revealing term. There is nothing indi-and therefore, it is in itself complement. We rect about the relationship betweenLucynnddo not say I made him with anything like the gave except thatLucy ishere functioningmeaning above.Uncomfortable isnot a modi differently thandoes love sothat ifloveisfier in the sense that red is a modifier in the direct object,Lucymight be called themade her a red dress.Well, there's quite a lot '-noudirect" object, a term that could be ety-of this and you see I've gotten into something mologizad "indirect." Perhaps the importantprettycomplicated. Obviously,we're only fact is that a word likeLucywarrants more picking out certain kinds of complements and revealing description. What is important tocalling them complements. And we're dismiss. say about a word likeLucy?How does thising the rest of them as modifiers. There is word differ in Ilove LucyandI gave Lucymuch more function going on here than we my love?One difference surely is that in thehave readily recognized because we mainly first sentenceLucy isa complete complementhave used function just to support our defini- whereas in the second itis not.It can notions of the parts of speech, when the thing: longer function as sufficient complement. Icouldn't stand up withoutit.Personally, I gave Lucycould be a sentence, but it wouldfound this an exciting business. have to mean something else; in any event, I am sorry that we do not have time to the grammar would be different. In otherexamine the last two major functions which words, in the first sentence, Lacy is a selfcan be recognized readily within the working sufficient complement. In the second sentence,ofthelanguage,namely, modifying and it is an interreliant complement, and it raisesshowing relationship`. the question whether this indirect object is a I'm willing to say right now, if anybody sort of exception or the main division withinshould ask me, that1 suspect that function, the complement. The question, of course, iswhether it be the most scientific basis for a whether such objects are few and exceptionaldescription of grammar or not, may be the or whether they are many and varied. Webasis that will do us the most good in that it might look at a few more candidates: I gavemay permit us to show youngsters most read- him a black eye, I gave him up for lost, Iily what is happening in sentences, and hence made him uncomfortable,I cannot under.how to read sentences and how to write sen stand his denying my complicity in the affair,tences. As far as I'm concerned, in the busi. I cannot imagine him denying me inr comness of most of us grammar is some good plicity in the affair.Obviously, this could goonly if it helps us to teach youngsters how to on indefinitely. The language is replete withuse the language.

The Meanings of Words Words have no fixed meanings: they have the power of designating referents and of stimulating awareness of meaning in individuals. We use words as though they were dippers, the same dippers far everybody, but the stuff that is dipped up with the dipper depends upon the body of stuff from which it is dipped. And when we use words we are always dipping into ourselves. fivlion I 0,0 Ennorurge i \r. 1,11.1{,11.1imrhart inkln. 0,41, p 17

26 464-94le4tied

The linguistsboth the structuralists and the trans- formationalistshave criticizedtraditional gram- marians for fitting a language to a grammar instead of fining the grammar to the language. Dr. DiPietro, a well-known linguist, explains why the linguists have developed new approaches to the analysis, st,idy, and teaching of language and he effectively dispels the fears of those who may have thought that Linguistics was an impenetrable mystery.

ROBERT J. DIPIETRO

Phonology ingful to the person who doesn't understand One of the great tasks facing the linguistthe language. has been to separate from the general bulk of traditional grammar that part of it which canMinimal Pairs be scientifically verified and deductively and If I should come into the room and start inductively tested. One of the first things thatspeaking to you inFulani, a language of he did, of course, is to take from this generalAfrica, you probably would not understand understanding of language the basic me. All you would hear would be a hodge- sounds of the language and the system inpodge of sounds. If you were a linguist, you which they function. This in turn led to amight sit down and say, "Well, let's see what view of language as a system haling layersthe meaningful units of sound are inthis or structures, language." Then you would try to find a set There was a phonological layer (a layer ofof minimal pairs; that ia. you would try to sound) and also a grammatical layer. Thefind combinations of sounds in places where linguist first considered language as a stringthey would make a difference in meaning. In or combination of sounds in E meaningfulEnglish. for example, you might find the two pattern, a pattern meaningful to the person wordsin and bin which have different mean- who understands the language but not mean ings conveyed by the initial sound of the

1 t,ttrenaion .24 made h, 1,hrF.., hteilter of the Pure. rubli word. In one case it's a voiceless sound and r at'," ,t1 rti ,f Dr. Dhelr't ptrfb1.1), in the I irgui, in the second case a voiced sound. Find. rwRAth p 11,1tit1rd ht the Pdrim (e( Autuo Et 2t, lg(t5 ta,n ihe r,t,right lhn mrvnal and ha rilrning enough of there meaningful contrasts will 17,71r,,,,,r,the Burr.I (MI, twrrnii.. t' prhi IhiIlrvirnsthm in Ottenable you to set up the meaningful units of

2'7 LINGUISTICS 27

sound. These are called phonemes.Pilland Suprasegmentat Phonemes killwould give you1plandle/as two differ. In English, as well as in many other lan- ent phonemes in the language. You could doguages, phonemes areclassifiedeitherin it with vowels such as infeet and fii. Feesand terms of their being produced in succession fit would show you that141and /i/ wereone after the other or of their being produced separate vowels. in combination with some other phonemes. At one point you would exhauat all theVowels and consonants are segmental, i.e., possibilities, and at that point you would they can be written down on a piece of paper have the minimal basic sound units ir, thein succession. Suprasegmentalphonemes, language. This does not mean that you couldwhich comprise the elements of stress, pitch, then speak Fulani. It means that you couldand juncture, cannot be sego eotalized this write down the sounds and that you knewway. about the patterns of sound in the language. English has four levels of stress. In English The reason that this knowledge doesn't guar. you may stress a syllable or not; if you stress antee an ability to speak the language fluent.it, you may stress it according to three differ- ly, or even to understand it, is that there is ent levels of stress.Let me give you an still another layer remaining the gram-example. Take a word likeelevator.The sy matical layer that underliesthis series of lableelcertainly is the loudest of all; it has sounds. the primary stress. We all probably agree that va is the second loudest syllable and that the Complementary Distribution other two syllables are weaker than eitherel or to.Elevatorshows three levels of stress Another term we should become familiar We."-va.tor. with is complementary uistribution. Comple If you add another word, such asoperator, mentary distribution is viewing the arrange- you would haveelevator operator.The word ment of forms in terms of whether or not theyoperatorby itself would have the same pri- can ever occupy the same position. Let's look mary stresspattern as elevator.When you put at this set:pill, spill, till, still, kill, skill.We them together, however, you can make one of 1plin and have three phonemes here: the pill the primary stressed syllables louder than the spill,the It/ intilland still, and the id inkillother one. You can either sayelevator oper- They are different in sound, aren't and skill. atororelevator operator. So,to show that they? The1plofpillis heavily aspirated, thethe accented syllable of one word is greater is also aspirated but not quite as It/ oftill than that of the other words, I usually write a heavily aspill,and the /d ofkillis aspirated. little double mark over the one that's the You can classify these slightly different pho- loudest.I call this sentence stress. The sen nemes by the principle of complementary dis tence stress is the one that can be shifted tribution; that is, they complement one anoth-around in a sentence. er. The /p/ ofpillis never preceded by an s; theIplofspillis always preceded by an .s. I nerdhome at tuo o'clock. Any word in the language starting with44is I weal home at tuo o'clock. always aspirald. I am not implying that we I scent home at tuo o'cicrck. would ever tell the student anything aboef complementarydistribution,buttheterm Believe me, sentence stress causes atre- consonant blend which is used to describemendous learning problem for people study- such combinations assp, si,andskdoesn't do ing English as a foreign language who native. the student any goodeitherbecause it doesn't ly speak a language, such as French, which say what blend means. What is blending with does not have this possibility. what? Is p becomingsorsbecoming p? It This second stress in English is an impor- seems to me that the teacher should have atant part of our language. It annoys me that technical framework to check off the things some books of versification talk simply about thatare important totalk about. To the stressedandunstressedsyllableswithout students he would simply say, "Pill!" in front bothering about the levels of stress. of a piece of paper to show them that more English is 3 stress -time language. You can air is expended in sayingpillthan in sayingtake a metronome and equate every primary spill. stress with one beat of the metronome. Ilav

28 28 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION ing the metronome swing once, you can haveences, We start off on a pitch level of 2 in the students say a sentence such as He's aeach sentence, gc up to 3, and drop down to doctor. A native speaker can say that in one 1. stroke of the metronome, He could also say 2 2 2 3 ."1 2 2 2 3\1 He's a good doctor without rushing to get in My name is John. What is your name? the added word. Furthermore, he could even say He's a very good doctor in one stroke ofThe final arrow indicates the trailing off of the metronome. In other words, the relative the voice. number of syllables is not as important as the Usually, the central pitch point comes at beat. In a language like Spanish, the numberthe same location as the sentence stress in of syllables is more important than the relaEnglish. The basic question type in English, if fiveloudness, thestress. These three senit's not a whattype question, is usually a2, tences, if said in Spanish, could not be said3,3 rise: each within the same time limits. The Spanish 2 2 3-3 speaker takes longer with the longer sentences Are you going? because he can't shortenthesyllables as Intonations differ in many ways. They dif. much as we can in English. fer from region to region, between men and I think it is important to point out that thewomen, and according to the meaning to be highestlevelof stressisthz one thatis conveyed. movable within the sentence. As long as you Many jokes are linguistic in nature and have one word, you only have three levels ofaepend on stress or juncture. A difference in stress. But if you have a sentence in whichthe juncture can turn What's that in the road there are several words of unequal length andahead? into a quite different thought. Jokes in which the location of the primary stressof this kind are very well known and occur in can be varied, you may possibly have fourjust about every language with which I am levels of stress. familiar. In English we have pitch and stress. The We could go on and on about intonation pitch and the last level of stress .ire associatand phonology, but the structurallinguist ed with what we call intonation in English.says that when you go to work on a language, Things can be uttered with the same sequence you first work on the phonology; then you of segmental phonemes but with several dif.work on the grammar. There's probably little ferent kinds of intonation. Thus you can say,reason to talk about phonology in teaching "Good morning!" (veryfriendly);or you Englishbecausethestudentsarenative could say, "Good morning!" (not so friend.speakers at least are native speakers of ly). The layer of intonation colors all of oursome variety of English. The important thing speech and helps identify us is a personality.for you are the grammatical layers, the part It's just as important to understand as thethat deals with the juxtaposition of form. segmentals. Another thing that the structuralist did was to distinguish between what we call pres.crip Let's examine some examples of differenttive rules of language and descriptive rules. A locations of stress. Charles Hockett, in hisprescriptive rule is a rule that tells you what book A Course in ,dchlern Linguistics (New you should say in a language, and a descrip York, Macmillan Co., 1958) uses this senLive rule is a rule that tells you what people tenet: Ile was dancing with the stout major'sdo say in a language. This is where a lot of wife. Notice what happens when the stress iscontroversy exists in language work. Hewasdancingwiththestout shifted. For nonnative speakers,Ithink the dic major's wife. Ile was dancing uith the stouttionary ought to have every word. For exam major's q.t.. He trim dancing with the stoutple, the nonnative speaker of English wants major's to know what somebody had said, so he looks In American English, there are four levelsa up in the dictionary; and if he doesn't find of pitch. We use the numeral 1 to indicate theit and the dictionary calls itself unabridged, lowest level and 4 to indicate the highest. Myhe wonders what kind of a dictionary it is. So name is John. if hat is your name? We canhe goes back to the speaker and says., "Well, say both of these sentences with the sameyou said soandso and suchandsuch. I can't intonational contour, the same pitch differ.find it in the dictionary." The speaker replies,

29 LINGUISTICS 29

"Well, that's not really good English." The non-native speaker comes to the con For the structuralists, each language has a elusion that there's good English and there'slayer of structures. Each has a layer of pho- bad English. The distinction between goodnology (sound) and a layer of grammar. The and bad in this case is a statement ofpre- structuralist sees parallelisms in the pattern, scription you are passing a value judgment the phonological pattern with the grammati- on it. cal pattern. If the phonology has as its unit I'm not saying here that we shouldn't passthe phoneme, the grammar has as its unit the a value judgment. A teacher of English or ofmorpheme. As the phoneme is the smallest any language, as a matter of fact, has to passsignificant unit of sound, so a is value judgments. He has to direct his students the smallest unit of form having meaning in a toward certain goals of style, of articulation,language. The ing of going is certainly a of expression for the reason that society inmorpheme because it has a meaning all by general makes distinctions of language. Theitself. We don't even have to say what the English teacher tells his students, "Don't usemeaning is; all we have to do is recognize double negatives. If you use double negatives,that ithas a different meaning or it has a you won't be linguistically accepted in themeaning of its own. In morphology, we don't circlesthat we consider the well-educatedhave to say specifically what itis. All we circles in this country." Or he says, "Don'thave to aay is that it has a unique meaning. say 'ain't'." These are the kinds of valueWhen you get into semantics, you can talk judgments that teachers and people generallyabout what its meanings are. make about language. There may be two or more in a Apart from those value judgments, how.word. In other words, if I give you a record. ever, are the rules that you make up toing of a sentence, you can analyze it as a string of phonemes, their arrangement. You describe the language. Those are different. can also analyze it as a string of morphemes The first thing the linguist wants to do when with their kind of arrangement. According to he walks into a group of speakers is to make the structuralist, language has layers. It's like up the rules that describe the way they are looking at a piece of cake that has been cut speaking. When he starts, he has no way of knowing what value judgments the nativesso that you can see the layers. It's still one make about their language. Only later on,cake but it has different layers and you can talk about the filling or the top layer or the after he understands what they do say, can he lower layer, but it's still one piece. go about understanding what they should say. You have situations in which one mor A teacher in a class of pidginEnglishpheme is correlated to two completely differ. speakers in the Caribbean would first try toent sounds like rows and oxen. In this understand what the students were saying;case, row is a separate morpheme, ox is a then he would have a better idea of explain.separate morpheme. Z forms the plural of ing to them what they should be saying.rows and en forms the plural of ox. By my Language mistakes follow patterns. If yourinference, therefore, en and z are the same student says ain't, he probably says ain't in amorpheme. We call them allomorphs of the certain way, in a certain pattern. If he sayssame morpheme class. You also have situa me after it is, he probably also says kim, her,tionswith two completelydifferent mor and all the other object forms after this pat-phemes that would be correlated to the same tern. If he uses the third person singular verbsound. You have examples of this in the book's formula has for I has, he probably does it forcorer and the ten books. One is possessive all the persons they has, ice has thus and the other, plural. If you have possession regularizing it all th^ way through. An under.plus plurality, they're both correlated to one standing of what he does,Ithink, helps asound even in one sequence. great deal in deciding how to explain to him This idea of a morpheme as a basic unit of what he should be saying in order to bemeaning is important in describing the gram. accepted as an educated person. mar of a language. Morphology is a state. Teachers of English (or of any language)rnent of the forms which the morphemes take in organizing their classes have to be awarein the grammatical units of a language; syn of all the aspects of language. tax is a statement of their arrangements. You

30 30 HALT/MORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION can say that the wordrosesistwo morEnglish for a year without necessarily using a phemes. There's a morphemerosand thenoun such asescalator. morpheme s, which means plural, and the Function words are like traffic signals, and syntax of these two morphemes is the syntax parts of speech are like automobiles. Function of suffixation, which is the syntactical process words direct the traffic of the parts of speech. by which they are joined together. They point which way the nouns are going, The system of phonology and the system of which way the verbsaregoing. grammar the morphology and syntax of a language areseparatesystems. One, in a Grammatical Categories sense, lies on top of the other one, but their The term grammatical categories refers to patterning isdifferent. the particular kind of grammatical distinction IPAus take as the grammatical core of athat a language makes. In English, for exam- language the following: (a) parts of speech,ple, we make a grammatical distinction of (b) grammatical categorie-t, (c) constructiontense. We have past tense and present tense. types. We make a distinction of number. We have singular and plural. We do not make a dis- Parts of Speech tinction of gender grammatically. We make a We know that parts of speeci; are nouns,distinction of gender semantically. We don't pronouns, verbs, etc. What we want to discussdo what Latin does with its three classes of here is the definition of parts of speech as anouns nor what French does with its two. We class, as a set. First, all of these parts ofhave a grammatical category of person in the speech are stems; they carry semantic mean-pronoun set only /,you, he, she, it,and so ings. What classifies aset of stems as aforth; we don't have it anywhere else. We specific part of speech is its common syntac-make a case distinction in English only in the tical and morphological behavior; that is, apronouns and in the possessive case of nouns. part of speech isa class of stems whoseWe don't have a dative or accusative case, an members have the same morphological andablative, or a vocative. And in the pronoun syntactical arrangement or distribution. Aset, we only have a threeway contrast: a class of words can be defined as verbs ifnonobjective case, a possessive case, and an they're all inflected for tense. In other words,objective case. We havewe, our,andus. they all have the same morphological behay.That's all we have. tor. Adjectives can't be classified as verbs because they don't get inflected for tense. Construction Types In English, a distinction is made between The third part of the grammar core are the such parts of speech and the function orconstruction types. This part has to do with structure words. The parts of speech of Eng-the way things are put together. the way lish are rather simple and few in number.sentences are made, and the kind of syntacti- They are limited to nouns, adjectives, ad.cal arrangements that the language has. verbs, and verbs. Such things as prepositions, Constructions in English belong to two aa- coordinators, and subordinators, which arejor types, the centered type and the uncen traditionally called parts of speech, have beentered type. Linguists who like Greek deriva put in classes of function or structure wordslives call the centered ones endocentric and by today's linguifts. A very important reasonthe uncentered ones exocentric. for doing this is that, in speaking English, The centered constructions contain a logi- nobody really knows all of the members ofcal center along with an attribute or a series allof the parts of speech. No one knowsof attributes. In standard English, attributes every noun inTh. Oxford Dictionaryno:are of two types in the same construction. If does anyone know every verb in English. It is 9,.ey'resingle attributes, they usually come not necessary to know every noun or everybefore the center (bighouse, white house, verb to speak English, but it is necessary toyellow bird).If they are clausal or phras- knoweverypreposition,toknoweveryal, thatis,if they contain more than just conjunction, to know every subordinator. It isasinglestem,theyusuallyfollov:(The very difficult to speak English without know.man u ho came todinner).It ho came to ing the prepositionin, at, to,orof,although itdinnerisanattributetoman.The man is certainly conceivable that one cou:d speakthatI saw )orenla) that ISR Ifis an

31 LINGUISTICS 31

attributeto man. Single stem attributes inform bounded by an intonat anal :amour: 2, English only rarely follow the noun, as in3, 1; 2, 3, 3; and the terminal contour. A House Beautiful, in Operation Crissbow, inlinguist trying to define a paragraph would courts martial. This sort of thing occurs insearch for a sequence of construction types to English but isnot as common as puttingfollow. the attribute before the noun. Is there any formal mechanism that a para- There are three types of exoccntric or un graph has that a sentence doesn't have? You centered constructions that Hackett lists asmight say that people speak in paragraphs. I directive, connective, and predicative. A direc-don't think they do.Ithink they write tive type has a director and an axis as itsorganize things in paragraphs. We try to immediate constituents, as, for example, insay semantically that there's some unification the prepositional phrases in the box, on theof thought, yet one person's unification of table, or in the constructions if he is going,thought might not be another's.Itis my while we were there. opinion that paragraph and chapter are writ- A connective type would contain a connec-ten forms, forms that look good on a page. A tor and a predicate attribute in such examplesstyle sheet from one publisher tells authors as became excited, is a big man, and the verynot to write short paragraphs. If there were interesting one He lay in Ike corner motion.some formal way :o define a paragraph, the less. Lay in the corner connects motionless tolengthof aparagraph couldnot beso he. The child grew sickly and The child grewarbitrarily legislated. There is no unit larger quickly. Quickly is an attribute to grew andthan the sentence with which the linguist can is, therefore, not a connective type. In Thecope. He can cope with a sentence because he child grew sickly, sickly does not describe thecan talk about the structure of a sentence, but growing of the child; therefore, itis'hot ahe is unable to go beyond that. modifier of grew but of child and is linked to child by grew. We call grew a connector andInflection and Derivation sickly a predicate attribute. A predicative type would have a topic and Linguists try to make a distinction between a comment with a structure such as Thatinflection and derivation.Inflectionisthe man, I just don't like.Ithink this topic-manipulation of stems by means of function comment type is the one that you are going tomorphemes like ing, .s, and ed. Derivation be most concerned with, because this type ofis the formation of stems. structure has been expanded in certain kinds Derivation occurs when you take a word of English. In My mother, she upstairs, Mylike hostile and add ity to it because you're mother is the topic, she upstairs is the commaking another stem out of an original stem. ment. We won't accept that particularar-If you form the plural of hostility, you would rangement in standard English, even thoughnot be making another stem. You would be itfits an acceptable structure such as Thatinflectingthestem.Inordertoestablish man, I just don't like. My mother, she upwhether a form is a stem, you must test the stairs, although it follows the same structure,form to see if it can occur by itself. Any word is not acceptable unless you use a particularthat can't stand by itself will be called either kind of intonation and then put in a linkinga prefix or a suffix depending on where it verb My mother, she's upstairs. This re-occurs with another form. vised form cal ,11 be in the same context as In words like reconsider and relocate, re is it was used in its original form, the one thatdefinitely a prefix because we cannot say it we won't accept. unless it is attuched to the other words. Only when we have more than one mor- When you come to words like relieve and pheme can we talk about a construction type,receive, you think you have the same form re, because construction types are concerned withbut you don't. When you cut re off, you come the way two or more morphemes are putup with forms that make no sense by them together. The largest construction type that selves ceive, liete. If the eche of receive we have in English is a sentence. We talkhas a meaning as a morpheme, then it should about the paragraph in writing. There is nohave the same meaning in the word deceive; way of linguistically defining a paragraph.but there isn't any central theme of meaning. Linguistically, we can define a sentence as aOf course, they do come from the same histor

