Descartes, eager to define humans as entities distinct from the natural world, contended that language does not result from “natural movements which betray passions and may be imitated by machines as well as manifested by animals” (Chomsky). Crying, while a communicative act, does not constitute language; it merely denotes a response to stimuli. The phrase “I am sad,” by contrast, rises to the language level because it represents abstract self-awareness on a creative plane unaffected by stimuli. Much of Descartes’ comments, which tie inevitably to his philosophical writings, stem from the assumption that human thought—and by extension, human status—deserves commendation as something uniquely praiseworthy: “I think therefore I am!” Concerned with proving that animals and machines can’t be people, he left unexamined the complex relationship between language and ideology. The legacy of 20th Century linguistics encourages a view of language as a fascinating field in its own right and not merely a symptom of intelligence. (Moreover, insofar as scientists now apply the “language” label to behaviors across the animal kingdom, we might wonder if Descartes’ views amount to a form of species-ism.) I offer here an overview of three philosophies of grammar that derive from this legacy and comment briefly on their relevance to writing instruction.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure promoted a view of language which had significant consequences, by the 1960s and 1970s, to philosophy and creative arts. In brief, Saussure’s view held that language, and in turn thought, stemmed from a type of disruption, or as later philosophers termed it, “difference.” Saussure’s view emerged in contrast to the traditional quest through the 19th Century, by which scholars, seeking universal vocal sounds related to the real world, hoped to arrive at a fundamental description of language. Saussure argued that scholars pursued the quest in vain, for human language offers only one constant: the interplay of consonants and vowels. Extrapolating further, Saussure argued that without such interplay—and not just between vowels and consonants, but between all sounds recognized by the mind as phonemes (in their simplest form, the letters of the alphabet)—language would cease to function. We recognize the sound denoted by “R,” for example, not by R’s innate qualities, but by its contrast to “S” and “Q” and other basic sounds. This description represents an auditory parallel to the way we think about the world on an ideological level. We know “sky” not because of its singular presence, but because of its boundary with earth and sea. According to Saussure, our language structure, as well as our conceptual view of the world, thus depends fundamentally on the difference between entities.
People who remember grade school English class as a series of grammar drills meant to identify parts of speech or diagram a sentence participated in a style of instruction influenced by Saussure. The concept that we can break a sentence into articles, nouns, verbs, prepositions, and adjectives implies that we can recognize the difference between such units and also that we know the syntactic instances in which one unit (and not another) may occur. No matter how complex the sentence, we can reduce it to fundamental units. This premise, a structuralist notion, provides the origin for the grammar known as “case-slot.” To adherents of this school, Thomas Paine’s famous sentence These are the times that try men’s souls breaks down into syntactic slots (subject, verb, object, dependent clause) and the cases to fill those slots.
Dedicated to the idea that the building blocks of language fit into certain structures but not others, case-slot grammar gives English teachers unafraid of appearing dour, prim, and snobbish a chance to enforce “The Queen’s English” via prescriptive rules. Apostrophe ‘S, as a basic unit, cannot precede the noun for which it bestows the quality of possession. . . the object of a preposition can’t be the subject of a sentence. . .etc.
The “whole language” fad which took hold in the 1990’s, along with Humanities professors’ unquestioned fascination for Derrida and Postmodernism, drove a wrecking-ball into structuralist notions like case-slot. In his landmark essay Structure, Sign and Play . . ., Derrida argued that because we have no adequate definition or intrinsic awareness of difference—we can only define it by recourse to itself or perceive it in the presence of other things—a paradox arises. Basing knowledge upon something intrinsically unknowable destabilizes both language and knowledge. How can words have meaning—or at least an “official” structured meaning—when at the center of the meaning game lies an entity not clearly defined? Humanities departments throughout academia still resonate with the implications of this “postmodern condition.”
During the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of Cold War politics that brought tremendous funding to the sciences, another philosophy of grammar, transformational/generative linguistics, emerged as the darling theory among American linguists, largely through the work of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s name echoes with guru status not only in linguistics but also political science and social commentary, and much as Chomsky branched into other fields, so did generative linguistics spread out of the academic community into applications such as artificial intelligence. Perhaps the appeal of generative grammar lies in its somewhat “scientific” quality: based on observations, it seeks to predict language phenomena. Further, it offers a convenient explanation for the way children acquire language. Noting that children move rapidly from speaking single words to speaking entire sentences, Chomsky and his adherents speculated that a pattern, a set of templates, resides within the human mind. According to Chomsky, we learn language not by imitating, but by matching the patterns we hear to the master template in our minds.
