Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48602-6 — Grammar Tom Rankin , Melinda Whong Excerpt More Information 1 A Guide to the Linguists’ Guide to Grammar It’s the natural worry of every novice teacher: that question which you have no idea how to answer. I’ll never forget the very bright Korean student who brought me every piece of written work containing feed- back from me, on which he had highlighted every instance of the use of the English article, along with a log he was keeping of his encoun- ters with correct and incorrect article use, and every explanation of the grammatical properties of articles he could find in the range of pedagogical materials he had collected. After setting out his findings, he was hoping I would explain the dozen or so ‘exceptions’ in his list of examples that he could not account for. What this experience and this student taught me was that knowing how to approach challen- ging points of grammar is much more valuable, and appropriate, than expert knowledge of each and every challenging point of grammar that exists. One motivation for this volume is to provide a degree of linguistics training, so that you have the tools to address any challen- ging question about grammar that you might encounter. I was, in fact, not able to provide ready answers for my Korean student. But as is often the case with students, he provided the way forward himself. By collecting instances of the grammatical phenomenon in question, he had collated a data set which we were able to work through to make sense of the complex properties of articles in English. We hope that the language-data-based approach we take in this book will achieve our overarching aim: to help you develop a methodology for approaching the complexity of language – and grammar in particu- lar – so that you are better able to facilitate the development of lan- guage amongst your learners. A secondary aim is to boost your own knowledge base of language and languages and linguistics, in order to add to your ever-growing expertise as a language teacher. We will, for example, provide insight into the properties of the English article system (see Case in Point 1.1 on Specificity). But alongside grammatical explanations in English, we will be exploring how linguistic properties 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48602-6 — Grammar Tom Rankin , Melinda Whong Excerpt More Information 2 a guide to the linguists’ guide to grammar 1.1 CASE IN POINT: SPECIFICITY Particular grammatical structures may be made complicated due to ‘hidden’ grammatical properties. By this we mean features of semantic or grammatical meaning which play a role in regulating usage, but which do not have an obvious marking. Specificity with regard to English articles illustrates this. There is no explicit gram- matical form in English noun phrases which overtly indicates spe- cificity. Specific meaning is nonetheless grammatically relevant in English, and cuts across the perhaps more familiar definite/indefi- nite grammatical distinction. The sentences (i)–(iv) show how defi- niteness combines with specificity to result in differences in meaning (examples from Lyons, 1999, p. 167). (i) He didn’t see a car parked at the door – until two men got out of it and asked for directions. indefinite / specific (ii) He didn’t see a car parked at the door – so he knew the visitors hadn’t arrived yet. indefinite / unspecific (iii) I didn’t meet the professor during my visit to the philosophy department yesterday morning – but I managed to get hold of him in the afternoon. definite / specific (iv) I didn’t meet the professor during my visit to the philosophy department yesterday morning – so I began to wonder whether that chair had been filled yet. definite / unspecific Later, we will see how this sort of meaning is manifested in other languages and is relevant in the acquisition and learning of gram- mar (see Chapter 3 for more on articles and specificity). are manifested in language in general, and provide examples from across a wide range of languages. As you see, we are relying on a set of text boxes, each called ‘Case in Point’, within which we will present language data that illustrate a particular grammatical phenomenon. We will walk you through how these work in this chapter (see Case in Point 1.2, which explains how to read these). You will find that we make use of a large range of languages, most of which are likely to be foreign to you, including some that you are likely to have never heard of. We have done this intentionally in order to widen the scope of your knowledge of lan- guages in the world. However, as we progress you will find that we highlight larger more ‘well-known’ languages more because we are drawing from published research on language learning and acquisi- tion, and, for better or for worse, it is these languages that have © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48602-6 — Grammar Tom Rankin , Melinda Whong Excerpt More Information A Guide to the Linguists’ Guide to Grammar 3 received the most attention in research terms. While we hope you will want to develop your expertise in language, we also recognise that making sense of linguistic data is hard work. For this reason, we have tried to ensure that the general conceptual point being made in the Case in Point is clear in the surrounding narrative that would allow you to skip a Case in Point in your reading as you might find it more useful to examine the Case in Points separately. In fact, we have written this book in such a way that it would be possible to save all the Case in Points to work through separately. The narrative, by con- trast, is designed to develop concepts in an accumulative way that might not as readily allow for the reading of chapters in isolation. One obvious truth about all learners of a ‘foreign’ language is that they already have full competence in (at least) one other language. Given that one fundamental tenet of education is the value of building on existing knowledge, we take the view that when teaching a ‘target’ language, one would do well to make as much use of students’ existing language knowledge as possible, a point which is not uncontroversial in foreign language teaching, and which we develop more fully in Chapter 5. At the same time, we realise that it is unrealistic that you would have full mastery of all of your students’ existing language knowledge, especially if working with a class of multilingual speakers. What this book aims to do is to expose you to a wide range of linguistic phenomena across many languages in order to raise your awareness of what’s possible (and not possible) in the grammar of a language. Along the way, you’re likely to learn a thing or two about specific languages; but the overriding aim is to equip you with a more sophisticated understanding of how language works. In doing this, we will intro- duce the notion of Grammatical Concepts as an important aspect of what we will call a Virtual Grammar. We hope that adopting this understanding of grammar will ensure that you have more confidence when you encounter a student who challenges you, like mine did with English articles. But it will also allow you to think in a different way about how to approach grammatical properties of language in your teaching. As may be clear already, we are linguists with background and some training in teaching. For this reason, our aim is not to make sugges- tions on how you should teach. It is, instead, to provide a better under- standing of what you are teaching. Like all areas of academic study, within the discipline of linguistics there has been great advancement in our understanding of language. Unfortunately, another feature of academia is that development in one area does not always make its way into another area of study. The fields of Linguistics and Education © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-48602-6 — Grammar Tom Rankin , Melinda Whong Excerpt More Information 4 a guide to the linguists’ guide to grammar are two academic areas of study which have developed away from each other in the recent past. We hope to do our small part to address this by exploring the intricacies of grammar through the eyes of the linguist, but with the interests and concerns of the language teacher in mind. We start by presenting a brief overview of the field of linguis- tics in a way that attempts to provide an outline of the complexity of language. 1.1 THE LINGUISTIC TERRAIN Linguistics is a relatively young independent academic discipline, though language itself has been a topic of inquiry since antiquity. There is a level of fragmentation in the field of modern linguistics which is, perhaps, not surprising, given the rich complexity of lan- guage. The starting (and ending) point of this overview of Linguistics is the reminder that linguists are all trying to understand and explain the same thing: Language. Because the object of study is shared, one would think that the conclusions that linguists come to would also be shared. However, the sheer complexity of language means that there are many different ways to approach the study of language, each with a different emphasis and, concurrently, with different omissions.