3 ) 32 BALTIfORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

ical source. One thousand years ago, theyWe might end up saying that there are vari probably weresepare.le morphemes; now,ous seers. Just to further show how difficult it they have fallen together and it makes nois, we can bring in a few more words sense to break these verbs down into separatelobster, sister, huckster. morphemes. The derivational suffix ster shows that a This brings us toa very fine point instudy of how stems are derived can be com- linguistic theory the difference between aplex. purely synchronic analysis of language and a Morphemes, then, can either be derivation. diachronic analysis. The synchronic analysisal or inflectional depending on what Asera- deals with language as itis right now. TheLon they perform in the language. By deriva- diachronic analysis of language deals withlion we refer to making new stems. In deriva- language as to how it developed into what ittion, we may or may not change the form. is today. Diachronically, the ceive of receiveclass membership. We may make another and deceive are the same morphemes; synnoun from a noun or we may make it into a chronically, they are not. Reconsider istoverb, or an adjective from a noun. Inflection consider again. Report is not to port again;never changes the formclass membership of a reduce is not to duce again. Very often, Eng-stem;itadds function morphemes so the lish teachers mix diachronic analysis withstems can be used in constructions. synchronic analysis. I'm suggesting here that we keep the two analyses separate. Teach first the detachable prefixes as being a tool in Structural Syntax modern English; and then if you want to go Among linguists there are many schools of into the history of these words, you can do itthought on how to analyze language and how as a separate kind of performance. When youto evaluate the analysis.Ina sense there discuss report, reduce, receive, and retain, thehasn't been any adequate way of saying that student eventually says, "Well, isn't that theeither the transformational or the structural same re that we had in reconsider?" And youanalysis of grammar is the one that's most say, "Well, it used to be, but it isn't anymoreappropriate for teaching English.I suppose because we don't say ceive anymore. In fact,that eventually, after a lot of careful work, we can't even find the same meaning for ceivesome particular way will corms to the fore as in receive and deceive. The ceie part hasbeing the most adequate. shades of meaning, which have become differ. The two kirls of approaches to language ent morphem." analysis are generally called taxonomic or Let me give you some other examples ofoperational. Both refer to linguistic descrip derivational endings which are really nastytions. ones to work out. Take thesuffix or A linguist of the taxonomic approach re whatever you want to call it --ster. We haveports the language the way a biologist de- youngster, we have oldster. Youngster is onescribes a kind of animal. This linguist says, who is young, oldster is one who is old. Wefor example, that German has three genders: have, then, a complete parallelism of adjec-masculine, feminine, and neuter. It has a set tives plus ster ster meaning one :rho is. of strong verbs and weak verbs, and so on. But then we come across teamster one whoIn other words, he describes the structure of is team? That doesn't work. One who belongsGerman. These are taxonomic rules. to a team? That doesn't work either. One who An operational model of German would be drives a team? That one works; now we lookone in which I could give you a set of rules around for other parallels and we come uponon the basis of which 3 ou could produce new mobsttr. Mobster isn't one who drives a mob.sentences in German. I might say to you, for He is a member of a mob. In mobster the seerexample, that in German a certain kind of means one who is a member of. This takes ussentence has a noun as thefirstelement back to youngster. Do we say youngster is afollowed by a verb as the stcond element. member of young? It is very difficult to findThen I give you a list of nouns and a list of a thread of continuity here. verbs followed bya direct object, another How about spinster? One who spins? His.noun of a certain class, and still another set torically, one who was a spinster was oneof nouns. If you select something front each who spun, but it doesn't mean that an) more.one of these lists and put them in their proper

33 LINGUISTICS 33

slots inthis structure, you create Germanwar and in the leg were connected to what sentences of one kind. This is a very simpleprecedes b' different constructions? The con example of what I mean by an operationalstruct ion type, we feel, is different. model. To show that these are different kinds of The transformationalists are primarily op.construction, we could do something vet erational in their orientation. They look atsimple with Ile was shot in the leg and lit language as a functioning system, like a mawas shot in the war. All we have to do is to chine they work. They turn on the ignition ofinsert in the war in the other sentence. John their cars and something happens to make thewas shot in the leg in the war. You can't say wheels turn. The taxonomistlooks attheJohn was shot in the war it the leg, can you? language as he might look at the engine in aIf the two elements wen; really the same static condition. He looks at the eagine as aconstruction, then you shouldn't be able to do combination of arrangements of bolts andthat. But the fact that you can put one in nuts and gears and screws and wires andbefore the other one proves that they are, things. ile takes it all apart and he puts it allindeed, different kinds of constructions. together. The operationalist is more interested Let's use a diagram to examine the sentence in describing the action that goes through theIle kissed her hard. (See Fig. I.) engine whereas a taxonomist's rules describe the engine in its arrangements. He kissed herhand Owen Thomas, in his book The Transfor- mational Grammar awl the Teacher of Eng. lish (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. 1965), uses the light switch in his anal- ogy describing the taxonomist and the opera- tional grammarian. The taxonomist describes the light switch in the state of being on or off; the operationalist describes it in terms of Fig. 1 the motion from on to off or in terms of how it goes on and off. I might add that linguisticOur diagram will be like that little btx theories are moving more and more towardtype diagram that is used in traditional g. the operational type, even the ones that callmar except that it's more consistent al 1 themselves taxonomic. have to identifythereationships oft One of the outstanding contributions ofpiece. Usually the way Nelson Frar.. structural grammar is the view of language asCharles flockett and the structural lin,eu, being put together in layers. And one of thedo itis to draw a big box, and the v. things we talk about in terms of foyers is thesentence is put init. Now this bith. way structures of cor tructions are put togoing to contain lots of little boxes wk. 1, gether into sentences. Traditional grammarlike Chinese boxes you know, whyre with its diagramming of sentences had al.open one box and there's another box in- in, . ready started to do this. You open that one and there might Consider a sentence such as Ile tcas shot ininside. You open one of these two arid Pr, the war and the sentence Ile was shot in themight be nothing inside of the first, bia 11, leg. Superficially those two sentences seem tomight be another one inside of the eLord. be built by the same construction. We mightLet's draw this line here to show thi.. say that they are both made up of a subjectbox. (See Fig. 2.) and a predicate type of thing or maybe a directive type of construction. Then in the He kissed war would be a prepositional phrase with in her hand as a kind of director, tear as an object or axis. And you'd do the same thing with in the kg. Or, on the other hand, would you try to make a distinction between the wai this piece in the leg and thispiece inthe war ate connectedto what precedes them? Would there be a way for you to show that in the Fig. 2

34 34 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

The next box might contain another box Now you have to go back and identify the which contains the subject He and the predi-relationship that each piece has to the other. cate kissed her hand. We're finished with theFor example, one relationship hereisthe box containing Ile. (See Fig. 3.) predicative type. You could write a little p. The symbols here aren't important. In kissed her hand you have to define the relationships He kissed her hand of the verb to what follows; you might want to call it a directive type, and you use a little arrow to indicate it. Then, you are left with her hand. This type of structure is what we call a centered construction because there is a piece of it, the hand part, which operates as a kind of fulcrum around which you could Fig. 3 build other thirgs. You could say, Ile kissed her little hand, lle kissed her cold, little hand So then you look at this one and you open it ...pretty, cold, little hand. You can keep and you find two more boxes, one of thembuilding and hand always remains the center containing kissed and another one 11.-?r hand. of the construction. It's always the central (See Fig. 4.) piece. So we draw a little arrowhead towards the center with the point of the arrowhead Hekissedher band always pointing towards the center. Kissed in a sense is also a center construction, but ed is satellite to the center which is kiss. So we draw the arrowhead with the point going the other way. P Basically, we have only two kinds of con- structions. We have the centered, the ones in Fig. 4 which you can [hid some kindof center around which you can build constructions, You open the box in the center and you findand the uncentered type which have no cen two more, one of them containing the inflec-ter. tion, past tense. (See Fig. 5.) You open the The construction all that fresh milk on die one on the far right and you find two more;table is a centered construction, because by then you have completed your immediatethe time you break down all the pieces, all constituent analysis (See Fig. 6.) the immediate constituents, you em.' up with a word like milk around which you build every- thing else. A constructionlike across the Hekissedherhand street is not a centered construction because you can't build around any part of it the way you can build around all that fresh milk on the table. However, if you took the expression across the street and took off the word across P and had just the street, you would indeed have another centered construction, because Fig. 5 then you could say across the nide strut, acrosstheold Street,acrossthe gravelly. nicer. liekissiediherIhand The structural grammarian reacts against the traditional grammarian who would say that in All that fresh milk on the table is good the subject is milk. The structural lin guist, thinking of these lay erings we have just P investigated, would say, "No, no. no! The subject is All that fresh milk on the table." Fig. 6 Then he'd break that down and get smaller

35 LINGUISTICS 35 pieces until he eventually comes to the word This brings us to the matter of how ade milk. He looks at language as one piecequate is a lingui-tic theory. The transforma- inside of another piece, whereas the tradition-tionalist says, "Structuralists are not coming algrammarian goesrighttothecenterup with an adequate theory. They don't ex piece, takes that out, and calls it plain enough of the language. Certainly, Ian. the subject. guage may be looked at in terms of patterns You can also reverse the procedure in I.C.and arrangements, but that isn't enough. Lan. (immediate constituent) analysis, Rather thanguage also involves the ability of the speaker start with the big piece, you can start with theto create new sentences." little pieces and go the other way. It comes The structuralist says, "Aren't the transfor- out the same, only you use a different kind ofmationalists being very impressionistic when diagram. If we use Ile kissed her goodnight,they talk about how a person creates a Ian we would start with the closest relationshipsguage? Isn't that too mystical an approach? and go to the most remote ones, rather thanif we're scientists, shouldn't we work with the starting with the most remote ones and goingaccomplished deed, with the sentence as it has to the closest ones. The closest ones here been uttered, with something tangible?" would be between ed and kiss;and then This argument goes on and on; however, I between good and night; and then betweenthink more and more people are moving to- kissed her goodnight; and finally between he ward,if not a generative transformational and everything else. (See Fig. 7.) model, at least some kind of mode] of Ian guage which has operations in it, some kind He hissed her of motion or activity in it. Whether they call it transformation or not is beside the point. U The latest thinking seems to indicate that we t 1 should include operations in descriptions of languages. Transformational theory has prob. ably developed more rapidly than any other theory in linguistics. In about ten years, a Fig. 7 wealth of material has been written on trans- formational grammar. Transformational Syntax For the transformationalist, language is an How does thetrans'motional way ofimmense machine. You start at one end with looking at a language chner from the way thethe basic raw materials and out of the other structuralist looks at language? The structur-end comes a string of sounds which is tan- alist looks at language as an arrangement of It's the linguist's job to explain what units laid out on a table top the gears, thehappens in between, to explain how the /an wires, if you wish, everything that is part ofguage is produced. the language. The transformational or the A grammar can be generative without be- generative grammarian looksatlanguageing transformational. If a set of transforma- from another point of view: he wants to knowtional rules is introduced into the theory, the how sentences are produced and recognized. description of the grammar can be made The structuralist could never accept as partshorter. of his analysis the relationship of The wine Let us take a quick look at a schematic tu was drunk by John to John drank the winesee how transformational rules are correlated because, in order to relate the two sentences,to generative rules. you have to bring in some kind of analysis that involves moving from one state to antll S NP VP other state in this case, from an active to a (2)NI' 1/et N passivesentence.Thestructuralistsays, (3)VP V + NP "We're looking at language as arrangement, (1) N man. bey, girl, woman as arrangement of units in a pattern; there- (5) .ees, likes fore,The wine was drunk by John is one(0 Del ---.. pattern and John drank the wine is another ttie pattern. They really have, as far as we're We began with what we call a sentence in concerned, little to do with one another." English, and we took what just about every 36 36 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION transformationalor generative grammarianformations in understand.3g the sentence or takes as the first rule: a sentence is a nounin creating the sentence, and when he does phrase plus a verb phrase (1). Now we mustthat, he ends up with the deep structure of the rewrite each element to the right of the arrow.sentence. Noun phrase is determiner optionally plus In the deep grammar, ambiguities of struc- noun (2). I am making these rules very sim-ture are resolved. The shooting of the hunters ple at this point. Verb phrase is verb pluswould produce one surface tree. There are noun phrase (3). Noun is man, boy, girl,also two deep grammar trees that would be a woman (4). In rewriting verb for a specifictransform of the hunters that shoot with an grammar, we would probably write ve-''asimbedded sentence: the first would be hunters number, plus person or tense, or ph. e, ti shoot, hunters that shoot; and the other one ever we would want to show in the verb set.would be people that shoot hunters. In order In order to simplify at this point, we shallto explain this difference, you would have to rewrite verb as sees, like (5). Let's put in onetalk about the embedding, which you would determiner, the (6). do in the deep grammar, not in the surface Let's draw our little tree diagrams arid seegrammar. The surface grammar would simply what happens. (See Fig.8.) be the first analysis that you do in the sen tence without reference to the transformation. S al rules, but only with reference to the phrase structural rules. Emmon Bach, in An Introduction to Trans- NP formational Grammars (New York,Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1964), gives ex- amples of structurally ambiguous sentences. V NP The committee's appointment was a surprise. I just can't see flying kites. John feels cold. He's crazy to go to Cuba. Very often, even out of context, we would interpret these state- ments one way and that would be the end of 1 it.If we apply the deep grammar rules of The/mansees embedding and transformation, however, we come to realize that they are ambiguous. Fig. 8 For The committee's appointment was a surprise one set of rules would produce the We could also have had a sentence, Theappointment of the committee (meaning: that man sees the mart, The boy sees the roan, Thethe committee was appointed was a surprise), boy sees the girl, The girl sees the man, Thethe other set would produce the committee woman sees the man, The man sees the omappointed (meaning: the appointment made an, etc., until all of the possibilities are ex-by the committee was a surprise). hausted. By having simply four nouns and Ambiguity is shown here by the fact that two verbs, we have explain d quite a numberthere is more than one underlying analysis. ofEnglishsentences.If we increasetheWe have not shown which one was meant; we classes in Rules 4 and 5, the possibilities arehave shown that there are two possibilities. further increased greatly. There are two sets of grammars you have The generative grammarian says, 'Thisto write. You have to write a forward grain- demonstrates the power of my description ofmar in which you start with the kernel rules, the language.Ican explain allthese sen-the noun-phrase, verbphrase rules and you tences." What resulted from thisfirstap.move toward all your transformations and roach to the analysis of a sentence accordingyour final sentences. The forward grammar is to ',hr.'s: structural rules is a surface tree.the productive type. There is also the recap- 1 he transforinationalist agrees but goes on t3tke type in which you take the final sentence say that if you want to explain sentences likeand reverse the procedure.It'scalled the The girl is seen by the man or The girl isreverse grammar because you go back to get liked by the man, you have to write moreto the kernel. This is harder to do than going rules. Eventually he has to apply the trans.forward because there are more rules since 3i LINGUISTICS 37

you have to try all possibilities. If we had aferent from the real grammar of thelan. sentence like The wine was drunk by mid-guage must also be developed.If thisis night, we might saythatitlooks like ariot done, thelanguage describedwill be passive sentence. We apply in reverse themisrepresented. passive transformation and endup withmidnight drank the wine. We apply thei lease struc- Item Grammar or the Grammar of tural rules and it comes out in a different part One Language? of speech. We junk the whole thing and try Both the structuralist and the transforma. something else. Eventually we work out thetionalist recognize that a language has its underlying tree. That's working from the fin-own unique system. The traditionalist who ished sentence and going back to the kernel.writes a grammar which explains Hungarian It's much easier to start with the kernel rule or German but looks very Latin is attempting and write out the sentence, which is what weto associate the structure of his language with do when we speak; but when we hear, we reversethat of Latin. Latin grammar works very well the procedure. When we speak or write, thesefor Latin but not for other languages. ambiguities do not really exist. It's the listen- The moretraditionallyinclinedperson er or reader who is puzzled by the ambigui-says, "Well, every language has nouns; it has ties. names of persons, places, and things just as The transformationalist with his trees andwe do in English." Of course, this may be diagrams very often feels close to the tradi-true but the nouns in one language may turn tional grammarian. The transformationalist isup as affixes or in the middle of words. Here rigorousandformalinhisdiagraming,is the weakness of viewing grammar as some- whereas the traditionalist isnot. The tradi-thing existing apart from any specific lan. tional grammarian never formally specifiesguage. The language is fitted to the grammar, why you should select one diagram over an the important contrasts often being disguised other one; the transformationalist is now at as exceptions and hidden in footnotes. tempting to make this explicit. He is attempt. ing the traditionalist's technique, but he is being more rigorous and more formal inItem III: What's a Rule For? applying it. The structuralist talks about language in terms of patterns, whereas the transforma- tionalist has a rule or a series of rules show. Operatiboal Definitions: Traditional, ing how utterances are interrelated. The struc- Structural, Transformational turalist will not operate his analysis unless he Item I: Hen or Egg? has something that has been said. The trans. formationalist, on the other hand, has a set of The linguist insists that the only languagerules which produces sentences. lie produces iswhat you speak and thatwritingisa a sentence and then asks, "Can this sentence representation of this language. The usualbe said in the language?" linguistics textbooks point out that language The traditional grammarian sets up a rule has been with human beings aslong asand then if a particular construction does not they've been human beings maybe a mil.fit that rule, he labels it an exception. The lion years. Writing is no older than 7,000transforinationalisttakes the language first (maybe 8,000) years. Writing really neverand formulates the grammar to fit the lan- represents all of language just parts of itguage, whereas the traditionalist very often has so that as far as the linguist is concerned,an idea, an absolute definition of grammar, writing is a reflection of language. A gram-and then fits the language to the grammar. mar developing and explaining the written Traditionalgrammar may make some system of a language can, of course, be devel- statement of rules for the placement of modi- oped, but the important components of !nor.fiers.It may state, for example, that preposi- phophonemics,phonology,andintonationtional phrases follow the nouns they modify would have to beleftout.Ifa separateas in the big, red house on the corner. But the grammarforthewrittena arietyofthe smile grammar may define on tire corner as an language is developed, a setof rules thatadjective phrase Here is one of the big prob. explain howthiswritten grammarisdif. lems of traditional grammar, mixing the form

38 38 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

and the function. The form of in the corner isgroup of words bounded by an intonation." a prepositional phrase. Its function is as anNow he has a unit that he can work with. attribute. The transformationalist says a sentence is a In the sentences John :;.s happy there, Johnnoun phrase plus a verb phrase. He's got a is happy today, and John is happy quietly,definition with which he can work. the words there, today, and quietly would be, for the traditional grammarian, adverbs; butItem V: How Do They Handle Expansion? the third sentence isn't English. It ought to be The concept of expansion in the structural John is quietly happy. The linguist, therefore,and the ,.ransformational approaches can be cannot put there, today, and quietly in thecompared to the traditional way of talking same category. Quietly isnot in the sameabout expansion in grammatical forms. form classas there and today becauseit Let us take a phrase like red house and cannot, like them, go after happy. Any suchwork with itas would a structuralist. We formal criterion the teacher of English canwould first break it into its immediate constit bring from linguistics to separating parts ofuents and talk about red as being a modifier speech or form classes is good. It gives theof house. Then, if we introduce the idea of student a foothold in grammar, something heother structures that would be related to this can cling to that is formal rather than somesort of structure red house a certain thing that is just meaningful. amount of layering would occur. Another example of such a formal distinc What otherstructurescouldwe build Lion in English is the use or the nonuse of thearound the nucleus of red house? We could definite article in phrases s'ach as in schoolexpand itto big, red house. What isthe and inthe school, at school, and atthe relationship of big to the rest of the structure? school.If one says, "He'sin school," heDoes the immediate constituent cut go first means something quite different from "He'sbig and then red house in relationship here? in the school." The traditionalist calls themThis is the way I would analyze it anyway allprepositionalphrases.Whatlinguists,big, red house. (See Fig. 9.) structural and transformational, do is to tie thedistinction between the twotypes of big red house phrasestothe use or the nonuse of the definite article, a formal distinction.

Item IV: What's a Sentence? The structuralist and transformationalist can, if they wish, describe run-on sentences and fragments. The transformationalist can write a rule that produces double negatives. Fig. 9 In cases such as these,Ibelieve that the teacher has to be prescriptive. Suppose we had a form like big, old, red The teacher of English rejects run-ons andhouse. Would it be big old, red house, fragments,I think, because of a value judgwould it be big, old red house, or would ment that we all make about the language. Iit be big, old, red house? The layering, think that it's a good value judgment butI of course, would vary according to the mean. don't think it's necessarily anything linguistic.ing. This is building on a particular structure. We use run -ons in speech which are accept.We could also build it the other way big, able because of their intonational contours.red house on the corner. We have another Linguists,structuralandtransformational,I.C. that would break down into on and the are certainly aware of intonation. corner. The corner breaks into the and cot. To the traditional grammarian who definesnet with the attribution going to tug, red a sentence as a group of words which conveyhouse. (See Fig. 10.) a complete thought the linguist says, "Fine, As long as we can go on expanding the that's what it is but that's not specific enough.construction around one center inthis You must be more detailed in saying whatcase, house we would be dealing with a kind of group of words." centered construction. We have here the ex The structuralist says, "A sentenceisapansion of a centered construction, and this is

39 LINGUISTICS 39

bigred houseon thecorner big red house on the corner (I) + VP (2) NP--4- Det + N (3) V + PA (predicate at- tribute or prep. phrase) (transformation) N +V +PA 4 PA +N The house is big 4 The big house The house is red 4 The red house The house is on the corner 4 The on the corner house Fig. 10 The rules numbered 1, 2, and 3 explain the construction. After writing those three rules, what the structuralist means normally when we transform noun plus verb plus predicate he talks about expansion. He talks about attributetopredicate attribute plus noun. putting in more attributes or modifiers butThat's our transformational rule. The house is keeping the same center to the construction.big is transformed to the big house. We have So, therefore, expansion and modificationsthree embedded sentences which have under. with the structuralist are synonymous whengone this transform. they deal with nominals. When they deal with The traditionalist may approaA expansion verbs (go, is going, leas going, trill be going,in various ways. lie may talk about inserting might hare been going), the term modifica-things in a structure, but he is not specific in tion does not fit. telling how he inserts them whether he Now let's look at the way a transformaadds them on in layers or whether he inserts tionalistexplains expansion. What devicethem in terms of rules. For the traditionalist, might he use to talk about big, red house onexpansion probably involves all kinds of in- the corner? The different ideas would have tosertion. In a sense, then, he is more closely be embedded. What, then, are some of theallied to the transformational point of view patterns that the transformationalist wouldwithout showing specifically how it operates, introduce? The house is big, the house is old,how it functions. the house is red, the house is on the corner. The traditionalist may also take a semantic He would take allthose kernel sentences,point of view and say that expansion involves apply to them a series of ordered embeddinggiving a clearer and clearer picture of the rules in order to produce this sentence. basic kernel.

Language Is What People illake It As times have changed, language too has changed to meet the needs of each generation. it is just as wrong to speak of "decay" of language as to see in it an inevitable progress. Language is what people make it. In every generation thereare he who use it skilfully and those who use it clumsily; those who use it honestly and those who use it corruptly. The final lesson of its history is that not only poets and scholars. but ordinary citizens as well have a hand in shaping the language of their own time. This is our privilege and our responsibility.

Nrli TnrraniTA. nf tvfoh INe Ynrt. 111 rt,,1 di mpany, Inc1963t.p

ti0 Dialectology and Usage

Dr. Shuy argues that dialect involves more than just words and that many of us speak different dialects depending on the situation in which we find our. selves. He cites the causes of dialect differences and shows how "good" or "bad" usage is affected by historical, psychological, and sociological principles, all of which indicates in Dr. Shuy's opinion that English teaching should aim for many styles of Eng- lish rather than just one.