Language, to the generative linguist, refers to a pattern organized by a set of formulas. The formulas derive from a master template, and the words we speak and the sentences we write comprise transformations of the template, a surface reflecting a “deep structure” underneath. Thomas Paine’s famous sentence reflects a transformation of two deep structure statements: Certain times try men’s souls + These are the times. The surface sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls” adheres to a formula allowing the combination of two sentences into one through the generation of a relative clause. Sentence-combining exercises, for years a regular activity in grade school English classes, trace their origin to transformational grammar.
While Generative linguistics does much to explain the process of language acquisition, the concept of an internal template ignores the influential effect that culture, environment, and belief have upon actual language use. Critics of the generative model often argue that language is only partly internal. More accurately, such critics contend, language and culture describe a circle of influence upon each other: born into culture, we depend upon cultural values for our perception of meaning. The cultural influence upon language, known as ideology, serves as the launching point for the third major approach to language: functional grammar.
Largely developed through the work of linguist Michael Halliday, functional grammar proceeds from the premise that any description of language must include a description of context, the surroundings in which language has meaning. Further, functional grammar assumes that at all times users of language have choice, in the words they use, in the sentence structures they select, etc. As such, language amounts to a form of behavior. Intriguingly, functional grammar asserts that meaning (thought) fundamentally links to language. We do not wrap thoughts in language—rather, what we think IS our language. Medium and message comprise flipsides of the same communicative act.
In this view, Thomas Paine’s famous sentence “These are the times that try men’s souls” operates on three levels of meaning: ideation (i.e. what the speaker depicts as action), theme (i.e. what the speaker makes the sentence about), and interpersonal (i.e. how the speaker links the sentence to an ongoing conversation with a larger community). The main verb, “are,” suggests a state of identification equating one concept with another. Conceivably, Thomas Paine could have said “These times agitate us,” choosing a verb of process rather than static existence. A similar choice underlies what the sentence asserts thematically. The pronoun “these,” referring to “times,” emphasizes circumstances rather than humans. Further, the circumstances do the action—stylistically, Thomas Paine communicates that humans are the victims of an environment outside their control.
Functional grammar offers a rich resource for writing instructors. For one, it suggests that all aspects of communication, from the sciences to the humanities, derive from ideology. Further, leading students to question ideology encourages critical thinking. Asking students to compare phrases like “Fire fighter” and “freedom fighter”—structurally similar expressions with divergent interpretations—helps show that we do, in fact, speak ideologically. How do we know that one “fighter” fights against fire while the other fights for freedom? Culture tells us, imbuing “freedom” with such a positive connotation that we automatically assume the “freedom fighter” must strive to promote it. Similarly, if we can say “it’s raining” to indicate a sky filled with water drops, can we say “it’s winging” to indicate a sky filled with birds? The fact that English speakers recognize the sense of the former but not the latter reflects cultural biases that refuse to accept birds as a weather phenomenon.
Much to the detriment of creative writing majors, very few creative writing courses at the undergraduate level incorporate a formal study of linguistics into their curriculum. Consequently, colleges across the nation each year graduate thousands of aspiring writers who possess only a rudimentary awareness of the meaning game. Some of them may boast portfolios of entertaining short stories polished through the classic workshop approach long regarded as a staple of the writing classroom, but very few have sufficient fluency in discourse theory to understand how a text makes meaning. To raise a point that some may regard as trivial but I consider highly pertinent, how many creative writing students understand speech act theory? Writing teachers obsess over authentic dialogue, and assign texts that model characters speaking authentically, yet very few of these teachers (and even fewer students) know about Grice’s Maxims, a famous tool for the linguistic study of conversation (and the perception of text as a conversational act).
An ideologically informed approach to writing instruction would emphasize the HOW of a text as much as the what. . .in other words, it looks at the medium as much as the message. Linguistics offers a valuable toolkit for developing a more robust awareness of text. In my view, the “functional grammar” of Halliday holds the most potential, but any formal linguistic represents an improvement over current practice. Unless undergraduate creative writing programs place a greater emphasis on linguistics in their curriculum, they will continue to graduate writers who fixate on message without a full grasp of the medium.
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