ROGER W. SHUT

Last year Iinterviewed people in a shop-speech. It can be that of any social group, of ping center in Lansing, Michigan, to get anany occupation group, of any racial group, of idea of what people think a dialect is. Here isany number of other possible subgroups. Dia- a selection of the responses I recorded: lect may be used to describe the ingroup "A dialect is something like Chinese." speech of the educated and the socially accep- "A dialect of speech is one that determinestable as well as of the down and out. The which communities are separated from otherterm dialect, then, carries no pejorative con communities: Asia, Europe, the South." notation. Many of us speak different dialects "Dialect means usage not the way thedepending on the situation in which we find language is supposed to be." ourselves. "Dialect is the same language spoken in a The secret of social and linguistic success different manner." comes from knowing how and when to switch "Dialect is the local style of pronouncing afrom one dialect to another. This is the most word." important thing thatI am going to say. A Almost all of the people to whom I spokeleacher must help his student learn this secret about dialects spoke negatively about them.of social and linguistic success. Ile certainly One girl, in fact, said that dialect is the way amust not insist that the student eradicate his languageisnot supposedtobe, Lack ofhome speech. certainty about language, in this case about We teachers of English have the reputation dialect, is obvious. of being negative, of standing in our ivory One of the best definitions given by thetowers and shooting things down. Iwould people inthe shopping centerinLansing,rather add a dimension to a person's life than Michigan, was: "Dialed is the local style ofshoot a dimension out of his life.Let him pronunciation of a word," Dialect, however,know what is over the horizon and encourage involves more than just words. It isseen also hint to go see for himself. In the long run, in pronunciations, in grammar, even in synhis switch fromone dialectto another will be lax and in intonation. Ii k not just regionalfacilitated much more smoothly than by tell ing him he must desert the old or the new. Dialect differences exist for anutril,yrof

1141, Ik Shuw r re in. orlht and ln n hr reasonswhich are all tied into another phase Ptrra.4 rrur,i,prim thy- 1,11.nel, in ihr of our lives which we as English teachers tend to overlook,

41 DIAUCTOLOGY AND USAGE 41

Settlement History population shift is important in the formation of a regional dialect area. The steamboat We ought to teach some of the causes forplayed an important part in population shifts. dialect differences. One such cause isto be The automobile has had and is still having it found in history. effect as well. Whether we realize it or not, our language Another factor that affects dialects is the is influenced by the people who settled ourdevelopment of urban prestige. Cities like area and established acceptable behavior pat- New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and San terns. Although the settlement history of an Francisco have become culturally influential. area does not prohibit future change in lan-No one city, however, dominates American guage or in any other aspect of culture, theculture nor American speech. Americans say, vestiges of the influence of the early settlers"Why should I speak like people from Bos- remain for many, many years. Examples ofton?" And, indeed, why should we? A com- this are seen in the German pronunciationsbination of factors, including the size of the and the German vocabulary still found in country and the effects of democracy on our Grundy County, Illinois, the linguistic effectsthinking, causes Americans to pattern on a of the Irish in Beaver Island, Michigan, andregional rather than a national scale. It seems theBritishisras foundin many Americanto me that here the English teacher has some- communities which were settled directly fromthing to say about social studies. England, such as Albion, Illinois, or New Various urban areas become focal points in Parmina, Indiana. the culture, which includes the dialect of a The first English-speaking settlers in Amer-given arca. Somewhere between Chicago and ica, of course, came from England; but at the Detroit,fairlycloselarge northerncities, time of the earliest settlements in Massachu-there are some speech features which disap- setts, Virginia, Maryland, and Rhode Island,pear. The influence of Detroit reaches out the dialects of England were by no meanstowards Chicago inaseries of concentric uniform. Speakers of these various dialectscircles. The dialect of a community located crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled withbetween these two cities depends upon whose their own dialects along the East Coast. In-influence it comes under. Such cities as Chi- frequent visits from outsiders caused these cago and Detroit, because of their urban pres- dialects to not change. That's why the East tige, become focal points in the culture which Coast has more dialect areas than we have inincludes dialect, pronunciation, words, and the Midwest. Cohesiveness of the separategrammatical choices. colonies helped to make the dialects distinc- tive. To this day this area exhibits smallerPhysical Geography and stronger dialect areas than most of the Another influence on dialect differences is regions to the west. the pattern of physical geography. Today we are seldom troubled by physical barriers such Population Shift as rivers, deserts, or mountains, Another reason for dialect differences lies Today, dialect boundaries are not apt to be in patterns of population shift. It's a curiousfound on opposite sides of a river as they thing that most Americans think of their diawere in the past. lect areas without considering the patterns of The Connecticut River between Vermont mobility. Ask anyone what the dialects ofand New Hampshire separates pahk the cah America are and you will probably be toldfrom park the car. The Connecticut River that they are Southern, Eastern, and general used to be a boundary. Even after bridges American. Despite the tendency of textbookswere built across the Connecticut River, the to perpetuate this notion, American dialects diale:tdifferences continuedtoexistvery simply do not divide themselves that neatly. strongly on either side. The differences might Since American population shift generallywell continue into the present day. In more has been from cast to west, dialect boundariesrecent') settled areas. how et cr. lac find influ- are more apt to run horizontally thaneril roces of phtsica I geography less important in call). People from western New York took establishing dialect differences. their dialect o Michigan, Wiscoesin, northern In the East, we find that rivers are rather Illinois, and northern Ohio. The pattern ofclear markers of dialectareas.Inearlier

42 42 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION times, rivers presented physical boundaries.though iceboxes have not been in common West of the Mississippi, geographical bound-use for many years. Older natives of the aries were not prohibitive since settlement ofNorthern dialect areas still may call a skillet the West came largely after effective develop.a spider, a term which you may never have meats in transportation. heard in this part of the country. Sex differences, of course, are not difficult Social Structure to find. Lovely, peachy, and darling are not apt to be found in the vocabulary of boys. Another reason for dialect differences, inAdult males are not apt to know or use many additiontosettlementhistory,populationwords concerned with cooking, sewing, or shift, and physical geography, is the matter of social structure. Much recent study of dialec-women's styles; and women of all ages are not likely to use the specialized vocabulary of tology has been concerned with the relation- sports or automotive repairs or plumbing. ship of regional dialects and social dialects. A person may reveal his educational or Although America does not have clear cutoccupational background through his choice class distinctions, relative judgments about aof words. It is no secret that learning the person's social rank are forced upon us daily.specialized vocabulary of psychology, elec- We make social distinctions in our own minds tronics,linguistics, orfishingisnecessary whether we are conscious of them or not,before one becomes fully accepted as an in- particularly in the matter of language. sider. Truck drivers, secretaries, tire builders, Our difficultyin establishing what high,sailors, and farmers provide specialized VO middle, or low class means in America iscabulary of occupation groups in everyday evidenced by the difficulty we have in finding language. names forthe classes.Dialectologists have Origins will also be indicated in V ocabu resorted to various numbering systems in anlary. "A baby creeps," is generally Northern. attempt to avoid being called prejudiced; butCrawls is Midland. The container in which no matter what they do, they are subject toyou carry water or milk is a pail in most criticism. Northern dialect areas and a bucket elswhere. Since language involves itself in so manyA carbonated beverage is pop, soda, tonic, or different aspects of the curriculum, I think thea soft drink. In the center of some fruits, we English classroom is a natural place to coor- find seeds, kernels, pits, or stones. dinate the various disciplines in the curricu- A good reference for the study of vocAti lum. lary is Hans Kurath's A It ord Geography of The factors usually thought of as the spe-the Eastern United States. In this day and cial property of history and the social studiesage, no one is going to shoot you down for a course are of great significance in the study ofvocabulary word used in a different sense American English. Our language, after all, isfrom his own. He may consider your use of made up of the various elements of history,the word amusing or quaint, but I don't think geography, and society in the backgrounds of you are going to be typed socially for having us all. used it. The study of vocabulary differences, however, makesforinterestingclassroom Differences in Vocabulary work.

1would like to call attention here to some thingsin terms of dialect differences andDifferences in Pronunciation vocabulary which might be useful forthe The study of pronunciation is somewhat classroom leacher. Everybody is interested inmore difficult to handle because it requires an vocabulary, althoughIthink vocabulary isear for language and some basic background the least significant of the areas of dialectol-of the major sounds of language, of English. ogy in terms of social contrast. The difference between creek and crick is not There are vocabulary differences related tohard to hear. We asked in Detroit what a age, to sex, to education, to occupation, andsmall body of water running throngs a farm to origin. would he called and we usually got crick. The useof certainwords indicatesthe When we did get creek for the general term, speaker's age. An electric refrigerator may kwe often got Battle Crick for the city where known as an icebox to some people, evencereals are prepared. A pronunciation hangs

43 DIALECTOLOGY AND USAGE 43

on to a place name longer than it does on aoverdoveand perhaps is going to win out in general term.Creekis gaining in the Norththe long run. That is as much of the whole even though it's a Southern pronunciation. Ittruth as we can say. It is not simply a matter is gaining in the Northerncitiesfirst and thenof one is right and the other is wrong, but working its way out into the country. thereis something going on that is much East of the Appalachians, people say get.more precise that we can say about such tingmahriedwhereas Isay gettingrnerried. grammatical forms asdivedanddove. Where I come from we make no contrasts Language change is constant and also in- between merry (as in Merry Christmas) andteresting. Which is"correct"?Quarter of Mary,norbetween Maryandmarry. Ray"isfour. Quarter '111 four. Quartertofour. Quar- Midland Southern androof,Northern. In theter before four.There are a number of gram- urban North,roofis gaining. KC/eh is sup.matical items in the new bookDiscovering posed to be a bad pronunciation for catch,American Dialectswhich will be useful to the but you'll "ketch" most teachers in the Mid-teacher of English. west saving it most of thetime. I think that the teacher of English, rather Teachers who teach that there's a consistentthan taking differences in vocabulary, pro- pronunciation of phonogramic relationshipsnunciation and grammatical forms as prob- among certain lists of words must take carelems, should use them as beginning points for to put them in their regional context, becauseinteresting discussions. some parts of the country have itoneway and other parts, another way. Dialectology in the Classroom Ihave been saying things along the way about the place dialectology has in the class- Differences in Grammatical Forms room. I now would like to put these things There are any number of pronunciationsinto a framework. which we could consider, but let us now take Here are some cardinal rules, it seems to a took at some of the differences in grammar.me, that we can discuss. To this day, the grammar books are not First of all, theteacher should not ridicule settled as to what is the past tense ofdive.the speech of his student no matter :chat it is. Most dictionaries list two past tense forms:Most teachers are conscientious, believe in dove,found largelyintheNorth;dived, their children, and want to help them. Yet, we found in the Midland areas. do tend to ridicule a student's speech. What is a teacher to do about the past Once when I was working for the National tense ofdive?Teachers, in the past, felt theCouncilof Teachers of English,I asked need to select one form or the other.Divedteachers, "How wouldyoudescribethe was probably taughtmoreoftenbecausespeech of the children in your classrooms?" that's what most grammar books say is cot.-They said, "Ugly. Horrible. Miserable. Slov- rect. When you seedove inDetroit and Chi-enly." All of these teachers worked indisad cago newspapers and when you hear Senators vantaged areas. Then I would ask, "What are and Presidents saydove,you wonder who isthe features which are ugly, slovenly?" I had out of step here. a hard time getting answers which were relat- 1 think one of the most important thingsed to what I saw in the classroom.I don't that linguistics geography or linguistics canthinkwe're going to get anywhere if we add to the teaching of English is that theysubconsciouslyor consciouslyridiculethe provide more precise answers to such ques-children we teach. I doubt that you're going tions. The simple fact here is thatdivedis ato communicate much to somebody whose MidlandSouthern form anddove isa North.speech you abhor. ern form; thatdived is gainingin the urban Another of Shuy's principles is this:Speak. North, perhaps on the principle of anatc$yers of one dialect are not inherently superior ith all other ed words. Ever since the timeto speakers of another dialect.I'm saving of Chaucer, English has been dropping thehere that speakers of substandard (vs 11:-.tcver seven classes of strong verbs and adding tothat means) dialect are not inherently in'lerior the three classes of weak verbs. Any new verbto speakers of standard dialect. For one thing, today takes anedform in English. how do you define "standard"? What is stan In the urban North, then, dived is gainingdard in England is not standard in the U.S

44 44 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

What is standard in Texas is not standard inout structural interference on the grammatical New York. Perhaps we can define it as thatlevel. A child is reading this sentence: "He which enables a person to get along wellwalks down the street." He actually reads, within his own group. Then there is a stan-"He walk down the street." It is very likely dard English which is different in one groupthatthe childhas merely transferredthe from a standard English in another group. Iswalks of the printed page to his own dialect dived then better than dove? Is rnf betterwhere itis walk.Isthis a problem of not than roof? pronouncing an s? I think not. It seems to me America, with its expanded provincialismto be more of a problem of grammatical or nationalism or whatever you want to callinterference of one dialect with that of anoth it, enables me to say that I'm as right as youer. The child doesn't have a reading problem. are, by George, and just because I'm fromThis child understands so well that he trans- Texas and you're from Boston doesn't meanlates a word into his own dialect. What we do that you're better thanI am. On the othe.about it is another matter. For oral reading, I hand, we must also be conscious of the viewguess we want him to pronounce the s. Un- others take of us. We must be willing to learnderstanding the grammar of a dialed may be a more "acceptable" dialect and to useitvery useful in diagnosing problems in gram. when the appropriate time arrives. matical interference in another dialect. My third principle: Understand your cur- rent attitudes in relation to your own socialDifferences in Usage background. Perhaps I am covering the same The terms sociolinguistics and sociodialec- ground that I covered in the first principle. Iftology are fairly new and convey somewhat you have just recently emerged from the low-different concepts from the old definition of er middle class yourself or lower class tousage. middle class or lower middle to upper mid. What do you, as teachers of English, think dle, be sure you understand yourself in relaof the usage in the following sentences? tionship to your judgments of others. For (1) His work is different than mine. example, I have no way of saying, "I am (2) Can I have some more? right,. . . I?" 1 can't say, "Ain't I?" (3) Everyone put on their coats. because I am an English teacher. I can't say, (4) We only have five left. "Am I not?" because people of my genera. (5) I will pay your bill. lion where I'm from just don't say it. "Aren't These sentences have been selected from I" is just as pretentious as it can be to me. Ithose used by Norman Lewis in a survey think Iunderstand, however, my son whowhich he reportedinIlarper's.'Lewis re says, "Aren'tI?" lie can sayitbecauseceived 460 responses in his survey of some 19 people in his community say it. items of doubtful usage. Those who respond. Idon't know how many papersIhaveed included 155 teachers of college English, marked wrong in grading compositions on12 dictionary makers, 33 authors, 80 editors, things which are only manifestations of my22 radio commentators, 32 teachers of high own provincialism in terms of speech. school English, 60 subscribers to.Iarper's A fourth principle is this: Both standardselectedat random, 4.8 feature writers and and substandard dialects are systematic. Acolumnists, and 26 women's magazine editors. dialect which calls for 1 runs, you runs, he The first sentence in the Harper's survey runs, we runs, they runs is just as systematicgained 31% acceptance. Eleven of the 12 as the one calling for I run, you run, he runs,dictionary makers acceptedit.The second we run, they run. sentence received 40% acceptance. Two-thirds Subgroup dialects, since they are system.of the teachers of college English accepted atic, can be as clearly described as standard this one. The third Sentence was accepted by dialects. IfI have a knowledge of the sub-45% of the respondents. Again, two thirds of group dialectsystem, Iknow what Iamthe teachers of college English acceptedit. "teaching against." I also know what trans hr fourth Sentence was accepted by 14% of forms should be taught in order to achievethe resp,twients. And again, two- thirds of the the standard dialed. teachers of college English accepted it. The Another thing that dialectology does for N41,011 r.wn.II.. .1 .1 Ingh.h the classroom, it seems to me, is that it points Ilf,11,,olo. 1,14 iqr h Wry. iv1,8

Oil D !ALEC TOLOGY AND USAGE 45

fifth sentence was accepted by 90% of thewell. He wants to add the rigidity that seems respondents. to be lacking in the world of English and, What I am getting at here is not that weperhaps, in the child's life. He creates prob- are now absolved from the problem of findinelems for the child when his rigidity is not the usage items. Rather, I am saying that here isrigidity of the next teacher or when his rigid. one way of getting at an accurate statementity does not agree with the textbook. about usage based on some evidence. What What about the authority of a book? Over interests me here is not whether these sen-the last two generations, professional students te.ices are classified as acceptable or not butof language, thenteachers, and lastof all the basis on which the decision is made. If we laymen have begun to understand something reject or accept a particular construction, we about usage. The layman, however, suffers a ought to have a good basis for rejecting ortension resulting from a feeling of relief at accepting it. being toldnottofeelguilty about using I am attempting to focus on the problem oflanguage naturally and from his expectation deciding what is good English and what isthat the dictionaries and handbooks are sup- not.If we seek authority to back up our posed to make him feel guilty. usage, whose authority do we use? We shall Let's turn now to the authority of a disci. examine several systems of deciding whatpline. We know that radioTV people have their good English really is, and, in doing so, we'll own standards. Obviously the seminary has find that man is a rather complex person. Theits own standards since pulpit diction is quite word good, when we talk about good English, different from the diction that you hear else- has a way of changing its complexion depend. where. I have a very good friend, a Baptist ing on such factors as context, audience, sub- minister, who becomes an entirely different jectmatter, age, andinterests.Itisvery person in the pulpit. 1 tell him that he's difficult to find a good English which exists schizophrenic. He's informal and chatty in atall times. We'll find also that languagepersonal relationship, but he rolls his is in change has an important bearing on any the pulpit. Speech teachers have their stand. definition of good English. ards. The newspapers have their own author. Furthermore,we'llfindthatthetotality on usage. Theodore Bernstein of the New communication structure relates significantly York Times in his book called Watch Your to our own understanding of good English.Language makes a number of interesting We may be in fact we usually are statements about usage which are relevant to unawareof ourdeviationfromsociety's the New York Times.2 Keep in mind that norms. they are pertinent for those who write for the Times but are not necessarily pertinent for Pthorities for Good Usage others. If you want to write for the New York Systems of finding good English are many.Times, you had jolly well better follow Theo- We may seek the authority of a person, of adore Bernstein's prejudices and his ideas. book, of a discipline, or of society. would strongly suggest, however, that you Let's begin with the authority of a person.don't use it for love letters. We have all lived under the iron rule of a English teachers, who certainly represent a solid, firm, unbending English teacher. Herdiscipline, are perhaps less unified in their ways were the right ways, her judgmentschoice of usage than representatives of other final. Although we disliked her rigidity to adisciplines. It seems to me that English teach- certain extent, we found it comforting thaters should have a strongerunificationof some rigidity existed in the world. Unfortu usage standards than they do. nately, we were never able to fathom exactly Society also exercises its own brand of why her judgments were made. Then, whenauthority over language. t hatf am saying we met another equally strong English teach.here is that language is primaril.. sociological er whose standards varied from those of theand that society agrees upon erlain things. first, we were faced with the dilemma ofAlthough some children say d sses for desks, deciding which of the former instructors society decides that they are called desks. The rigid, wonderful people though they were society formed by nine.) ear-olds on a play was right? Of course, the authoritarian person means t.. Irojo

4 46 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION ground may decide that they are desses, andwithin himself a tension between the old, the nineyearold who wants to be "in" callscomfortable ways and the new ways that them desses. We all know that women speakpromise to make him "acceptable." This ten- in a somewhat different language from thats;on can easily lead to insecurity and the used by men. In other words, society, how.insecurity, to timidity. Say it the safe way, do ever it defines itself as Brooklyn, as Ba it the easy way, the way which won't get you more, as nineyearold Negro boys in De-in trouble. troit'sinner city hasits own ways of In writing and in composition of any sort, deciding what's right and what isn't. Werehowever, tension and insecurity will produce this not so, we'd still be saying pw'r insteadtimidity. The very thing we don't want in of boy. composition is timidity. "Be brave, be bold!" The usage committee of the American Dia.we say. lectSociety has beenattempting to make statements about usage in the Publications ofClassification of Usage the American Dialect Society (PADS). The One treatment of the dimensions of usage is Journal of American Speech, the same type ofthat usage is either good or it is bad. A scale journal, published by Columbia Universitx which is frequently given in usage guides and Press, contains many articles on vocabulary,English textbooks is literary, standard formal, pronunciation, and other matters having to dostandard informal,homely, andilliterate. with contemporary American English usage.This type of scale is not only unuseful but it These are attempts at recording what sccietyis also harmful and misleading. Usually we judges useful or nonuseful. interpret literary as best, standard formal as second best, standard informal as third best, There are ways of getting at good English,homely as fourth best, and illiterate as worst. and some ways are better than others. Simply Grammarians over the years have tried to accepting the authority of the textbook willdiscover the universal principles upon which lead you into trouble, particularly in an ageto judge good usage. George Campbell in the in which we're telling our students to chat-18th century, in his English textbooks, said lenge the textbook, to think critically. I don'tthat in deciding upon which word or which see anything wrong with facing a controver sial issue in the classroom by saying, "Let'sexpression to use, one should prefer the pres. ent, the reputable, and thenational. This look atihe facts.Idon't know what the answer is. Let's see if we can find out." Doseems like a pretty good idea to you have usage guides? Go to them. Do youme. However, usage handbooks have reflect. ed more interest in items than in principles have dictionaries? Go to them. Do you have afor judging the items. Of course, there were linguistics atlas? Go to it. More and moreproblems in interpreting Campbell's criteria, materialis becoming available for to use but he had criteria first. research of this sort. If we accept the theory of setting up elite Usage is in one way a complicated prob.via for judging usage, what principles do we tern; in another way it is a relatively simplehave? one. Certain pronunciations and certain vo. We have the principle of history..I think cabulary and grammatical items are valuedthat the teacher of English would find a more than others for certain situations. That'sknowledge of the history of the language very the simple part. The complex part is deter.useful in the classroom. Explaining the influ mining exactly how they are valued in exactly ence of the Norman Conquest on the ough what situations. words (rough, tough, bough, through), for Almost everyone recognizes that in someexample, is of more value than just saying, way some people use the language more effec"That's the way English is," tively than the rest. Their way of h:ndling the The textbooks that warn against slow used language attracts attention. People are enas an adverb evidently are unaware of the couraged to emulate them. The semadefact that in Old English stoic was an adverb man, who is comfortable in the language heas well as an adjective. Words, such as slow, has been using for years, may be tempted bypresent the opportunity for the teacher to give advertisements that ask him, "Do you makethe historical background that accounts for these mistakes in English?" Ile builds upthe usage surrounding them.

47 DIALECTOLOGY AND USAGE 47

Besides the principle of history, there are The Scales of martin .loos the principles of psychology and sociology. Let's take another look at the item Ire only Martin Joos in his monograph called "The have five left. Many textbooks tell us to putFive Clocks " looks at usage through four only :text to the word it modifies. Presumscales, each scale having five clocks.4 ably, then, only is supposed to be modifying RESPONSIBILITY BREADTH we, and the usage is incorrect because the best genteel statement is illogically arranged. On the other better puristic hand, some linguists claim that psychological. good standard ly such a statement isperfectly acceptable fair provincial because it cannot possibly be misunderstood. bad popular It's not exactly ungrammatical. It's not even AGE STYLE socially unacceptable this way. Robert Poo ley senile in his book feels this is the case.3 I have no frozen mature formal reason to doubt his opinions on this. Sociological principles also operate here. teenager consultative child casual The only valid reason for the creation,pres. baby ervation, or extinction of a word is whether intimate it is useful to our society or not. If we need The style scale is the one in which Joos is the word, it will live; if we don't need it,itmost interested. Styles are appropriate to the will probably die. We are going through anoccasion. They are appropriate to the size of interesting period right now with the wordthe group, the degree of familiarity within the index. It seemed for awhile that indexes wasgroup and they are even appropriateto gaining on indices, but now indices is popularthe subject being discussed. The problem again. We are even developing a back forma.comesinselectingtheproperstylear. I LionwhichIhave heard many educatedshifting from one style to another. people use in the last year. The plural indices The paradox, perhaps, of English teaching would suggest the singular is indite.I haveis that we aim for one style of English, hea *ndice even in professional societies. Iwhereas we should aim for many styles. it is say c1 when I am talking to English teach-certainly appropriate for a preschool child to ers a).-I dita when I'm talking to linguists. Incall his train a cheo choo. By the early teens, editing Social Dialects and Language Learn-the child usually has at least three working ing, I had both English teachers and linguistsstyles (serious, systematic data gathering is look it over. The linguists were adamantly inlimited here): one style for his peer group, favor of data is, whereas the English teachersone style for parents and other adults, and generally wrote diira are.I don't rememberone style for strangers. This is a minimal the last time I saw datum in print. Perhaps itstylistic repertoire needed for the normal so- occurs occasionally, butitcertainly is notcial life of the teenager. needed as often as the plural. For educated adults, the five Joos styles are Well, what then do we do in our attempt tocommon. The consultative style is the central find the dimensions in usage? Well, we tookone which is used for opening a conversation for things which will indicate clearly thatwith a stranger. The major focus in the con- something is formed which will enable peoplesultative style is on communication with a to appreciate us rather than laugh at us. minimum of social, aesthetic, or emotional

Jr. 111-17,' C. F`Ohfry.rmrAinrf No,oh \ ow 1,i,trifri..11. 17 Martin '7-The Eke' (I, i.," / norion Journalof tmeriraq Century Cr It., n d1. 1 ingozgr(rt r 4prd, 10621.

Almost all teachers believe b dh that they recognize ihr diffvrenues between such students' "natural language and the kind of which is believed lobe desirable. and that the) understand howloteaell tie standard dialect to their students .. . The fart rrf the matter is that different is in dialect and differ- ences in variety of language are far more complex than the training of most teach- ers has led them to suspect. Th .00 II, .- . . 11. Dr.ft.1,..el I. "attl,4,1. ,t(0,.,. le 111-1 If e, r-Iethh.

48 4i BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

overtones that characterize other styles. reader into educating himself so that he may The casual style is what we'd use in easybe more confidentinacting therole he conversation among friends, except when thechooses. The key here is that these styles all seriousness of the occasion calls for consultarequire subtle shifts of pronunciation, gram- the style. Here we find elided pronunciationsmar, syntax, and vocabulary, depending on such as Ent gonna. The sentences tend to bewhether the language used is written or spok- more elliptical, such as Eat yet? Comingen. It is not a matter of good versus bad or tonight? It may include slang or even occaliterary versus homely. The native speaker sional profanity. It is not used to convey verymust learn to control these shifts to a varying serious or complex informathini because evendegree and I think this is the tremendous task close friends should use consultative style forof the English teacher to be able to handle serious or complex information. In writing,this kind of thing. this casual style is characterized by a lot of contractions, abbreviations, the heavy use of the dash. One of the thingsItrytotell Detroit Dialect Study college students in freshmen composition is to If we are to make statements about what be more consultative and less casual, lesspeople actually say, we must do large-scale chatty, lessinformal. The most commonly language gathering studies.Iant going to used style of the high school and collegediscuss very briefly the Detroit Dialect Study, student is the casual style except in the class-which 1 am conducting, in the hope that such room and in writing where he shifts to thean overview will give you an idea of how consultative style. As tear iers, we must recsuch studies are organized and carried out. ognize thisfactfor we need to help the The purpose of our research in Detroit is, student to know when to sw4tch and when not first of all, to describe the speech of Detroit- to. ers from various economic and age levels and The intimate style is used by people whoof various ethnic, religious, and geographical know each other so well that they can predictorigins. We are interested in any kind of an each other's reactions to a given situation.ingroup, no matter what it is. Since there are Much communication here is nonlinguistic 70 ethnic groups in Detroit, we spent most of eyebrow- raising, shrugging, groaning. Ilusour efforts on these groups which livein bands and wives communicate withsuch particularkindsofghettos.Other ethnic things as 11mm? and Urt-huh which dependgroups include Negroes, Jews, Poles, Mexi- on intonation for meaning. Words are oftencans, and Appalachian Whites. We can split slurred, are clipped;.here's an accidentalthese groups into various subgroups, basing mispronunciation, maybe purposely pre- our distinctions on the scales of breadth, age, served. style, and responsibility. The formal style, expository discourse, is Our second purpose if. to relate this linguis informative and discursi-e. It is notconversa tic descril to the sociological factors in tional.It is used by lecturers, by preachers, zolveciii rto determine what speech newscasters, judges, legislators, by anybody features cll.. erite each group. We want to alone before an audience or by a writer writ- gather data, but we want to relate the data to ing to an auolenee which cannot talk back. any kind of information we have about age, The frozen style is literary. The fact that itthe geographical origin of grandparents, of is preserved in such a way that we would not parents,aboutreligionand manyother want to change it is why it is called frozen. things. Intimate style roses two personalities. Cas- We want to relate the linguistic facts that ual style integrates different personalities into we find to whatever other information we can a social group which is greater than the sum discover about Detroit. Sociologists, for ex of its parts. Consultative style produces coop- ample, have found that the Poles on the east eration without the kind rintegration that side of Detroit tend to have different values you get with casual style, Formal style in- from those of Poles on the west side and that forms the individual separately on a oneto those from the east side who change their one basis 5,0 that his future planning may be residence tend to move to one section whereas more discriminating. Frozen style lures the those from the west side move to another.

49 DIALECTOLOGY AND USAGE 49

Our interest in describing the speech ofworkers. Each field worker could do approxi Detroiters is not limited to that of the innermately two interviews a day, each interview city people; we are interested in as many running about one and a half hours. classes as we can get. We know that our The basic areasinthe language to be sample is not going to tell us in the end thatexamined here were pronunciation (word for. Detroit speech is such and such. We are notmation, inflections, and derivational affixes in even pretending that. What we want to do isthis case), syntax (the way word order pat. to gather the speech, relate it to the sociologi.terns go), and vocabulary. I was least inter. cal factors, and then utilize the information to ested in vocabulary and my questionnaire provide a theoretical basis for pedagogy and reflected it.I think vocabulary is interesting even to develop some materials for the class-but it does not carry the crucial social stand. room. If we discover certain kinds of syntax ing that pronunciation, grammar, and syntax features characteristic of one group, we wantdo. The search here was for indices of social to tell teachers who work with members ofstanding within the matrices of race, econom. the group what these features are and to tellics, religion, age, ethnicity, origin what. teachers in other areas r..t to worry aboutever other matrix we had in mind. such features. Let me give you some examples of the Since time for making this study is limited,phonological indices that we are testing now. it has seemed to me that we should focus onThe final consonant deletionisone such problems. We need background information thing. The dropping of the d and the I in such on comparisons of geographical areas, of eth.words as bed and wet are examples that come nicity, race, or even religion, and of age. to mind. The substitution off for th in such In our survey, we have interviewed chil-words as bathroom and the dropping of the dren of the fourth and sixth grades, teenagers,final g in words that end in ing are others. In parents, and grandparents. addition to deletions, modifications, and sub- stitutions, we are also studying consonant By now, you are probably wondering how additions(chimbleyforchimney),vowel we chose our informants. We decided to usedeletions(g'ragefor garage), and vowel the registration files of all the public schoollengthening (coon' for cow). These are only children in Detroit as our population. Wesome of the phonological indices being stud. randomly selected schools from each of 10ied. areas and then randomly selected 10 children In our study, we are going to talk about from each school from the 4th to 6th grades.grammatical indicesin terms of processes We did pot feel competent to interview any.rather than items. We think that it will be one below the 4th grade. Then we interviewedmore useful in the long run if v'e can lump the older sibling, if there was one. If theregrammatical things into patterns rather than were two older siblings, we would pick thesimply say, "Here are a list of grammatical one who was not out of high school and work things." So the processes involved arethe our way down. We wanted to get an age morphophonemicprocesses,theanalogical difference here becauw we know that some.processes, the deletion processes, the proc thing happens to the language between theesses of vIclition, the processes of permuta- nnddle elementary grades and high school. Iftion, (he processes of concordial relationships, possible, we would like to get a measurement the processes of expanded or restricted form of those differences. class usage. What we want to do is to put all We interviewed one or the other parent on these things into various kinds of processes so a rigid basis, the father in one case, thethat the teacher will have a better grasp of mother in the next. We interviewed a grand. the unity, the problem involved, parent if one was available. 1 think it is much better to understand that We finished the fieldwork on August 12. the child's problem is one of analogy than it We have between 700 and 750 interviews inis to say "Your problem is that you put errs the city of Detroit. That may not seem likewhere they don't belong." very many, but keep in mind that up to this One ofthemorphophonemicprocesses time the total knowledge that we had waswhich is common is the neutralization of the based on four interviews conducted 20 )earsan distinction (a apple instead of an apple). ago. We had only 8 weeks and 12 fieldThis seems to be an age grader in Detroit. It

JO 50 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

also has some social manifestations beyondreally said anything about dialect in syntax. age grading. When we come upon such things We are now preparing a file which will as stringstrang, bring-brang, gooder, balder,show the exact number of occurrences of each or feet feels, we put them under the process ofsentence type, each clause type, and each analogy because we would like to be able tophrase type used by each speaker in Detroit, understand why the child is saying what heItis a fantastic undertaking. It is laborious says, not just what he is saying. butitisimportant in terms of language The process of deletion is one which gram-learning. Four typists have been working all matically has bearing in Detroit, We foundsummer making transcripts of the recorded particle deletion (you out the game for youinterviews. The linguist takes the transcript are out of the game), copula deletion (heand checks it for accuracy against the tape. crummy, he nice), article deletion (1 want toAfter the transcript has been retyped and put make wishforI want to make a wish),on a stencil, it is run off and studied bit by conjunction deletion (there eight ten horsesbit every phrase, clause, and sentence. We for there are eight or ten horses), auxiliary.go through our potential indices of syntax deletion (we playing forice are playing),and our potential indices of grammar to see relativedeletions(differentthingsSantawhat he does and how many times. We record brings). The deletion of the dependent clauseevery peculiar use that we think is diagnostic. with a comparative (1 like arithmetic better)At the present time, we are testing hypothe- is another case. I look at this problem fromses. We intend to do a lot more, of course, in the viewpoint of deletion process rather thanthe organization of the findings. Ours is a as a logic problem better than what? Heremonumental undertaking, but when it is fin. is the deletion of a whole unit of speechished it will say more about Detroit English which I prefer to consider in the same classthan any file of its kind yet in existence. with copula deletion, particle deletion, and We came upon a few new terms in Detroit, conjunction deletion. but we are not really as much interested in We are also looking atthe processofvocabulary as we are in grammar and syntax. addition. Prepositions seem to be the most Our study will relate to the teaching of fruitful area. Adverbs come in for their share. English primarily in describing what actually By the process of permutation, which isis there in terms of pronunciation, grammar, and syntax. It should indicate where a partic- another we are dealing with,Imean the change in linear order of things, such as heular kind of problem exists or with what used to always go instead of he always usedtypes of people. It should indicate the tt hy as to go. well as the what. It should find the systems into which the language of each child fits. Another process is that of concordial rela This study would not do the schools of lions, the subject -verb concord; for example, Detroit much good if all we did was tabulate watches, we goes, he go. We are trying tothe results and hand over the tabulations. In discover the systematic pattern of this concor-the case of one respondent who reverted to a dial relation as it exists in Detroit. Multipledifferent system of language when he became negativesfitinto concordial relations, We emotional,Ithink itis worthwhile for the asked, "How much have you traveled?" One teacher to know that thisisa systematic of the respondents said, "1 ain't neter wentreversal and that it is common. Teachers may nowhere on no trip." be tempted to say, "What a chaotic thing. There is the expanded or restricted formWhy, this boy. for no reason in the world, class usage, such as we have with pronounsstarts using a copula. He knows better." I buy me a house (the object pronoun usedthink the situation is quite different when he as a reflexive). Him and my sister went home understands why. (object pronouns as a subject), Ile's better Another thing that must be related is the than me or better than I (pronoun with ainterference of subgroup speech to standard comparative). English. When a student reads l be the nne We are studying, then, certain numbers ofwho came for I am the one uho came, his grammatical indices. We are also studyingproblem isnota reading problem nor a some syntactical indices, which are not quitephonemegrapheme problem;itisa gram. as easyto formulate because nobody hasmatical interference problem.

51 DIA LECTOLOGY AND USAGE 51

I think there's something to be said for tual. I hope it will be useful. applying this kind of research to composition. Certainly we can also say something about If we can isolate by quantitative analysis the usage statements, I think a great deal of ink number of each phrase, clause and sentenceis wasted on nonexistent problems. Usage type used by people of different age, racial,problems vary from place to place, situation economic, ethnic, geographical, and religiousto situation. Basically, we are attempting to groups, we can discover something about how find out exactly who needs what said to him. syntax acquisition comes about. So far, no Ireally am excited about the kind of re. one has said much about this. Composition search we are carrying In in Detroit. I think teaching,unlessithaschangedsince I our results will be of great usefulnessto stopped teaching composition, lacks concrete. English teachers in the Detroit area.I am ness. Our research in Detroit, I think, will say hopeful that teachers outside the Detroit area something about composition which isfac- will also benefit from the results of our study. Linguistics Is a Process Linguistics is a process: it's a special way of doing something, and [it] has two parts to it. One part concerns what we call attitudes. In order to behave as linguists do, in order to do linguistics, one has to accept certain attitudes. These arc as well known to you as they are to me. They go by various names such as tenta tiveness, objectivity, a certain hostility to authority, certainly a hostility to authori- tarianism, openmindedness, willingness to accept the fact that there can be dif ferent answers to a single question, willingness to accept the fact that any answer you have in your head today is subject to change and sometimes immediate change. All of these are attitudes that we generally associate with the scientific methods of inquiry. You cannot do linguistics unless you are willing to accept these attitudes. frt addition to attitudes, there arc certain operations that are part of the process of doing linguistics. Once again, these are well known to you. To over. simplify, let me name five or six of them: Question-askingyou almost always start an inquiry by asking the question; Definingyou spend considerable time trying to make as clear as possible the meanings of the key terms you are using: Observ- ing, Classifying, Generalizing, Verifyingall of these are operations that we L.. sociate with scientific methods of inquiry ... It seems to me that if linguistics is a process, if its a way of doing something, then what this means for the English teacher is that he must refashion his class. room environment so that almost daily what h s students arc doing is linguistics, and by "doing it" I mean using the attitudes and procedures that I referred to. If the students are not doing that, then they are not doing linguistics. the classroom is not a linguis:ically-oriented classroom... [Linguistics] stresses active inquiry on the part of the learner so that any classroom in which the study of language is fundamentally an act of obedience is not a linguistics classroom, no matter what definition of a noun is being used or what definition of a sentence is being used. What is at stake here for all of us is in a way even more fearful and painful than what some of us might think is involved in mak;ng changes. because what we need is not so much a new English, if you'll forgive my saying it, but a new English teacher .. . who makes the whole range of language behavior the subject of in quiry, so that what his students are doing is not giving back a kind of h i.fi or low-fi recording of someone else's answers to someone else's questions. but ... actively doing what the linguists do. What linguists do is ask questions, define their terms, make observations, classify their data, draw generalizations from data, and verify. As they do this. they accept as a matter of course all oldie attitudes that we associate with the sci entific method of inquiry ... 1e41 r.,.trtan. nf f ne,A1114,0,.\-1,41 "Ina ,rk.A./.. initulo, ,hr Tr..11,4 of ihr .F.41,h1 ihr Halt < Pull, h.« I. an,Ithr Ini1.1ii %kr-a.m.! J-71 Nonstandard Speech Patterns

Many people will he surprised to learn that non- standard dialect has a coherent, structured, mean- ingful system of its own with its own historical back- ground. Dr. Stewart's intensive investigations into an increasingly critical area stress thatitavails the teacher little to recognize a deviation from standard English without understanding the nature of the de- viation. "Without the sophistication to evaluate ex- actly," Dr. Stewart says, "the teacher must use a great deal of caution in a correction device."

WILLIAMA.STEWART

Talking about dialect variation and theand more technological, requires increasingly problem of dialect differences involves sodasome kinds of formal education as preparation ogy, foreign language teaching technique, thefor acting in a technological society. The days history of the United States, and, in somewhen people could get by, where most people, cases, foreign language differences. in fact, expected to get by as simply a ditch. A change has taken place primarilydigger, are past. because of changes in educational and social With respect to the socioeconomically dis philosophy in the United States not onlyadvantaged, particularly' people many of about who is to be taught but also aboutthem Negroes in the slum areas of our big what is to be taught. Groups that we-e wrycities, educators now have to ask: How can much left in the periphery or totally outsideteach these people what I need to teach them? of the educational process in America have in the last few decades been taken seriously intoLinguistic History the educational process. knowing something about the history of The goals have become more practical,the Negro in the city ghettos means knowing since th,.: people who have been included havelinguistic history as well as social history. At been people representing actuallya muchthe formation of the United States as we wider range of cultural differences, of ecoknow it today, Africans made up some of the nomic differences, and of background. Manyvery first immigrants. They started arriving very different kinds of people have to bealong the South American coast before prac- trained for practical interaction with othertically anybody arrived in North America, kinds of people in a life which, being moreand Africans also were among the first people ilti. rondenrrii..a mrde by Vim< ant C Mobn ihr Sur..a of hrt11. to arrive in North America. They weren't in rytiono d. lape rtrordiniDr Sitart. prr.rnta..,11Y.111. 1 irrui, it ror.4.6.4 by rh. frahin,..re for Public 5.1...4, ttuteu.e S the very first wave; but soon after, they start 1966. R. Str an retain. r..yrnshi on th. nIsleria1 and h.. pion ed coming. Purr.. of Publ.,io.65 pet 611,1..6 I. prirsi in the Ora f ti ewe Ed enof if'uhicatinn. By the late 1690's, which is still fairly early

$2 53 NONSTANDARD SPEECI1 PATTERNS 53 in American history, a sizable number oflandfalls for ships, tribal people and sailors Negroes was in the United States, some Af-used two or three kinds of pidgin languages ricans and some western-born Negroes. Afri-for trade. One was pidgin English, another cans came to the United States with a foreignwas pidgin Portuguese, and another was one of language as their native tongue usually, andthe African languages pidginized all still they were faced with the problem of acquiringusedinvarietiesalong the West African the language of the new nation, the languagecoast. of most of the immigrants in this new nation. Many staves brought with them this pidgin Because they were of slave status (as theEnglish, as did many whites who were en vast majority of them were for the next fewgaged in the slave trade, and it apparently centuries), very little in the way of formalgained quite a bit of currency among the education was open to them. English had toearly dark-skinned field hands. These African be picked up as best it could until the devel-slaves were deliberately mixed ethnically. The opment of an elite today we would call itpolicy of slave owners and slave buyers was Negro, but in the early days a social distinc-to mix the African slaves with respectto tion was made a mulatto caste (usuallytravel origin, the language they spoke, and derived from a union between master andthe area in Africa they came from. slave). They were often freedmen in the Bos Plantation owners planned to keep com ton and New York area, although in themunication, interaction, and common back- Southern areas they were still defined as hayground to a minimum. ing slave status because usually they were of a slave mother. They were given formal edu-Rapid Linguistic Transition cation, and often they constituted an elite cadre of household-type servants. The slaves had to have a common language A social dichotomy arose then between theto communicate with each other, and unless elitists, who were upper-class or relativelythey happened to find somebody who spoke upper-class, formally educated, fairly stand-their own tribal language, they couldn't use it. ardspeaking Negroes,andthe darker-They had to acquire some kind of English as skinnedfieldhands, who throughoutthea communication language betweenslaves group's linguistic history by and large wereeven in the very early days. In one sense the nonstandard speaking Negroes.It's been aAfrican slaves coming to the United States dichotomy which iswell known and welllearned a kind of English more quickly than studied by Myrdal and Franklin Fraiier andmany of the other foreign immigrants. Many such people and has existed right up untilforeign immi rants, Italians and Scandinavian recently within the Negro community. groups, for example, took two or three gener To most of the field hands and theyations to make the transition from the lan- constituted the majority formal educationguage that they came with to the kind of wasn'topen.Theyweren'teducatedin English they ended up speaking. For slaves, schools, and they just had to pick up Englishparticularly thefieldhands, the deliberate as best they could. Now, although it has beenmixing situation forced a rather rapid linguis- generally assumed historically that Africantic transition. And it had to be a makeshift slaves arrived on the North American main-one because formal education wasn't open to land speaking no English at all, we have tothem. revise this opinion. There's evidence, for ex- We have many early texts of the two basic ample, that a kind of pidgin English waskinds of pidgin English spoken in the United spoken as a trade language and primarily asStates. Another kind of pidgin English devel- a slave trade language along the West Afri-oped in communication, first, between Euro- can coast ranging roughly from where Dakarpean settlers and American Indians and then. is today dear down through the Ivory andlater, between different kinds of American Gold Coasts thatis, down to roughly Indians. These had previously especially where the Fernando Po blandisintheon the Plains used one or two Indian south. So along the whole area of Africa,languages as an intermediate 'rade language running from off the coast of Senegal to offand also a nonverbal sign language. But once the coast of Cameroon, at the slave stations,this American pidgin English got started, ap at the trading stations, watering ',lams, andparently along the eastern seaboard when the

54 ,54 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

first European settlers had contact with thewas susceptible to the correction and direc- Indians there, it spread quite rapidly so thattion of standard English, and therefore was a Indians were using it among each other longstep closer. before European settlement had spread west, It was also probably very similar to what out to the Plains areas, for example. iscalledGullahor Geechee.(It'scalled One of the characteristics of this pidginGeechee inthe Charlestonarea,although English was the nonsubject-object differencetechnically within the area itself Geechee re. in pronouns. People saidmefor bothmeandferstothe sort of citifiedvariety of the I. Verbs that were transitive had urn attachedlanguage spoken in Charleston, Georgetown, to the end. The stereotype of American pid-and cities along the coast.) The Gullah area ginEnglish, Me likum heap big chief,isextends roughly all along the coast in the rice actually rather accurate. The urn on the endplantationarea from the South Carolina- of like is a transitivity marker. In Me icanturnNorth Carolina border halfway down Geor- wampum, want is a transitive verb so it takesgia. The dialect demarcation isvery rigid urn on the end and Me is the subject. But inbetween the rice plantation area on the coast Him likum me, me is the object. Americanand the cotton plantation areas in both Geor- pidginhas pronoun simplificationinthisgia and South Carolina. Gullah, still spoken sense, and it also has a simpler but a moretoday, especiallyin the Sea Islands which regular way of marking verb transitivity. have been isolated historically from the in- This American pidgin English got well es-land, is quite obviously a creolized kind of tablished and vestiges of it are still used inpidgin English. A pidgin and a creole lan- Alaska in certain kinds of pidgin English stillguage are different primarily in that creole current there. Isuspect, althoughIdon'tlanguageisa pidgin language which has know firsthand, that bits and pieces of Arneriacquired native speakers -- people who speak can pidgin English structuresstillsurviveno other language. Pidgin language is a mod. on some Indian reservations, probably notified variety of a language that is used by reported even though heard by lots of peoplepeople who speak some other language as who don't know what it is. their native language. And the pidgin modi Another pidginEnglish, developed andfled variety has been modified because it has spoken in the South Pacific area, has nowbeen influenced by the structure of the native become almost an official language in thelanguage. Malaysian and New Guinea area.It spread Thus, for example,if Chinesein Hong north to Hawaii, and today large numbers ofKong suddenly had to acquire English rather peoples in the Hawaiian Islands speak pidginquickly, their English would be modified by English, a different kind of pidgin English.linguistic structures of Chinese analogies And a dialect problem there invokes teachingwith Chinese grammar, syntax, phonology, standard English to pidgin speakers, now priand lexical translations. In some cases, the madly of Japanese 1.ckground with some ofEnglish might be simplified: in other cases it Philippine ethnic origin in Hawaii. might just be made different; then it would have become a pidgin language but with a lot Slave Pidgin of structural influences of Chinese. Butif For the slave pidgin in the United StatesChina were to disappear and just Hong Kong many attestations are found, including attes to survive, people would forget Chinese and the Cations by sucl, capable observers as Benja children of the people who spoke Chinese min Franklin, who kept his ears open when natively but who had learned pidgin English he heard some characteristic slave speech inas a second language would learn just pidgin. the United States and set it down. It's ratherAnd pidgin world then become what is called like what we know about the early stages of a creole language. West African pidgin English, though in some Again, in West Africa theslaves came ways a step closer to standard English. No speaking African languages and learned pid longer in an enairornent asit had been ingin French. Because the African languages West Africa where the other languages spokdidn't survive, the second generation knew en were quite different from pidgin, it wasnatively just this pidgin French which then. spoken side by side with standard English,by definition, became the Creole language,

55 NONSTANDARD SPEECH PATTERNS 55

As the importation of slaves to Americalower-class fieldhand pidgin or creole lan gradually diminished, people speaking Af-guage imported to Liberia. The two kinds of rican languages became rarer and rarer, andEnglish preserve what was probably alin- American slaves divided into the small grcupguistic cross section of the American Negro in of fairly sophisticated, well-educated Negroesthe eastern coastal states in the 1840's. and the vast majority of field-hand types. They spoke primarily a kind of pidgin, butMigration, North and West when it acquired native speakers, it became The freeing of slaves after the Civil War, by linguistic definition creolized English andthe Reconstruction, and the turmoil as the was fairly different from the European lan-North industrialized and the South degenerat- guage to which it was lexically related.Ited into a plantation area decaying in a world looked like standard English, and somebodyin which plantations were less important, be. conducting a dialectic survey by looking at itsgan avast movement, particularly of the lexical items and at its sounds and not at itsSouthern Negro, northward and westward. grammatical structures might, in fact, classifyGeographic mobility has characterized the Ne itas part of the general dialect system, al-gro from right after the Civil War until the though in some ways odd. present time. In comparison, the migration of Grammatically, it was often quite different.the poor southern whites today is trivial. And the early attestations of slave speech, As the plantation economy spread inland even in the 1840's, 1850's, and 1860's whenfrom the rice plantations to the cotton planta- obviously the slaves were already native-borntions and Negroes and whites moved from the Americans, illustrate the differences, as docoast inland toward the Mississippi Valley, Gullah and the Charlestoncitified Gullahthe English of each changed. We can trace called Geechee today. features of the coastal white dialects inland to the delta region, so that the white English of Liberian Resettlement Project Mississippi and Alabama today is not like the The Liberian resettlement project of thewhite English of Georgia and Atlanta. The 1840's makes it much easier for us to tellsame is true with the dialects of the Negroes; what the linguistics of the American Negroas they got off the lowlands of the Georgia were like at that time. The program tookCarolina coast and went inland and then over manyfreedandsometimesnonfreedAf-into the Mississippi Valley region, they got ricans, and sometimes slaves freed by thisprogressively more standard.The Uncle Re- particular process and "repatriated" them.mus dialect of Joel Chandler Harris repre- The quotation marks are needed because of.sents actually this stage and is one step more ten there was no evidence that these people'sstandard than the pure creole Gullah in John. ancestors had come from the Liberian region.son's Negro Myths of the Georgia Coast. Rut But Liberia was available. thes, stories basically African Anansi sto Liberia preserves today in its English situa-ries, although the spider has turned into a tion what was probably the linguistic profilerabbit are the same in the coastal Gullah of the American Negro in the1810'5.Essentales as in the inland dialect of Uncle Remus. flatly two kinds of American Negro were Like many early plantationwhites,the repatriated. The elitist type American NegroJohnson who told the Anansi stories, in later usually spoki, a fairly standard variety of theyears a Civil War Army colonel, had 'ken local English where he was raised, for exam-raised by slaves. Many whites were totally ple, a fairly educated kind of Georgian Engbilingual in creole slave English. Johnson was lish.But the dark-skinned fieldhand typea native speaker of Gullah. A lot of bilingual- probably spoke something like Gullah or aism was relatively usual beilycen standard very creolized English. English and pidgin, now statistically minor in In Liberia today, these two kinds of Eng.the population but still quite common. Slave lish exist side by side. "Old Settler" or "Ameri.overseers, whether they were white or the coLiberian" English are very much like aNegro assigned overseers, were bilingual in blend of uppermiddleclass, coastal Southernlocal standard English and pidgin English or standard dialects. And Liberian pidgin Eng-creole. The household servants were probably lish is probably a direct descendant of thebilingual, speaking standard English to their 16 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION masters and a creolized English to the field on the 7'est Coast have large Negro commu hands. Even the masters were probab]bilin.nities. gual the sense that in childhood they used As these people moved, they took their the two kinds of standard English with theirdialects with them, whether it was the creole parents and probably their brothers and sis-English that still survives along the coast or ters, but creole English with the children ofthe inland Mississippi Valley type well on the the field hands with whom they mingled free.way toward standard English but with bits ly up until adolescence. and pieces of the creolismsleftinit,or Johnson was one of these cases in his beau.whether it was the fairly standard English of tiful Gullah. Joel Chandler Harris was in facteducated Negroes or the very nonstandard another example. He was raised in inlandEnglish of uneducated Negroes. In Boston, Georgia in the cotton plantation area, and hisNew York City, and Philadelphia there had stories are in this other dialect. These arebeen very early Negro communities made up, both very accurate renditions of the day asas far as we can tell, of standard speakers of far as we can tell. the local dialect. whatever it was. These Ne- if you compare Johnson's Gullah and Har-gro communities, however, got swamped by ris' inland Georgia dialects, you can see whatthe Southern immigrants and essentially they happened once the Negro left the coast anddisappeared linguistically. For exarr lost contact with West Indian and New Af.where theoriginal Negroes lived in,say, rican influences. The English speech of the Boston or Philadelphia, was where the immi Negroes who left the coastal area shows agrants would go first because of residential transition from the Gul lah to the Uncle Re-segregation, and, of course, the communities mus type dialect. Then the Uncle Remus typeblended and swamped the dialect which had dialect again fades off into the Mississippi been spoken by very few people. Valley dialect. This was all before the Civil Washington, D.C., has had a Negro com War. muniii for some time, which earlier probably The Freedom Train and its trickle of ndgra-spoke a fairly standard kind of English, not tionnorth, althoughstatisticallyitdidn't unlike what was spoken, I suspect, in Alexan- amount to much, established channels of niidria or in the old white settlement in Anacos gration which then were later fed by largetia. The tremendous wale of migration of numbers of people. This pattern is character-Negroes from coastal Virginia, from North istic of migrations. One or two persons trickleCarolina, South Carolina, and to some extent into an area, Place X, and settle. Eventually,Georgia, with sprinklings from the Mississippi their relatives move there. Then lots of other Valley, has swamped the earlier English. And people have cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers, you can see families that are in transition, and sisters in Mace X; so they move there thathavefairly'standardspeaking parents and You get a sudden wave of migration. and radically nonstandardspeaking children 1 he Freedom Trains had established chan because the children associate with other chi'. nels of migration that Negroes started using. dren. The stop-off points have left traces today. In Bloomington, Indiana, Negroes are, in someDialect Blending ways, well integrated into the white communi- Today, Negro communities in many of the ty.I found no case, for example, of a Negro large cities represent a range of dialect behav household living next door to another Negroior. The result is that the earlier dichotomy household. But the small towns were just a between the sophisticated, standardspeaking jump-off place on the way northward intoNegro and the lowerclass, uneducated Negro Indianapolis and Chicago and other places. is now disappearing, is dying out. A lot of By the early 1900's Chicago had a verydialect blending is taking place and since the well-established and sizable Negro communi nonstandardspeaking poor migrants cooling ty, as did New York, as did Washington,north outnumber standard speakers in Negro O.C., as did Baltimore (although Baltimorecommunities, the standard kinds of English had always had one for other reasons), as did inthe Negrocommunitiestend toIx' many of the Northern cities. And then in later swamped by the nonstandard kinds. waves, people went to the West Coast; and Essentially,there's a rangeofspeech todayOakland. California, and Los Angeles (-speech"ratherthan"dialect-becausc NONSTANDARD S PEECI I PATTERNS 57

there's really no one dialect that's spoken);one can hear in Negro communities today there's a range of linguistic behavior andthroughout the United States, And some of styles and tippr9ximations toward and awaythese are attested in the early slave pidgin from standard English. Many are able toand creole and exist today in some kinds of switch, though not through the whole specWest African pidgin EnglishLiberian, for ex. trum of linguistic behavior, at least across aample. One recurrent linguistic feature is the series of contiguous dialects of three or foot-lack of a copula, as in He a boy. Another is a markedly differentlevels of approximationnonpossessive marker, where appositionis toward or away from standard English. Theused for possession with a certain number of linguistic repertoire of members of a Negrostress patterns, For ,example, bfe massa dog community is a hooking together in overlap.occurs in very early slave speech fer My ping circles where shared features connect themaster's dog,and Uncle Remus dialect has whole community in some ways. The ethnicityMy massa dawg. You will find today in many which lumps all of them together in the samenonstandard kinds of English in Negro com- boat causes, for example, the children often tomunities throughout the United States The end ..4) speaking more like the poor immiman dog for The man's dot; and so on. grants than like their own parents, although There are many of these kinds of structural the converse is in some individual cases alsofeatures, particularly in verbal morphology, true. syntactic structure, etc. Although phonology Nevertheless, this common origin thisis a little harder to trace, some definite phon- eastermsoutheastem seaboard origin resultedologicalfeaturesseemtobepreserved in the concurrent social isolation of the Negrothrough the extension of these Southern Ne from the world of the white. The Negro v.asgro dialects into the North, although I think always put in a special category. He wasit wrong to say generally that Negro dialects alwaystreateddifferently, always given ain the North represent only unique Southern special residential area, always given a special,features. The dialect atlas of the historically very circumscribedrange of opportunitiestypical speech of a given region was devel- with special limits on formal education, andoped on the basis of white speech, unfortun so forth. Because of this, dialect maintenanceately. occurred to much more of a degree than was If you're a dialect geographer and you're characteristic of whites, moving into the South, into a community to do an atlas questionnaire, you pick the person Social Isolation and Dialect Maintenancewho's lived there the longest. Who's this per For example, if you examine the westernson usually? A white person, a little old lady coast and the poor white migration westwardsitting on a chair on a perch smoking a pipe. by the Okies and Arkies, who move) on toIf there was a Negro barn there at the same California, for instance, you will find thattime thatthelittleold lady was, he has among their descendants dialect differencesprobably gone to ill'cago or Oakland or New disappeared in one generation because theseYork or Washington. people were integrated into the total commu. As a result, if you look at the linguistic nity and the children had the same opportunimaterials in the ,4prerircri Hiram ,4tlas and ties as other white children did in California.knew anything about the way the Negro dia Consequently, the dialect differcnc-s disapfrets in the South behave, you would think peared. Negroes started moving into the Oakthe Negro didn't exist. Some features just land and 1.05Angeles areas in the earlydon't tut n up in inventories of the Dialect I900's. But in the Oakland, Los Angeles, andAtlas that would have to if the Negroes had San Frencisco areas, and melt of Watts, webeen looked at at all One is the clear [1) see the maintenance of various southern diaformed "% the .piddle of the tongue up in lects over a long period of lime where inigrathe cen .u` the mouth rather than down. Lion actually predates that of the Okics andAnother feature is the replacing of the bilabi- Atkies, who Caine primarily in the twentiesalvoiced and voicelessaspirants between and early thirties. vowels byltland [f) bearer and nailing feir Because ofthisdialect maintenance, anbrother and nothing which doesn't occur interesting number of features are shared inin while speech at all but is very (oinnienin the more nonstandard varieties of speech thatalinast all the kids we deal with in Washing

JO 58 BALTINIOHE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

ton, D.C., and most or the kids I've heard inwhich also don't represent other groups. Eu New York and in Oakland, Watts, and all theropean Jewry is a good example. Also isolated Negro community sections. So the inadvertentin the ghettos, the European Jewry' in the bias against the Negro in the Dialect AtlasMiddle Ages innovated. The rirropean Jew in material means he got the same treatmentthe Middle Ages was not at ell like the Jew he's gotten in history and in all historical andwho migrated out of Palestiae. He wasn't social studies set up within the United Statesentirely like the surrounding Slays or Ger -- he got left out. manic peoples. He innovated and he dere!. oped new kinds of social norms. The Negroes Social Isolation and Special Features have done much of the same thing. One interesting innovation within the Ne- But if one has looked at features, he findsgro culture is ethnic slang, often confused some unique ones in Negro dialects that arewith dialect. not normally shared by whites. -- although Consider the following two groups of sen they can be. One thing you must understandknees: is that where unique features existinthe SI. She's a phat chick. speech of Negroes, they have nothing to do St. She's a pretty girl. with physiology. They only have to do. with D. She a pretty girl. social behavior, which is learned from other SI. He didn't dig his vines. people in the case of Negroes from other St. He didn't like his clothes. Negroes, because primarily Negroes associate D. He air' like he clothes. with other Negroes as the American social The sentences marked St are in ethnic in patternworks. Negroes constitute asocialgroup dialect; those marked St are in stand, group which is contained. Look, for example,and English, and those marked arein at residential containment.It has producednonstandard dialect. social cohesion but it has the Negroes and PI, slangis Howard University slang, whites work together, go to school together,which is as ethnical and as ingraupy as you yet when the bell rings, all go home into theircan get, and the dialect is from local nonstand- own social group. Preservation of speech patard Negro dialect sp3ken by kids across the terns is not physiological; it is social. A nicestreet from Howard University. example is the occasional Negro who is, let's The slang She's a phat chick for She's a say, the only Negro in theh:te communitypretty girl is standardized slang. She's a pret and who talks justlikethe whites aroundly girl is local, not standardized, in Washing- him. ton and recurrent in just about every Negro Other kinds of unique social behavior feacommunity in the United States. Notice that tures involve Negroes. Some of the posturalthe difference between the standard and the things are African survivals for example,slang is strictly lexical substitution phat bending and laughing, and sometimes coverfor prrlf y, chick for girl. Notice that the sy ntax ing the mouth and turning the head in laugh.remains the same. Look at the nonstandard ter. Averting the eyes, looking at an eye toelutterances. Lexically, the nonstandard dialect lower and to the side of somebody to showof these kids in the urban Negro ghettos is as deferenceisanother posturaltrait. Sayingstandard as call be and is a lot more standard "yes" with eyes raised, very common amongthan the rural dialects of people who aren't Negroes but practicallynonexistent amongconsidered to be nonstandard speakers. The whites also may be an Aft ican survival. Somevocabularyofthesekidsistremendously of these are probably ont.of-awareness behav-standard. ior. People learn them socially without realiz In slang. the sentence Ile didn't like his ing they're learning them just as they areclothes becomes Ile didn't dig his tines, and likelyto learn structure of their language:n dialect, lk oin' like his clothes. The differ. without realizing they're learningit. Someence between the slang and the standard Eng. just may be unique behaxior that people de-lish is the lexical substitution of dig (or Like veloped. They change and social behaviorand vines for clothes; the difference between changes, and in a group that's been isolatedthe nonstandard dialect and the standard is socially, they develop new norms which don'tagain grammatical. Notice the noneopulatixe represent anything they had historically, andand the nonpossessixe.

59 NONSTANDARD SPEECH PATTERNS 54

Slang is a deliberate lexical substitution.lexicon, the greater tendency they have to use Dialect is different linguistic patterns whichslang for certain kinds of ingroup communi- the person actually is unaware that he's usingcation, whereas the people who speak radical. and doesn't recognize as different. This is whyly nonstandard in grammar and phonology I think that in certain ways people are fool.don't do this as much. Slang is also very ing themselves when they take the approachchangeable. A slang term today disappears in that people in the Speech Training Programitsuse tomorrow. Grammatical patterns, on at Howard want to take. They want to givethe other hand, endure and exist over many the kid a bag of words to use. He already hasgenerations. Two that are characteristic of those words. You know, they are really acnonstandard dialect today the aoncoptila complishing nothing because they're givingHe a man and the nonmarking morpheme of him a bag of what he's already got. He's gotpossession The lady hat were attested to the standard words. No person, as far asI in early examples of slave pidgin and Creole know, who uses pleat doesn't know the wordin the 1700s and sonic adaptations of these pretty. Nobody who usesthe word chickthat go back to the late 1600's have endured. doesn't know the word girl, nobody who usesSlang as a linguistic phenomenon endures, the word dig doesn't know the word like, andbut specific slang items change quite quickly nobody who uses the word vine doesn't knowand they are deliberately changed. Slang is the word clothes. This is deliberate lexicaldeliberate behavior. Slang is very different choke well within the competence and wellfrom the grammatical structures of the non within the sophistication of the speaker whostandard dialect. These are outolawareness uses slang. and involve different kinds of linguistic strafe. Slang involves deliberate lexical substitutures and often different kinds of perceptual lion, that is, the manipulation of languagemechanisms. They are not within the range of behavior is within the competence and sophis-the user's manipulation because he isn't for. tication of the speaker; he knows what he ismally aware of what itis that he is doing. doing, and he knows how to do what heWhat the nonstandard speaker needs is tech. wants to do. riques for learning to recognize the nature of One can use slang inconjunction withand for acquiring the different kinds of lin nonstandard dialect grammar and phonology,guistic structures which willbe necessary, but he can also use it with standard grammat-along with the competence in using them, to le structures. Slang varies independently ofspeak standard English. And that's not an grammatical and phonological behavior. As aeasy job. student's grammar and phonology become more and more standard, apparently there's aA Different Culture desire to innovate, to create an ingroup lan Many features of nonstandard dialect are guage. recurrent throughout the country in tower. class Negroes. And by lower class here I When a slang term becomes generally ac-don't just mean poor;I mean a special cub cepted, when it's taken outside the ingrouptural configuration, what the anthropologist function, thenit's quickly dropped by thewould call a "different" culture. One of the ingroup and another term replacesit.Forthings that's caused a survival of this kind of example, the old word cat(for man) gotculture, even where it's socially disadvanta adopted by the true jazz musician, but whengeous insofar as opportunity capabilities of its the general public adopted it, cat was quicklycarrier are concerned, is the containment pol dropped. icy on the part of the white community to- Sometimes you get a change for something,ward the Negroes. The lower-class Negro is itgets generalized, and you get a semanticcertainly in many ways culturally quite dif- shift. Coo/ is a good example of this. Now,ferent from generalmiddle-class American cool has become not an adjective but a nounsociety and even from lower-class whites in thing, shift around in meaning, or they arethe same area. Moynihan was bitterly attack. dropped and a new term is developed. ed when he wroteastudy of lower-class Slang is very jealously guarded, very delibNegro family structure pointing out thatit crate, and very carefully manipulated. Thewas different; his point was misinterpreted by more standard the students' grammar andpeople who thought he was saying that it was

60 air

60 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION allright becauseit was different. But hisright to go to another family and say, "I general point was quite valid that in manywant to be your child." Then the child moves cases there are actually family structural dif-in and this is a quasi-legal kind of adoption ferences and that there are kinship differ-where these people become the parents of that ences. child and he becomes their child. African Social workers white middle-class sociallanguages have a special name for this kind workers who go to a lower-class Negro corn. of a relationship, different from the word for munity are often very confused in trying tofather or son, etc. In lower-class American find out what people's names are, who livesNegro communities, often the child lives with with whom, who's the parent of whom, andsomebody who turns out not to be his real so on. When Africans came to the Unitedmother or his real aunt. Or he has play States, they assimilatedinpartthe whiterelationships very much like the sort of vol- culture but not entirety. African social pat-untary brother or sister relationships in some terns that were brought to the United StatesAfrican societies, where two fellows who are were modified by slavery, were partially con-friends become each other's brother, so to formed towhitesocialpatterns,but notspeak. The lower-class Negro community has entirely. There were innovations and theya way of technically defining it; children, for survived in this changed form, but they wereexample, often refer to these semi-legal rela- not entirely identical to the white norm be-tions by the "play" prefix. Somebody is your havior. play-aunt, your play-uncle, your play-brother, There are variations within the white be.your play.sister. Isuspect that these kinship havior. Among descendants of Italian immi-terms in lower -class Negro culture, mother, grants and among descendants of Englishfather, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, are false immigrants, English stack or Scandinaviancognates with a kinship system of standard stock, the way of viewing the family is veryAmerican culture where they appear to refer different and there is a difference in family to the kinds of kinship and family structural visiting patterns. relationships that occur in standard culture; The Italians tend to regard as the familyin fact, they don't refer to these. what eye anthropologist and sociologist calls the "extended" family. This goes throughStandard and Nonstandard Dialects various kinds of cousins several times re- When you look at nonstandard dialect, you moved from the direct, or "nuclear," family.can look at it in two ways. You can look at The English-backgrounddescendantsoftenit, as many people do, as some sort of ran- prefer to limit their family interaction pat-dom variation of standard English, grammat- terns to what is called the "nuclear" family,ical patterns and phonology and so on, or that is, the family that lives within the house.you can look at it as a coherent, structured, hold and perhaps aunts and uncles. Thesemeaningful system of its own withits own attitudes go back to cultural differences inhistorical bar kground. England and Italy on what the familyis. Some transformationalists expect dialects Each one, perhaps, will define the family inof the same language to be alikein deep the same dflmain, but the real interactionstructure and to lifter only in very low level patterns show that they've got two differentphonotadic rules. But if this substandard dia- concepts of family. lect is a coherent system of its own, in some The American Negro who hasn't been tooways it becomes difficult to describe the dif much in contact with standard American cul-femme(' betweenthisdialectand standard ture (and here I'm talking about standard English in terms of a single deep structure. culture as I'm talking about standard dialect) let me give yr,' an example. In standard or too assimilated toit, often has a veryEnglish, we have one way of indicating a different kind of family structure, and some-predicate adjective and that's with a verb of times the kinship and family relationships arebeing, in various forms of person and teti. very foreign from any kind of European mod-In the nonstandard dialect, one way of Fedi. el. For example, one thing thatI suspect is aneating an adjective is with ut the verb fo be. African cultural survival deals with who yourIn nonstandard English you'd Ile busy. parent is. In Africa, if a child doesn't like his IAillliere is also mother Vid.s rit iii, ling parents or loses his parents. h has a sort ofanadjectiveinnonstandualErr lih NON'S TA NDARD SPEECH PATTERNS 61 that's with the verb be, as in lie be busy. Ifworld situation. It seems to me that since this you look from standard English logic at theinvolves knowledge about the real world, it situations in which you say Ile busy or He beliesata very deep level of grammatical busy, this is clearly free variation, But if youstructure and, therefore, the nonstandard and consider the situations in which this sort ofstandard can't be described in terms of a thing occurs and forget about standard Eng-single deep structure if this type of difference lish for a minute, the nonstandard dialect hasisto he incorporated. Nonstandard dialect worked on the basis of a rationale or logiccan behave in terms of its own logic, logic not found in standard English at all. That is,which at times is somewhat foreign to stand- the nonstandard speaker, in making his deciard English. Sometimes, however, the overt sion about predicate adjectives, has to scanform looks like something we think we know the real world situation he's describing andin standard English; in fact, we don't. incorporate for the purposes of his grammat- Let me give you an example, Two forms in ical structure information which the standardFrench are called presentatives:Voici and speaker doesn't have to. voila, historically from the verb role, to see, In dialect, the rule works this way: if it is aand then ici and la, meaning here and there, short-term state, an immediate situation, it ishave nothing to do with the verb voirin zero predication He busy right now; if it isFrench today. They are entirely independent a longterm state, habitual action, it is Ile beforms, presentatives used to call the attention busy all the time. A nonstandard speaker inof the listener to the existence of something Washington, I).C., will reject as nongrammat-either near the speaker or remote from the ical this has nothing to do with standardspeaker. English an utterance like lie busy all the time, and he will say only Ile be busy all the The child nonstandard dialect in Washing. time.liewillreject as ungrammatical anton has pre:Rntatives, too. Like the French utterance like Ile be busy right now. Nowpresentatives,theyhistorically come from here is grammatical judgment; here is a rejec-verbs that could mean other things but don't tionof nongrammatical forms and accept.any more. To the form There go the book on ance of grammatical forms quite outside thethe table (There is the book on the table) or realm of wiat standardEnglish does orHere go the book (Here is the book) the doesn't do. standardspeaking teacher might say, "John- ny, 1 don't see the book going anywhere." If somebody says to Johnny, "Why doesn'tThe bookis n't going anywhere. There go, your uncle come and visit us today?" Becausehere go are just presentatives which call the he limy would be the answer. attention of the listener to the existence of "Johnny, why isit that your uncle neversomething. The teacher is correct in singling conies to visit us?"Because he be busy. this out as a deviation from standard English, In standard English we would say Becausebut the teacher has to be careful about assess- he's busy in both cases. ing what the nature of deviation is. A correc The dialect speaker scans the situation andlion like "Johnny, the book isn't going any- he's got something extra to take into account.where" is a misevatuation of the nature of the He's got to take into account short-term statelinguistic event that has just occurred and is a and durative longtcrni state and incorporatemisevaluationof what's going eninthe it into grammatical structure. child's head and in his linguistic generative The standard speaker has other things hemechanism. Withoutthesophisticationto has to incorporate into grammatical struc-evaluate exactly, the teacher must use a great ture; for example, he has to incorporate per-deal of caution in a ccarection device. sonnumber accord, lie is busy, I am busy, As 1talk to researchers ir, other communi You are busy, etc. The nonstandard speakerties throughout the country, rrarsive dialect has time, too lie been busy as opposed tofeatures in Negro communities become more lie teas busy, and so on that he incorpoand more e%ident. lf, in fact, it turns out that rates, but the standard speaker has to incor-nonstandard dialects in Negro communities porate pure person predication morphophoall over the country are like each other, it nemies into his s)stern. A nonstandard speak-may also turn out that they're different from er doesn't and he has also to scan the realthe surrounding kinds of white English, stand-

62 62 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION and or nonstandard, and even from the nonto socioeconomically disadvantaged kids (be standard English of socioeconomically com-they lower-class Negroes, be they Mexican- parable white levels. We have suspected thatAmericans, be they Alaskan-Indians or any the tests developed for testing the verbal skillother kind of Indians in the United States, be of the nonstandard child have really beenthey any other group that you find Cau biased against him in asauming that his non-casians or Appalachian poor whites, or Okies standard dialect is just a minor deviation ofand Arkies) many times end up not testing; standard Eng lisb. end up, really, pointing out that there is a cultaral difference but calling it a deficiency Substandard Dialects and Testing of the maids, in the sense that they're tested by us in terms of consensus culture or standard A psychologist gave some lower-class Ne-culture and standard language and consensus gro kids from Washington the Peterson pie-language. They test the child and he fails. tureword correlation test and noticed that on(Obviously, he's failing something.) The test verbs they scored quite low. She developedworks, infact, as a test of devi ition from some theory that they were better on concretestandard culture or standard language. noun handling than on verb action handling, What these tests don't often succeed at, and shethendevelopedsomeecologicalhowever, is bringing out the kinds of things theory about why this is so. By the way, inthat they are intended to test. The Peterson digressionlet me point out thatif there'stest, for example, didn't test at all the verbal anything dangerous althoughitdoesn'tability, or verb usage ability, of these slum sound dangerous if there's anything that'skids. To me it seems very important that for really dangerous for their own ends, it's the purposes of testing and for purposes of speech stress of the social actionist that the differ.remediation and dialect correction, we have ences between Negroes and whites are purelyto develop at least some knowledge of what ecological. That's very self-satisfying too ifthe nonstandard dialect we are (baling with is one wants to sort of say, "Well, we're alland what the nonstandard culture we are alike," but to me there's a builtin danger indealing with is like, and how these differ from this sort of approach. the standard dialect and culture. We should then work in terms of these differences. The social actionist developed a very elab- orate theory that the ecology of lowerclass A lot is said about the lowerclass "loose" living had warped the perspective of these(and this means "not the standard culture kids and that they were good atconcretedefinition of family") family structure among noun thinking but not good at abstract verblower-class Negroes but little about the rather action thinking. How can somebody not betightage-grading structures among lower- good at abstract thinking when he can make aclass Negro boys where age-grade differences distinction between short-term and long-termare extremely important. Go into a lower- state in adjective construction? Let's look atclass Negro community, get some boys just this linguistH:ally and see if, in fact, severalabout any age below 19; ask them to list their things are invoked. First, if the objects andfriends and then ask them the last names of the actions are culturally unfamiliar to thetheir friends. You'll get lots of blanks. Then individual taking the test, we are testing hisask them the ages of their friends, and they'll culture and not his psychological perspective.give you the age of every kid in the neighbor. And, if the thing is culturally familiar to thehood that they have any contact with at all. person taking the test, he may not call it byAgegrading is an extremely important social the same name the testers do. device in lower -class Negro culture. particu- larly among boys. Dress differences, gram. Suppose I have a picture of a man with hisinaticalhehasior,playpattern,communi- hand on something on a wall and somethingcation patterns. and norms of politeness and down on the bottom says switchor turn. etiquette all these correlate with age-grad- Washington kids don't snitch or Into a lighting.lirre's a device of social organization off, they rid it on or off. There's no questionthat doesn't happen to match very closely of a verb deficiency; They just use a differentanything that strong or that well "rganized in verb. Many performance tests that arc givenstandard culture; voide look at it. 63' NONSTANDARD SPEECH PATTERN'S 6.3

Politeness Tags politeness tag only for a command or a request. The nonstandard politeness tag can be put We must take a good close look at what is not only in commands or requests but on the going on with the people that we are trying toplain statement to soften rt. A West African deal with. This is true for lower-class Ne-pidgin English or creole English called Krio, groes, for klexicanAmericans or any groupspoken in Sierra Leone primarily in the Free- that we want to work with, including Shenan-town area and related historically to Gullah doah Valley mountain whites who also haveand the American slave pidgin, has an intona- culture norms of their own. They may not betional politeness tag just like this. It is possi so drastically different as lower-class Negrobly a survival from an early North American culturally deprived from the standard, andslave pidgin politeness tag which was intona. they may not be preservedas long aftertional. migration into cities because there isn't as Sierra Leone Krio has it and Sierra Leo- much containment, but there are cultural dif.neans know, when they're speaking standard ferences just the same. It's to the teacher'sEnglish, that it corresponds topleasebecause advantage to see these and know what they they know the Englishman sayspleasein his are. Very minor differences sometimes cause requests. What they don't know is that it only big misunderstandings. One of the frequentcorresponds topleasein requests and coin- complaints thatIbear by whites about Nemands and that it isn't used in anything else. groes is that they're rude. One of the whiteThey putpleasewherever they've been using culture things that defines politeness isplease. their politeness intonation. This magic word in middle-class American A Sierra Leonean who doesn't know Eng. white culture is one of its main politenesslishverywellwillsay "Goodmorning, tags andone of the first things that parentsplease." "How arc you, please?" "It's a nice who edit child speech deal with. In lower-day, please." He just usespleaseas a direct class Negro culture this word is quite rare. structural equivalent of his politeness intona. These kids are taught this happens withlion. The important thing to recognize is that southern whites, too, soit may be justa (here are politeness indicators but that they general southern culture thing to saysirtoare structurally different. elders, and slum kids usuallysay sirto dd. ers. This doesn't get noticed, but thefact Syntactical Features that they don't saypleasedoes get noticed and they gel a bad mark. If you .start looking Let me show you some of the syntactical for politeness tags, you find two things. First,features of these nonstandard dialects.I've manis used as a politeness tag.Girt' me thementioned the noncopula and the nos pos bookis much less polite thanMan, give mesessive inThis John bookforThis is John's the book. Second,a slight intonational rise isbook. also a politeness tag, so thatThat'llbe fifty The grammatical mechanism of the dialect cerif?'as a request for payment is not so polite for making possession is apposition, soJohn as That'll be fifty cents/Thedialect uses not andbookjust get put side by side:This John the word precise, but an intonationalplease;it book. Mr. Jonesgets pot besidebook: This isn't the morpheme but an intonation. M aMr. Jones book. It'sa grammatical structure matter of fad, when you tell kids they're notandnotphonological.Decidingwhat's a being polite, often they're confused becausephonological problem cr what's a grammat they had a vague idea they were in fact beingicat problem requires a sophistication. Some- polite. And then the white gets judges astimes it is a mixture of both. Often there are hostile or aggressive when really he just mis-phonological rules, for example, which apply understands. Why don't we ask, "Now let'sto grammatical constructions and both are see, there are probably politeness devices indeviants from standard English. So thenit this culture there are in most cultures may be either a grammatical deviation or a what would they be?" Observing a situationphonological deviation or really both. and seeing how people are polite to each One of the ter/ nice things that a teacher other is very important. This politeness indican do to train hlrivelf in approaching people cator doesn't correspond exactly to standard whoareculturally different is to chs.erve h English please. StandardEnglish uses thethey are polite functionally within the area of 64 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDECATION

linguistics. How do they predicate nouns, ad-Contrastive Studies jectives? How do they show possession? How do they show comparative adjectiv struc- What you can do is &whip your own little ture? How do they form their tenses? Howcontrastive studies where you plot out how do they modify modally? flow do they qualistandard English does it and bow the dialect fy nouns with adjectives? does it, and then you can teach on the basis These are functional things. How does the fthose differences and tell the kids about the child start an utterance, how does he pause,differences. They'llbe fascinated,Iassure what does he do when he pauses as thoughyou. Eve had great success teaching kids he's thinking about something, how does heabout the nature of their own dialect. I got a ask questions? Question intonationisverygreat glow of recognition from them when I susceptibleto misunderstanding becauseitexplained the parallel between the use of their can be very different in different dialects. They'all as opposed to you and the French vous question intonation in the Washington non-as opposed tofu: youris plural and polite to standard dialect starts with a high silo anda single person, y'all is plural and polite to a has a rapid fall. In standard English, a corn-single person; fu is familiar and used only to m n question intonation starts with a lowa singie person, and the same is true with middle and has a rise at the end. Did youyou And never have I heard a French teacher frud the book? Now, in standard English, themake usein the Washington City French drop at the end in a question shows a veryclasses of this fascinating correlation between abrupt sort of extra surprise or irritation; andthe local dialect and standard French. therefore questions by nonstandard speakers Sometimes teachers find it useful to use the are often very much misunderstood. Employdialect, to hold the dialect form in some areas ers think a kid is rude or overexcitalde whento progress in ether areawhere they want he uses an intonationlike this not underthe child to concentrate his problem-solving standingtlkitinrealityitisjustausualactivities. question intonation. This system works because one of the first How people pluralize and where and whenproblems in learning to read is learning what is very important. In standard English, forwe call phonernegrapheme-motpheme corre- example, we put plurals on certain things andspondences. The child knows what the sounds not on others, and we generally correlate itmean but can't always recognize the letters with h many there are. In some varieties ofthat represent the sounds that's what his Englisharid nonstandard kinds of dialect,reading problem is. It's quite a complex prob. people don't pluralize a noun if they've got hem he's got tofigure out what these something else already pluralized. They say,marks on the piece of paper represent in the for example, I got four bruvrer for /lee gotway of sounds he knows and particularly four brothers, because /oar already takes carewhat this whole thing taken together repre- of the pluralization. But they say It belong tosents in the way of words thet he knows, One my brurtcrs (It belongs to my brothers);good way for him to do this is to look at the nothing shows thatit'splural there. Theywhole sentence. He can get a vod idea of have a plural marker when there is no countwhat the not easily recognized words mean word like "many" or any of these pluralizingand then he can problemsolve, Ile can tell things co-occurring with a noun. the rules forgenerally what the gist of a sentence is if it's pluralii.ation are different; there are a dozenclose to his own syntax. If it's not close to Ili. different ways to pluralize. If there were asyntax, then he has to define what it means spokesman for nonstandard dialect, he wouldand he can't concentrate on the sound[lean- ask, "Why do you say the plural of brothering word correspondences. His problem-solv when you've already said four? The dialecting activities are too diffused.If you can just works differently. maintain his syntax and let him concentrate How do they form conditionalandifon the word spellings, then he can concen- clauses? One way is with if but anotherway trate on the primary problem of what sound, involves subjectverb inversion, putting thethe letters stand for. lute' on Feu can worry pronoun after modals, for example. Are )ou about the syntax. sure can he go? I don't know did he do it is This is a technique that yeu can ,ley, h,p very common in dialect, quite easily getting your kids to dictate

65 NONSTANDARD SPEECH PATTERN'S 65 stories to you in their own speech. Take itoften don't talk to adult teachers because they down in standard English spelling but pre.are adults, and in towerdass Negro culture, serve rigorously the syntax, grammar, and thecommunication patterns are different not only vocabulary, and if the child uses a word in ain dialect but also in who talks to whom and way that you think is wrong, put it downwho talks back and why. For example, I have anyway because he probably uses it correctlyseen mothers actually work through an inter- from his point of view. You develop his textmediary, the older sibling, to get at younger and then you will have the children learn tokids; the patternisthatstrict.In Negro read from those. Because they meet no unfa-families the mother talks a lot, but often the miliar vocabulary, they can concentrate c.i-child doesn't talk back. If he does, it is with a rectly on the thing at hand. limited kind of utterance or through the sib. The history of language development inling intermediary, And I've seen this survive Western Europe and in the Arab countriesright into middle-class Negro families where shows that in spite of all the descriptions ofwe see all sorts of chores agegraded. In other Latin and classical Arabic that were written,words, if you can't understand why these kids vernaculars and dialects replaced them both.aren't saying anything, try to find out wheth- Describing a linguistic system does nothing toer the situation is foreign to them. These are preserve it if other social linguistic dynamicsthings you look at: If kids are quiet, are they are not aimed at preserving it. If a linguisticquiet because they really are verbally disflu system is destined to die out, it's going to dieent or are they quiet because there's some- '-ut in spite of your descriptions; and ifitthing different about the social structure? isn't going to die, itis going to survive in It seems to me one of the best ways to spite of your not describing it. As a result Ichange people culturally is by understanding see nothing dangerous in talking about thethe nature of what itis that they are doing nature of nonstandard dialect to kids that usenow and what it is that you want them to end nonstandard dialect. On the contrary, 1 gainup doing or wa,it them to at least have the an understanding that they have a system inability to do. It is important not to force a which they know how to think and expresschange on anybody; just make it possible-for themselves. them to make the change. A lot of debate is Be very careful in teaching standard Eng-going on about whether we should stamp out lish structure, even to a child. Some thingsnonstandard dialect or whether we should you can point out to children and get anpreserve it. immediate response. When you do, drill on it; Suppose you are teaching Spanish. Your then later on do pattern practice and anythingjobisto make him fluentinthe use of else that helps. A child may deny that he doesSpanish when he wants to use it. Where he some of these things formally; he may say,uses English and S;anish outside of the class. "Well, I don't do this. My brother does, but Iroom is his concern. Why not do that with don't do this." Let him deny he doesn't do itstandard English? What you want to do is to because. people often aren't aware of whatgive to the child skill in the use of standard they do and don't do. English. The English teacher's job is to im Be carefulin evaluating the child whopart skill in the ,Ise of standard EngiA to sometimescommunicatesandsometimesthe child so that when and where he needs it, doesn't communicate. What he does is often aor wh:41 and where society suddenly tells him, matter of social situation and social structure"Look, you've got to use it," he can have relationships between him and the personrecourse to this skill. This decision has to be who's communicating with him as well as ofmade about language and about other kinds his own language capability. A very talkativeof cultural phenomena. If the child wants to kid can be very silent in an Jrfamiliar situa-use bluffing behavior in establishing social tion or in a situation in which age-gradingrapport with other boys, that's his business. instructions are taking place A lot of kids areBut we need to teach him standard norms of silent in a classroom because of two situapoliteness for when he gets jobs and when he tions. One is that there is no culturally anal-interacts with people outside his own social ogous situation to the classroom in their owngroup. This point of y icw works for culture as

I eal culture so the classroomisa reallywell as it works for language, which is also foreign situation. The other is that childrenFut of came. Linguistics and Reading

Alarm over the fact that many children in Phila- delphiaas in all big cities were not achieving de sirable success in reading prompted Mrs. Wilson to re-examine her school system's reading materials. This began her interest in linguistics and, with the help of several outstanding authorities in the field, she employed linguistic principles in setting up a new program for the teaching of reading. Not only are the children now reading better, Mrs. Wilson states, they are also writing better.

ROSEMARY G. WILSON

Unhappily, in the big cities we are not That began my interest, actually, in how achieving the kinds of success with readingwe could use some linguistic principles to withallof our children from elementary teach reading, particularly to young children. school through high school that we would My interest in linguistics lay in the fact like. The degree of retardation is almost ap-that it represented scholarship in the field of palling in certain situations in our own cities.language. I felt that if I wanted to do some- Therefore, I felt that we couldn't he complathing new and ask teachers to do something cent about what was going on and we had tothat was different,I had better be on very decide whether any changes to be madefirm ground about our source of information. should be in favor of a new approach. And, of course, the linguists know our lam It did seem to me that one thing we had toguage. They know how it is structured, they look at critically was What methods are weknow how it operates, and it seemed to me using to teach children? Was it true that allthis was a firm basis from which to take off young childrenkat ntoread successfully on anything that was new and different. using only one approach through a basal reader?Undoubtedly, many children hadPrimacy of the Oral Language learned to read 1-cry well but what about this The firstbasic principle that has great big group that didn't seem to be catching on relevance to the field of reading as well es to using these particular techniques?I decided the other aspects of the teaching of English is that perhaps the one thing that we ought tothe linguists' expression of the importance of look at very carefully was what maierials weoral language and what they call the primacy were using and whether there were certainof the oral language. It is difficult to dispute materials that are better for some children eicir contention that oral language is primary than for othe.-is at this initial stage. ssh ri they point out that there are still more ,,ple in the world today that have no writ- T5.,,n,f mei. I,.'tm. tni I) Mal, ,f the RanAu.4 Pul.lo ten I ,nguage than there ate people who have tap. re. ,r 1,r, A %!. pr..Irlatin p rAto trd k k,gu.,2,. a IA litten language. 1.101- if,I OA r,A1,.If e 11,e linguist says, It isin the oral lam ILtr.1'104, n 1,r,, r,nT n in 11, liaroe r! I ehr ov.,n guage that meaning lies." Ffi 6? LINGUISTICS AND READING 67

It's quite apparent that of the children whodren, no matter their background, need this are severely retarded in reading, the clinic.kind of di rec. teaching. type cases, many are very, very good in their One authority has said that truing to teach oral communication. They not only expressreading without teaching theletters of the themselves well but '..nderstandcet,te wellalphabet is rather like trying t.) teach arith what is said to them on au adult level. Andmetic without teaching the Arabic nom. rah:. some a them can do this on a vety hign lev,1 In Western European cultures there are of material when their actual reading levelsome highly phonetic languages in the sense itself may be kck at second. or thirdreaderthat their writing systems have a symbol for level, but adult raverial can be read to themevery word in the language. and !hey have no problem at all if it is in the If a language has complete consistency of oral area. So, there is something very imporphonemegrapheme relationsltips, a chili can tant about the fact that the meaning lies inlearn to read rather easily because he hes no the oral language. decisions to make. But when a language has As flr as reading and structure in readingcertain letters representing as many as 9 or romeriAls is concerned, this oral language is10 different phonemes, which is the cs'c with basic. To have the greatest success with aEnglish, then not in the spoken language but retarded reader, may those words which arein the written language do children in many already in his language should be used. Thenwords have a decisionto make. This, of no con,Apt development is necessary. This iscourse, is why linguists are so opposed,I the problem Presented by many basal readingthink, to the basic premise of phonics, which materials to children from very poor edvironis the atteching of a sound to on individual ments. Many of those words that appear inletter. It would chill the blood of any linguist the pre.primers and primers are simply not into think that a sound can be attached to a the oral language of our children. They'veletter.It's the reverse that they're interested never had those experiences; they've neverin. 1. a child is asked to give the sound of the seen those particular types of toys. They can't letter a he might reply, "Which of nine or ten identify a scoubr because they have neversounds of a wauld you like?" In other words, seen one before, they've never used it, theythere is no such thing as the sound of a because have no label for that particular thing. Toit'sItthecontextofawordthatit eliminate one possibility of failure in earlyhas a sound value that it represents in that reading, words that are in the oral languageparticular word. So this is one basic differ- of the children should be put into the begin-ence between a phonic approach and a lin ning of those stories. Then there is no prob.guistic one; the words are always presented len' of concept development. This processas wholecrds as close to their usual pro- frees the child to concentrate on a very fewnunciation as we can get them. basic things at the beginning level and it Ile next thing to keep in mind is to think seems to be working. about the alphabet and the particular letters which present the greatest reading problem. The linguists have told us that 13 of the Alphabetic Nature of consonants of our alphat have great consist. The English Language ency as far as the sound:, which they repre sent.It seems to me that it's important for I'dlike to go on to the second idea whichteachers to know that the consonants do not linguists have given to us which is of greatpresent the real reading problem in our writ. importance in the teaching of reading andten Liguage. But they dwell cn the conso that is the alphabetic nature of the Englishnants at tremendous length. They are follow. language. ing the manuals of the basal series, for those There is a meat deal of research on the factbeginwithconsonantsasthebeginning that children who are taught the letters of thesound. They never seem to get beyond the alphabet and how to discriminate between beginning consonant in it word analysis. one letter and another at an eerly stage are It's quite obvious ti a the vowel letters of farther ahead in reading no matter whatthe language are the ones that present the the approach may be -- than children whoreading problems because they do stand in are not.It's interesting to me that all chilthe context of the words for so many different

68 68 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION phonemes. They take up the slack on these the shortowe), occurring in such words as sounds versus 26 letters. And yet, in onepin, pet, and cat. This not only forms a base basal series the teacher13 not told to dof.r the three.letter words which we begin to anything about vco.el analysis and word at.teachlittle childrento read but, if those tack until Reader 2-1, not ere second pre.wards are extended with consonants on either primer but Reader 2.1! side, gives quite lengthy words without get- This is a very long time to wait to tellting out of the first spelling pattern for short children what to do about analyzing the vow-vowels. One of the longest words still in the els in our language because every word has atfirstspelling patternisthe word twelfth, least one vowel and some of the very horriblewhere there are a number of consonants on ones have several vowels. The really bad oneseither side of the short vowel. With younger have the vowel clusters, as the linguist callschildren, of course, we do not get into exten- them, where two vowels coming together pre-sions of words that rapidly. sent a really great reading difficulty to the This first major spelling pattern, then, children. presented to children in the beginning read- ers. We attack the vowels immediately but we Spelling System of English do it by always giving children words which The question is whether or not all of this isare consistently pronounced and spelled. We a hopeless situation. Here Ifeel linguisticsdo not ask them to cope with vowels in all has offered us a tremendous amount of helpkinds of values right at the beginning. The idea is to give them security in reading; then we through the analysis of the spelling sistem of English. This is the basis of Fries' work. Ingradually begin to feed in a lot of the irregu fact, Ps approach is often called a "spellinglarly spelled words. For example, we might have a little sentence as this in a pre-primer: pattern approach." It recognizes immediately the importance of having children learn same-"Come to me." Here we have an o in a rather thing about the vowels and how to attackunusual representation of a phoneme, an u words on the basis of analyzing theey inthatrepresents aquitedifferent phoneme which those vowels are used in certain spell-from the usual one, and a "long e" in me, in ings. what makes a small pattern of words. We The linguists have said, particularly Henrycan't very well teach word attack at the early Lee Smith, that 85 percent of the words in thelevels when so many different varieties of English language are regularly spelled but,vowels are presented very quickly to the boys and girls. So what we have evolved following unfortunately, the15percent that are irregu. larly spelled are used about 85 percent of theFries' patterns is that in our first reader we time.Allthe linguists, beginning with Bloom.give the children only words having the medi- field, have by their analysis of the words inal vowel of a in the value that we traditional. our language in their written former) clear.ly call a short vowel. The idea is that in the ly explained what the spelling patr ns of ourpresentation of these patterns the children will get great security in reading itself. They language are. And Fries has dividedthe words G. the language into three major spell.are also dealing with words which are perfect. ly regular on phoneme-grapheme correspon irg patterns and a number of minor ones, The highly irregular words that don't form patdence, such as the word cat. This has a one. terns are few in number compared to thoseto-one correspondence, three phonemes and that follow regular spelling patterns. Thisthree letters. would be interesting, I think, in teaching at The only way in which we could get some of the irregularly spelled wards in our mate. any level. rids was to put in a few highfrequency struc- ture words in order to get another linguistic The First Spelling Pattern principle into play, which is normal sentence There are three spelling patterns on whichpatterns. But normal sentence patterns don't our own materials are based. The first onedevelop without parts of the verb "to be" and Fries calls a "major spellit g pattern" becausesome prepositions and pronouns, and on. more words follow this pattern than any otherOur first sentence is a very simple one "Nat pattern in the language. This is the consonant.is a eat." Nat is the name of the ca, in our vowel-consonant pattern, traditionally calledseries.

69 LINGUISTICS AND READING 69

The Second Spelling Pattern text, the child can almost always, if he only What Fries has designated as the secondhas two possibilities, know what that word major spelling pattern of the languageis should be, what it really is in th?t particular those words that pattern on a silent e, whichSentence. in English has a value in the lengthening ofMinor Spelling Patterns the preceding vowel. Once the children have Fries also introduces a number of what he learned to read with fluency in the first pat-calls "the minor spelling patterns," and cer- tarn, they are introduced to this second pat-tain words that he calls once-ers which don't tern which will give them hundreds of addi.pattern at all. These are certain irregularly tional words, this introduction completely byspelled words. The word of for example. he contrast with the first spelling pattern. Whencalls a oneeer since there isn't any other they can read with accuracy such a word asspelling that approximates it. There are many cap, in the second spelling pattern the chil-once.ers and sotrhave a very high frequency dren see cape. And in this kind of approachof use but they usually present no difficnIty. the entire word should always be presented to the child. Ask them to read it. The contrastMinimum Contrasts practically teaches itself. Use mat and mate Toere arc two important points that I'd like as an example and the children will want toto make. One is that the way in which the tell what this word mate is. They can almostchildren recognize different words is entirely read it without ever having seen it before,based on what Fries calls the principle of which is true of many word, as they are readminimum contrasts. In other words, the mini in context. This goes very rapidly acid thismum contrast is having two words in which second spelling pattern almost does not have only one letter is different. And his theory is to be taught by the time the groundwork hasthat children learn to read well not by seeing been laid with the first. hcw words are alike but by seeing how one word IE different from another word. So that The Third Spelling Pattern when we present the first pattern that we had, the at matrix, we present two words such as The thin", major spelling pattern is, to me,cat and fat. With thesefirst two words, the great clue m far as retarded readers arewhether the child is a retarded reader or not, concerned. It is the pattern which presents thethe contrast has to start, this habit of looking greatest reading problem: the vowel cluster,for contrast is basic to the approach. the two vowels which represent one phoneme. Words r:ontaining the clusters, however, doThe Linguist's View make smaller patterns and this is the wayOf Reading and Pictures they are presented to the children the ea'tt, Too many children think that reading is the ei's, the ie's, the words which don't yieldsomehow tied up with toiling at pictures and to phoneticanalysis. There's no way thatguessing what words are uni;erneath. And you can take a word like read and by separat-then they say that they can read: they can ing the e and a and giving them separateread correctly something they've memorized sounds come up with read. It doesn't workunder a picture, but when asked to turn to that way in English. It's the spelling conven-another page and read another sentence there, tion which children have to recognize as such,they will repeat the same ,entence. They are and not necessarily consciously. Now, this isnot really into the reading preoess, They've the first, real opening wedge that I have hadgot entirely the wronp, idea of whet reading in all the years I've worked with retardedis, that is, looking at Ihe printed word itself readers and teachers of retarded readers thatand then getting it back into oral language. will give children raw real help in how toBut there are children who learn despite these handlevowel duller andvoweldigraphpictures.I guess, more than anything, this words. As I have s icr, phonics doesn't helppk,;at can be illustrated by a very little boy on this but linguistics does: the linguist haswhom I asked if he warned to read to me, an worked out these patterns. There is the ea inacademic question for him, lie said he would the spread.thread.read pattern and there isread from the preprimer. lie opened to the the ea in seat and mean, and so on, wh -re itfirst page which was a double picture spread, has another value. And by bringing in con-the usual suburban house. Down in the corner

0 70 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION was the word home. So 1saidto him,adds something to the picture, and the final "Wcuid you read that word for me?" 1 don'tsentence is Nat is a fat cat, which brings know whether he even looked at the word,together the first two sentences into a se- but he immediately said, "House." I said.quence. We get into more complicated ones, "What else can you read?" So he went tosomething which is not true of other reading another picture of a huge red ban, and down materials. in the corner was the word farm. 1 know he didn't look at it this time. I said, "What isStages in Reading that word?" And he said, "Barn." Now this Something else about linguistics and read. really make.? me heartsick because here is aing appealed to me. Fries talks about the first child at the end of first grade who already isstage of the reading process as being the entirely mistaken about what reading is. "transfer stage," the stage at which the child doesn't know what it is to read. He looks atis actually transferring his oral language into the picture. He says what he thinks thatthe written language or viceversa.It's a picture represents. He never looked at thequestion of what he knows in his oral lan. word which is the reading part of the whaleguage, recognizing it in written language, and business. being able to read it as easily as he speaks it, Linguistic readers have 110 pictures at allwhich, of coarse, is our goal as teP.ehers of and this is the basic linguistic principle thatreading. This transfer stage can go on for I'd like to emphasize now. Looking at pic-quite a while or it can be very Lief because it tures has nothing to do with learning to read. goes into the second stage, which Fries de. What we do in Philadelphia is to have thescribes as "the stage of prodi dive reading," children draw their own pictures for thesea very happy term, I ti ink. This is what we're readers and we have gotten some very niceaiming for; produ ;the reading. I think it's an creative artwork after the children read thealhenownpassing term. A child can read pro. story. And we can d, this also in upperductively for information; he can read pro. levels. What we do is 'ay, "Now that you'veductivelyforenjoyment, forappreciation. read the story to yourself, draw a picture butAnd it's what we hope our children, all of you've got to put in that picture everythingthem, will be able to do. you read about in the story." So, if Dad and 11 he third stage which, unhappily, many of Dan and Nat are in the story, we want to seeour children never reach is the stage of vivid, Dad, Dan, and Nat doing whatever they wereimaginative realization, the high level reading doing in the story. 'Chia is a wonderful corn-that we are aiming for, critical reading of all preheasion check .3 well as an encourage.kinds, th3 level at which we hope the children ment of creativity. will function. The tragedy about retardation in reading is that we have many children in the secondary schools who are in the transfer Reading for Meaning stage. They are not reading productively in Some critics, who Ithink really haven'tany sense of the word, No one can read gone into what is behind the struduring ofproductively until he has the mechanics of materials such asthis,saythatlinguistsreading under control. A child who is not aren't interested in reading for meaning.I able to apply word attack skills will be sty. don't know how much teading for meaningmied on so many words that he will remain we do in preprimers, but, in any event, thein the first stage. But if a child is reading linguist could not be mz.re interested. Frieswell and with understanding, he is reading says very definitely that there is meaning in a productively, even at a very immature level as word, and that there iv more meaning in thatfar as subject matter is concerned. But a word in the context of a sentence. The realrather slowprogression M the beginning meaning howcv comes with a sequence ofseems to pay off in the end, as far as I ran sentences actually one adding to anothertell, because I thing sometimes in other sys idea. In our beginning stories, simple thoughterns, the children are expected to do too they are, we have errrfence of ideas. Wemuch too non. They are expected to be high have as our first sentence, Nat is a cat, whichlevel readers before they've even found out is a statement of fact in a normal sentencewhat reading is. That's why we get some of pattern. Next in sequence is A'at is fat, which our retarded readers.

71 LINGUISTICS AND READING 71

Writing Aspects of a suggested to my junior high teachers that they Reading Program give these children wh' are, shall we say, reluctant writers, a start at this early level Talking about the writing aspect of such a and finish one sentence for them, such as Dad reading program will give secondary teacherstaps the tincan. Then a child might say some concept of what can be done in creative something entirely different, using the words writing with children if a linguistic base isthat he's had from his readers. The tin lid, used, the teacher wrote in one class, and the child We begin the creative writing and wewrote is big after it. And then, Dan ran to can do this with secondary students as welland another child wrote Dad. Dad wins was in a very simple way by the use of thefinished by a pin for Dan. This is from a beginning pattern. One day, with a class ofstory the child had read. He's using the mate. children from varied ethnic and racial back-rial of the story at the beginning. Very soon grounds, I scrambled the firs' sentence in thethey won't need any start, butIthinkit reader and made it read, Arai cat a is. I askedwould be very good to pull junior high school the children to read it to make sure that theystudents into writing by supplying something could read every word, I asked, "Does this and letting them finish it in different ways make sense to you?" I've had no class,I which, believe me, they will do at the junior don't care how immature, where the children high level. did not say, "No, it doesn't make any sense at Very often at the early stages, after they've all." Nor did this particular group of chil- had a spelling pattern. we give the children dren, whose many problems make us think of the pattern and say, "See how many words of them as practically unteachable for the firstthis pattern you can use in a story." Some year, believe it made sense. resultsareratherinteresting. One rather ThenIasked, "Now, suppose you takebright little boy took the ink pattern and those words and you put them in the orderwrote: that you think will make sense." "Dad has a pink ink can. He cannot open The first responseI got was, "A cat isthe can, so Dad goes to the sink. He opens Nat," which almost floored me. Of course thisthe can. Mother goes to the kitchen with her is a perfectly good English sentence. mink togeta drink. Mother said, 'What I said, "Fine. Who can give me anotherstinks? I think the ink stinks.' " arrangement of the words?" We encourage humor, and the children roll The next child said, "Is ro rt a cat." Andon the floor at these stories. They do like to again, I said, "Wonderful." We didn't get the read what other children have written. simple, straightforward "Nat is a cat" until As an English teacher at various school the third lime. But out of this little group oflevels m've been amazed at the complexity of words we got three arrangements which dothe sentences written by these younger chit- make sense in English. drcn, which is greater than I've found in It is very interesting to linguists that thesesentences from children as high as the tenth chAren who we think are so culturally andgrade. In a first grade siltation in one of the linguistically deprived have, as the linguistspoorer neighborhoods, this paper was handed say, "internalized the structure of their Ian.in by a child. It is called "Fun After School." guage." Nobody's ever told these children "When we come home from school,I do that word order is important in the Englishmy homework before 1 go to play with the language; they know one order doesn't make boy s." sense, butthatiftheyturn these wcrds The teacher, of course, has carefully put in around, it will make a lot of c9ise. We usethe comma. We don't think it is necessary at this technique of the scrembled sentence con- the first grade to teach this kind of punctua- stantly with the children and they becometion. Now this child's sentence, even without very expert. They love doing it and they can the comma, to me 's a remarkable sentence, scramble sentences for the other children. an original sentence, and perfectly spelled, With the very beginning of writing, thewritten by a first.grade child who in some teacher starts the children on sentences. Theschools might be asked to read such things teacher prints in blue, Dad taps, for example. as, "Look, look, look." The sophistication of Then each child finishes the sentence. I havethese children in their ability to handlesen- 72 72 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION tences is impressive. And, as I'm sure you "I think the baby is crying because his realize, there's no relation between what chil- mother works every day and he never dren are actually saying and the language gets to see her all day. He only sees his that they are being given to read at the father. He likes his mother much better. beginning stages. The complexity of that first. When she comes home very late at night, grader's sentence shows many layers of struc her husband never gets to see her, either. ture, of different ideas, of subordinate ideas. The parents both work. The parents take We don't usually get such complex sentences him to neighbors. lie doesn't like it so written by our tenth grade students, let alone thatiswhyhecrieseveryday." our Prstgrade students. The content makes quite a paper for a seconcgrade child to write. What this girl's Ilike to think that because the children paper says reveals a reat deal. And we see have been reading stories where the sentences are sequential and not disjointed they writevery interesting sentence structure in "When she comes home very lateatnight," (the sequential sentences. child herself had a comma) "her husband Here is a secondgrade story which I like tonever gets to see her either," read because everyone generally finds it quite There's quite a let of development in this remarkable as to content and subject matter.secondgrade story, and thisi the kind of The children were shown a picture and askedwriting that we can get, that many children to write. We all use that as a technique rightare able todo. We believe that linguistics up through high tchool. This one is called,helps us teach children to read better, and "The Baby Wants ills Mother." therefore they can write better.

Mankind, A Perpetual Word Mill English possesses a sort of built-in automatic wordmaking device through which, once a word is in the language, speakers can make related words. Once we have American, anybody can devise un-American, proAmerican,antiAmerican, Americanism, Americanize, and Americanization. Such coinages become possible through a large body of prefixes and suffixes, which can attach freely to almost any word to produce a new but related meaning. Obviously the fact that objects need names has something to do with making language. The English Channel is a name, but, once the name is given, it can give rise to channel weather, a channel sea; the Panama Canal can lead to the Canal Zone, and with military personnel to a Canal appointment. Many other quirks of human minds and society produce words. Just now Americans are making words out of letters. Ok has become okay; a combination of nations can be NATO or Nate. We like to fuse words, particularly if they overlap, motor hotel becoming motel. Sometimes these combinations become ridiculous, like the tiny grocery storeh,,se owners called it a superette. Words like motet or the more recent boatel are known as blends in this country. taivi,thinLy Ova* CaNnolgr INc+ lot% 5r,r1Art P5 11,"Ion.190 4 pp 3354 a

73 Vffigutctm cufid clAitthg

The material for this structural grammar lesson is taken from the first three lessons in Chapter 10 of Mr. Schuster's book.* The subject matter is modi- fication around a nounthe way words fit around a noun. It deals with parts of speech in an untraditional way.

EDGAR H. SCHUSTER

This first lesson is going to have to do withand narrow it down somehow. Now, what the way some words cluster around otherkind of dog? words to affect their meaning one way orChild: A big dog. another. Let's pretend that this circle I'mMr. Schuster: Big dog is one way of doing it. drawing represents all the girls in the world.How about another word that will tell some- Sometimes we want to talk about all the girlsthing about dog? in the world and other times we want to talkC: Spotted. about fewer girls. For example, we might [Mr. Schuster continued until he had listed want to talk only about tall girls. Assumingbig, spotted, brown, fierce, greyhound, short. that half the girls in the world are tall, let'shaired, collie, and homeless.] cut our circle in half. So far so good. Now, suppose we try for a So this is one way we could alter the wordvery different kind of word or phrase that will girlstonarrow down itsmeaning.(Mr.tellyou something about dog. Something Schuster drew a circle, labeling it girls. Thenthat'sratherdifferent from any of these he bisected it, marking one half tall girls. Hewords.I'll tell you what to do to get one of continued to narrow the area, step by step.] the other types. Think of a very short 'seri. We might end up with some tall, smiling,tenet with the word dog in it. Have you all brunette Campfire girls uho were talking togot one? me last night. The meaning keeps gettingChild: My dog is pleasant. more and more narrow until itMr. S: Very good. Now we have my dog is becomes quite specific. Now let's think aboutpleasant. Do you see a word telling us some. how words behave when they're clusteredthing about dog which is different from other around a head word like girls. Let's changewords we have been using? the head word to dog. Use dog as the head word and let me have a word which will nintlertirritiot rise!, by John J. Schreiber of the Beres. of Pal, tOti0116 d a lope recording; of Mr 5.1,tietrit preetnistion to the Linpuit- stand either in front of or behind that word tit %.4.1,op eond,_trd b! the IS thirn-nre City ?AB< She -S.. Alpo 5. 21, I. Me Srli nein' trieino the rovrigh4 on Ail meterial iiroI lee Oi/f11 'Mar H. SA-Iiiimet. Creeime, t'serof SO. IN.,. YOril. l Awe* the terve., .4 Pebliceti.no pet mistioe to print this in the Clivii.km, McGee. wr Moo Compaq, 19651 rishimore emiterie of Ede, etros. 74 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

C: My. like each other, right? So we'll erase one of Mr. S: Exactly. How about another sentencethem greyhound, since it's longer. like that Mr. S: Anything else? C: The dog is friendly, C: I think brown and big. Mr. S: The dog is friendly. Okay. Doesn't theMr. S: Brown and big, very good. Any more? tell us something, too? The, my, and well(Teacher erases brown.) thinic of some others later on. Now, in addi-C: I think you could take out either the or tion to having words in front of the headmy. word, it's also possible to have words tellingMr. S: The or my, very good. You certainly you about the head word which go behind it,can because they're the same kind of words even though you don't have a sentence. Cansomehow. [Mr. Schuster worked through the you think of a word or group of words whichrest of the list until he had only the following can come behind dog and tell you somethingwords left:collie, short-haired, fierce, who- about dog? bel on gs.to.nte, on-the. block, big, the.] How about who belongs to me? Okay? We Now here's what I want you to do with a could take a whole group of words who-paper and pencil. I want you to take these belongsto-me notice I'm putting hyphenswords and arrange them around the word dog in here. Why am I putting hyphens in there?so as to have a good English phrase. Now Why do a weird thing like that? just to make sure you give me a 1 hrase and C: For them to run together. not a sentence, we'll take your sentence that Aft. S: Well, why would I want them togethe:?ended with is pleasant. Does everybody iin C: It's a ck .nplete group. derstand whatIwant you to do? Simply Mr. S: Right. Sharp. It's a complete group; itarrange these words around dog in the way functions as though it were a single word,you normally would if you were going to don't you agree? Now, how about a simplerwrite a good English sentence. Then complete kind of group of words that would modifyyour idea by saying is pleasant. Everyone can dog? change fierce to unfierce. You might say, for C: My dog is the biggest on tht block. example, dog, collie, shorthaired, unfierce, Mr. S: On the block. I like that -- on-the.who.belongsto-me, ontheblock, big, the,is block. pleasant, but you wouldn't because you have C: Of this kind. learned a great deal about English grammar; Mr. S:Of-thiskind. Very good [Astheyou have learned a lot by imitationas a pupils suggested the words, Mr. Schuster list.child. Let's see if you agree about the rules ed them in the columns indicated below.] for arranging these words around the word dog. Go ahead and try. I want you all to have DOG the same answer or almost the same answer, [Students worked and Mr. Schuster went the big whobelongs-to-meabout making an occasional suggestion.] my spotted on -the -block Now, what word's first on everybody's pa. brown per? greyhound homeless collie C: The. fierce Mr. S: The. Right. Is that an accident? Why short-haired didn't somebody put the someplace else? Are Now, how many different kinds of wordsyou all a bunch of conformists? Everybody do we have here? Do you see any two wordshas the first. What do you have in second which are, in your opinion, pretty much theposition? same kind of word? C: Big. C: Spotted and brown. Mr. S: What do you have? Mr. S: Spotted and brown. AU rig)-1? Okay.C: Big. Lees take out one of them. I'll erase the firstMr. S: Who has something other than big? one. Do you see any other words that are likeEverybody's got big in second position? You spotted and brown? are conformists! All right, what do you have C: Greyhound and collie. in third position? Mr. 3: Greyl,cund and collie. Well, they areC: Unfierce. LINGUISTICS AND WRITING 75

Mr.S:Unfterce.That's your third word? Mr.S: Barkingis a form of a verb that's a Does everybody haveunfiercethird? Yougood idea. What else tells youbarkingis a haveshort-haired?Nobody's got anythingdifferent kind of ward frombig?I'm thinking else, I hope justunfierceandshort-haired. not so much about the meaning now as about Now, what's next inline? Collie. Collieisother things; for example, the structure, the next in, I assume, everybody's version. Next?position. Can you change their positions? Dog.Everybody'sgot collieand thendog. Could 1saythe barking big collie dogor How aboutcollieandunfierce dog?Havedoesthe big barking collie dogsound more youeverheard ofcollie unfierce dog?Ornatural? The last one sounds more natural. collie big dog?Isn't that interesting? WhyWell, these are just clues, ways of coming to shouldn't there be acollie big dog?You gotthe conclusion thatbarkingmay be a differ. anyfeathered bright birds?You could have aent kind of word frombig, andItrust we pretty parakeet bird,couldn't you? Could youwould all say adifferentkind of word from havea parakeet pretty bird? collie. What's the next thing you've got? Every. MI right, now, what I'd like you to do next one hason- the -blockfollowed bywho- belongs is to come up with other words that are like to-me?Then, of course, you complete thethese. I'd like you to come up with a list of sentence. words that belong in one of these particular Now, one of the major points here is thatcolumns. We won't make it a long list, but it's got to go the way we have it here. Therelet's add at least a few to each column. are some exceptions; but, in general, every. C:Thecould beoar, my. body hasthefirst and everybody hascollieC: Colliecould beterrierorhound. stuck todog.It's got to stick todog.You C: Bigcould belarge. can't have any other word in between; notMr. 5:How about thebarkingcolumn? any of these words, at any rate.ColliemustC: Sleeping, running. stick todog, on -the -blockhas to followdogMr. S:Okay. Let me go back to the first and that has to be followed bywho-belongscolumn for a minute. I'm sort of interested in tome.There is a very definite order for mostthat first column. Can you think of other of these words. We have some disagreementwords that belong in there? about which goes first,unfierceorshort.C:An. haired. Why? Mr. S: Art,very good. (Mr. Schuster contin- C: Because they're the same type of word. ued to draw out words to make this list.] Mr.S: Does everyone agree? They're the same kind of word. We should have etiminat the big barking collie dog short-hairedout. cc, one of them. Let's take our small sleeping terrier bigandunfi -rce? Now how about That'smy large running hound an interesting comha- ition, isn't it? Supposean we took un offfierceWe could change ;hethat sentence to end with ru ty instead ofpleasant. their Wecan say either the fiercebig dogor thethis big fierce dog, can'twe? We agree they musthis be pretty much the same kind of word, and sothose 1'11take fierceout. Notice, by the way, thatthese when you modify a head word likedog,theyour single word modifiers tend to precede themany single word, whereas the word-group modal.several ers follow. That's a very natural thing inmost English. You find it all the time. three Let's getfierceout of here and in its place putbarking. The big barking collie dog.Do you all agree with me thatbarkingis another Mr.S: Three.That's good. You've got them kind of word? all now. You've got all the different classes of C: It's a different kind of word becausebigis words that can go in this first column, and a size andbarking iswhat something does. you did it in about five minutes. Congratult C: Barking is a form of verb. tions.

76 76 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

Each column represents a different kind ofLimiters beseriptives.Adjec:ves word. You agree that each column differs from the other. They all can modify a noun. the big I'm going to ask you something that you'll really have to think about. Try to give these words names. We know there arc different kinds of words because of the fact that they three large fit in different slots, but there's another rea son why they are different and that is that they tell us different kinds of things. In fact,Action WordsVerbsVerbals TypesClasses the kinds of things they tell us may be one way of helping to name them. Who wants to harking collie volunteer a name for any one of the classes of words you have up here? C: The large list could be called a physical description? runring hound Mr. S: I kind of like that descriptives. All right, let's take that as one possibility. In your own grammar study in school, you C: Types for the fourth column. may have called all these words adjectives. Mr. S: T) pes. Type or class you could say;There's no harm in that, but do you see what it's the sar le thing. is wrong with it in terms of this lesson? C: Anothe,. one could be action words. C: Each word, even though they may be S: Any other ideas for names for one ofcalled adjectives, has a different effect on the the groups? word dog so that they all can't be classified C: Well, the second one is adjective. actually as king ore same. Mr. S: You could call the second columnMr. S: if you put them all in the same bunch, adjectives, right. you'reobscuringthosevitaldifferences C: The third one could be verbs. among them and that's the objection I would 31r. S: Would you call the words in thehave in calling them all adjectives. Now, let's second column verbs? go on. Let's do something else. C: No. Well, sometimes, Suppose we wanted to specify where this Mr. S: Could you say, "1 was mailing downbig barking collie dog is without using a the street forging my own business?" stoup modifier like in the yard. Now we've C: Aren't verbals formed from verbs? got his type, we've got what he's doing, we've Mr. S: Verbals are formed from verbs. Dogot some description onhim,and we've got you want to call this group verbals? Let'ssome limitations on him. I want to add one face itYou could call these weds anythirgmore thing. I want you to tell me something you please. You could call them smorgasbordabout where he is in one word. Think of one and it wouldn't make any difference as longword that tells where this dog is and also as everybody else in the world would agree todecide where you would put it in this cluster call them smorgasbord with you. But if youof words. I see a dog walking down the lawn. want to call them verbs, that would be great;I want you to give me a word which wilt if you want to call them verbal!, Ill takedescribe his position in relation to you. that, too. Nobody's got me a word for theC: here. first column yet. 31r. S: Here. That's perfect. How about sorne C: Limiting? thing else? Mr. S: How about limiters? Now you've C: Outside. given me some ideas for naming these wordsMr. S: Good. and I like a lot of your ideas. I'm not goingC: Nearby. to insist on your calling any one of they`Mr. S: Nearby. inside. These are all words columns any particular thing. But I do thinkthat tell us about the position of the dog we should name each column because theNow, where would they go in our cluster? The types are so different one from the other. big barking collie dog on the lawn belongs iThe lists by now have all been givento me. a heading.] C: The big barking colli dog outside.

7 LIBRARY REFERENCES 77

Mr.S: You put outside after dog. Can you modifying nouns? Isn't dog a noun? Anyway, think of any other place where you might put that is a very interesting thought. What are nearby or outside or here? I think the natural adverbs doing modifying nouns? place is the first place you came up with and Maybe that kind of word needs alittle that is right after the head word. Now these working on some other time. are the words that specify position or place. What else might you call them? C: They point out where it is. To the workshop members this exhibition Mr. S: What do you want to call them of teaching structural grammar was outsiand- pointers? Pointers wouldn't be good, because ing because of the artful questioning that there are too many other things you might drew fray.the class itself the materials the cal! pointers, too. pupils were to use in making generalizations; C: Locators? the sure development of the concept of pat- Mr. S: Locators, fine. Now you are exercising terning, the structuralist's"filling a slot"; your own creativity again, wh;oh is great,Let and the constant referral to the criterion of me ask you for a moment to remember a "what sounds right." They were also delight. grammatical word you probably have ed at how effectively the teacher's enthusiastic learned. reception of the pupils' suggestions estab- C: Adverbs. lished an atmosphere in which ideas could be Mr. S: Adverbs what are adverbs doing generated.

LIBRARY REFERENCES Alexander, Henry. The Story of Our Language. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company. Inc., 1940. Allen, Harold B.. (ed.). Readings in Applied English Linguistics. New 701k: Appleton-Century.Crofts, Inc., 1958. Allen, Virginia French, (ed.). On Teochiag English to Sreakers of Other Languages. Champaign, Illinois: National Council of TesAers of English, 1965. Anderson, Wallace L, and Norman C. Stageberg, (eds.). Introductory Reading, on Language. New York: linh, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1,452. Atwood, E. Bagby. A Surrey of l'erb Forms in the Eastern United Stares. Ann Arbor: Unit ersity of Michigan Press, 1953. Bach, Emmon. Introduction to Transformational Grammars. New York: 11011, Rinehart and V% inston, Inc., 1964. Baugh, Albs's-I C. A History of the English Language. New York: Appleton Century-Crofts, Inc , 1957. Black, M ex, (ed.). Importance of Language. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prent ice.Hall, Inc., 1962. Bloomfield, Leonard. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.. 1961. Borgh, Enola M. Grammatical Patterns and Compositions. Oshkosh, Wisconsin: WisconsinSlate College, 1963. Braddock, Richard, led 1. Introductory Readings on the English Language. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice.Hill, Inc., 1962. Bram, Joseph. Language and Society. New York: Random House, 1955. Bred, Michel. Sratamics. New York: Dover, 1960. Brook, G.L. history of the English Language. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1964. Brown, Dont.WallaceC. Brown, and Dudley Bailey. Form in Modern English. New York: Oxford

Uniie:sity Press, 1958.. Bryant, Margaret. Current American ('sage. New York: Funk and Wignalls Company. Inc., 1962. Modern English and Its Heritage. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Buchanan, Cyninis. Programmed Introduction to Linguistics. Englewood, New Jersey: D.C. Heath and Company. 1963. Carroll, John B. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Harvard Cnisersity Press, 1953. 78 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

Cameleer, Ernst. Language and Myth. New York: Dover, 1946. Chase, Stuart. Tyranny of Words. New York: Harcourt. Brace, and World, [nc., 1959. Chomeky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1965. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. New York: Humanities Press, [nc., 1964. Syntactic St.-uctures. New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1957. Clark, John W. Early English. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1964. Cleator, P. F. Lost Languages. New York: New American I.ibrary, 1962, Mentor. Conlin, David A., and George Herman. Modern Grammar and Composition (Books I, 2, 3 and Re. sources). New York: American Book Company. 1965. 'Dean, Leonard F., and Kenneth G. Wilson, (eds.). Essays on Language and Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963, De Boer, John J., and Martha Dallmann. Ihe Teaching of Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.. 1964. de Laguna, Grace A. Speech: Its Function and lime/op.:en,. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1963. Dialog. New York: 1folt. Rinehart and Winston. [nc., Fall, 1965. Dialogues on Language. (Reprint from College English. Novrimbor, 19621. Champaign, Illinois: Na- tional Council of Teachers of English. Enkvist, N.C.., John Spencer, and Gregory Michael. Linguistics and Sipe. New York: Oxford University Vress, 196i. Evans, Bergen and Cornelia. .4 Dictionary of Contemporary .4rneriran Usage. New York: Random House, 1957. Faust, George Basic Tenets of Structural Linguistics. New York: BoLbs-Iderrili Company, Inc.. 1953. Firth, J.R. The fongues of Men and :7p-et-h. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961 Fouler, H.W. A Dictionary, of Modern English Usage. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Fraenkel, Gerd. What is language? Boston: Ginn and Company. 1965. Francis, Nelsin. The . New "for,: W.W. Norton and Company, [nc., 1963. . Structure of America' English. New York: Ronald Press, 1958. Fries, Charles C. American English Grammar. New York. ApplstoroCentary-Crofts, Inc.. 1910. . "Linguistics." (Chapter it of Linguistics and Readingl. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Win- ston, Inc., 1964. Linguistics and Reading. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963. The Structure of English. New York: Harcourt, 'trace, and World, Inc., 1952. Gelb, I.J. Study of Writing. Chicago: The Unhersity of Chicago Press, 1964. Gleason, H. A., Jr. Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics. New York: Holt. Rinehart and Winston. Inc., 1961. Linguistics and English Grammar. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Golden, Ruth. Improving Patterns of Language Usage. Detroit: Rayne State Un is ersity Press. 1960. Gordon, Edward, and Edward S. Noyes, (eds.). Essays on the Teaching of English. New York: Apple. ton- Century- Crofts, Inc., 1960. Gordon, Edward J. Writing and Literature in the Secondary School. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Gray, Jack C. Words. Words, and Words about Dictionaries. San Francisco: Chandler PuElishing Company, 1963. Greenberg, J. H. Unirersals of Language. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1962. Guth, Hans. English Today and Tomorrow. Englewood Cliffs, N.JPrenticeHail. Inc.. 1961 Hall, Edward T. Silent Language. Greenwich. Connecticut: Fawcett Publications. Inc., [961. Hull, Robert A Jr. Introductory Linguistirs. Philadelphia: Chilton Company, 1964. I- Linguistic, and Your Language. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company. Inc.. 1960. id and Spelling in English. Philadelphia: Chilton Company. 1961. Harris, Zelig S. Structural Linguistics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960. Hayakawa, S.!. Language in Thought and Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, lnc., 1961

. The Use and 4:isuse of Language. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc,. 1962. Herde, Paul. Langaage, Thought, and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Nets, 1958. Hill, Archibald A. Introduction to Linguistic Structures. New Y...rk: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Inc., 1958. Hoekeit, Charles F. A Course ia Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan, 1958. Hoenlgswald, Henry, Language Change and Linguistic Recomoruction. Chicago: The Unisersity of Chicago Press. 1960. Holbrook, David. English for Maturity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Hook, .I. N. Teaching of High School English. New York: Ronald Preps. 3rd ed., 1965.

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Hughes, John P. TheScience of Language. New York: RandomHouse, 196]. Hunt, Kellogg W.Grammatical Structure Written at Three Grade Levels.Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English,1965. Jesperson, Otto. Cron th and Structure of the English Language.Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955. Language. NewYork: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1964. Mankind, Nation, and Individual. mington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1964. Kerr, Elizabeth M., and Ralph M. Aderman.Aspects of American English.New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1963. Kurath, Hans.A Phonology and Prosody of Modern English.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid.The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic Stares.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964. Laird, Charlton.The Miracle of Language.Cleveland: World, 1953. Thinking about Language.New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, inc., 1960. A Writer's Handbook.Boston: Ginn and Company, 1964 Laird, Charlton and Robert M. Gorrell.(eds.!. English . NewYork: Harcourt,Brace, and World, Inc., 1961. Laird,Heleneand Charlton.The Tree of Language.Cleveland: World, 1957. Lefevre, CarlA. Linguistics and the Teaching of Reading.New York: MeGraw.Hill Book Company, Inc., 1952. Lehmann, W. P.Historical Linguistics: An Introduction.New York: Holt, RinehartandWinston, Inc., 1962. Leichty, V. E.Discotering English.Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, Inc.. 1964. Lexin, SamuelR. Comparing Traditional and Structural Grammar. NewYork: Bobbs.Merrill Corn. puny, Inc., 1960. Lin,SanSu. Pattern Practice in the Teaching of Standard English to Students with a Nonstandard Dialect.New York: Columbia University Press. 1965. "Linguistics".College English.26 (January, 1965) 4. Linguistics Composing and Verbal Learning(Reprint fromCollege Composition ant' Communication). Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1962. Linguistics-Current Issues.(Reprint from CollegeEnglish,October, 1961.) "Linguistics and Reading",The Reading Teacher,18, 3 (December, 1964.) Loban, Walter.The Language of Elementary School Children.Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963. Teaching Language and Literature.New York: Harcourt, Bract, and World,Inc1961. Malmberg, Bertil.Phonetics.New York: Dover, 1951, ' Malmstrons, Jean and Annabel Ashley.Dialects, USA.Champaign, Illinois: ltionel Council of Teachers of English, 1963. Malenstrom, Jean.Language in Society.New York: Hayden Book Company, 1965. Marckwarldt, Albert H.American English. NewYork: Oxford Unisersity Press, 1958. "Grammar and Linguistics in the Teaching of English".Illinois English Bulletin.46 (October, 1958.) Martinet, Andre.Elements of General Linguistic,.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964. MeDrrid, Raven.American Social Dialects and the Cal: oral Matrix of American English.Cham. paign, Pimp's: National Council of Teachers of English, 1965. MeDavld, Raven I., Jr., (ed.). AnExamination of the Attitudes of the TowardLanguage.Cham- paign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, )965. ' MeDa.riel, Raven 1., Jr. and Virginia Glean McDevitt.Relationship of the Speech of 4.nerican Negroes to the Speech of Whites.New York: Bobbserrill Company, Inc., 1951. Meneken, H. L.The American Language.1936-1918. Abridged by Raven I. McDasid, Jr.NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf,Inc.,1963. Miles, Leland. WhereDo You Stand onLiner/Wks? Supplement to the CEA Critic, XXVI, (January, 19641, 4. Miller, George A.Language and Communication.New York: McGrawill Book Company, Inc., 1951. Newsome, Verna. StructuralGrammar.Oshke.h, Wisconsin: Wisconsin Stale College, 1961. Nicholson, Margatet.A Dictionary of Amen roes - English Usage.New York: Oxford University Pref.!,

NIda, Eugene A.Morphology.Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1919. Cragood, CharlesE. Psycholinguistics. Bloomington,Indiana: Indiana University Press,1965. Palmer, it E.The Principles of Lang.age-Study.New York: Oxford University P-ev,, 1964. Pei, Mario.Story of English.Greenwkh, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1952. Story of Language.New York: New American Library. 1965. Planet, lean.The Languageand Thought of theChild.Cleveland: Word, 1955. 80 BALTIMORE BULLETIN OF EDUCATION

Pike, Kenneth L. Phonemics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1947. Phonetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1943. Tone Languages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948. Poo ley, Robert C., (ed.). Perspectives OA English. New York: AppletonCentury.Crofts, Inc., 1960. Poo ley, Robert. Teaching English Usage. New York: Appleton- C "ntury.Crofts, Inc., 1946. *Postman, Neil. Exploring Your Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1966. Postman, Neil, and Howard C. Damon. The Languages of Discovery. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Language and Systems. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. The Uses of Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1965. Portman, Neil, Harold Morine, and Greta Morine. Discovering Your Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963. Postman, Neil, and Charles Vt'eingartner. Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching. New York: The Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. Potter, Simeon. Language in the Modern World. Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 1960. Modern Linguistics. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Inc., 1964. Our Language. Baltimore: Penguin Books, Inc., 3957. Pyles, Thomas. The Origins and Development of the English Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1964. Words and Ways of American English. New York: Random House, 1952. Quirk, Randolph and .k.H. Smith. The Teaching of English. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Roberts, Paul. English Sentences. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1962. English Syntax. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1964. Patterns of English. New York: Harcourt. Brace, and World, Inc., 1956. llogovin, Syren. Modern English Sentence Structure. New York: Random House, 1965. Rycenga , John, and Joseph Schwartz. Perspectives on Language. New York: Ronald Press, 1963. Sanderson, James L., and Walter K. Gordon. Exposition and the English Language. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, loc., 1963. Sapir, Edward. Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc., 1949. Culture, Language, and Personality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Saporta, Sol. Psycho linguistics. New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1961. Sauer, Edwin. English in the Secondary School. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1961. Se-Mauch, Margaret. Gift of Language. New York: Dover, 1942. TheEnglishLanguage in Modern Times. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Schuster. Edgar. Grammar, Usage, and Style. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1965. Shay, Roger W., (ed.). Social Dialects and Language Learding. Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachersf English, 1964. Skinner, B.F. Verbal Behar.ior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1957. Sledd, lames. Dictionaries and Thor Dictionary. Chicago: Scott, Foreman. 1962. A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1959. Smith, Henry Lee, Jr. Linguistic Science and the Teaching of English. Cambridge: Harvard Uibersity Press, 1956. Stageberg, Norman C. "Some Structural Ambiguities". (Reprint from The English Journal. Notem. ber, 1958.) Stewart, William A., (ed.k Non Standard Speech and the Teaching of English. Washing'an, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1964. Sturtevant, E.H. Linguistic Change. Chicago: 1 he University of Chicago Press, 1965. Tagmentics. (Reprint from College Composition and Communiration). Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1964. *Thomas, Owen. Transformational Grammar and the Teacher of English. New York: Holt, Rinehrrt and Winston, Inc., 1965. Trager, George, and Henry Lee Smith. Outline of English Structure. New York: Columbia University Press,1965. Mend, John. amt./arise Grammars. (Reprint from College Composition and Communication. May 1964.) *Weiss, Bernard J. (director). Language, Linguistic and School Program. Champaign,Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963. *Wetmore, Thomas H., (ed.). Linguistics in the Classroom. Champaign, Illinois: National Council of Teachers el English, 1963. IThatmough, Joshua. Language: A Modern Synthesis. New York: New American Libsay, 1956. 1111Itehall, Harold. Structural Essentials of English. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Inc., 1956. IrInsti,Beniamin Lee. Language, Thought, and Reality, Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1956.

hrsibed ae i early" participates. Linguistic Approaches to the Study of the American English Language Phase I of the Baltimore City Public Schools Institute ran for five days a week (Monday through Friday) 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. from August 8 to August 26 inclusive. The daily schedule followed this division of time: 9:00.10:30 a.m.Lecture 10:30.11:00 a.m.Coffee, Browsing in Library 11:00-12:00 noonLecture 12:00- 1:00 p.m.Lunch 1:00.2:00 p.m.Discussions in Small Groups 2:00. 3:00 p.m.General Session questions to consultant of the day CHARLTON LAIRD What Language Is Theory of language: language process, structure and operation History of the English Language Origins and development of language; history and characteristics of the English language Semantics Theory of semantics: precision in use of words: ways in which words affect hu man behavior English Grammar Overview of comparative approaches to English grammar ROBERT J, DIPIETRO Structural Approachphonology,morphology, syntax Theory of structural linguistics: approach and objectives of the structuralist Transformational Grammar Theory of transformational linguistics: approach and objectives of the ansfor- 'nationalist ROGER 'W. SHUN' Dialectology Theory, approach, and objectives of the linguistic geographer; relationship to pronunciation, grammar, and vocabtlary Usage Theory of linguistic usage: cultural levels and functional varieties of English, determining levels of usage WILLIAM A. STEWART Linguistics and Speech Applications to altering nonstandard speech patterns: establishing standards of usage; altering patterns of language; applying te,hniques of teaching foreign languages and of teaching English as a secon] language ROSEMARY WILSON Linguistics and Reading Applications of linguistics to the teaching of reading

EDGAR H. SCHUSTER Linguistics and Writing Applications of linguistics to the teachingof %irking

R? BALTIMORE CITY PUBLICSCHOOLS Baltimore, Maryland 21218 Baltimore Bulletin of Educationajournal published since 1923 under the authority of the Board of School Commissioners-Vol. XLIII Nt..e. 2-4 1966-67 Address communications toThe Editor,Bureau of Publications, School Ad- ministration Building, 3 East 25th Street, Baltimore,Maryland 21218

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