Why history matters
From Babylon to Sweet, Tesnière,
Chomsky and the National
Curriculum
Dick Hudson, Henry Sweet Society, March 2011
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My credentials
• I'm not a historian.
• But I sometimes read other people's history.
– and sometimes remember some of it.
• I've lived through 50 years of intellectual
history.
• I know something about grammar teaching.
• I'm curious.
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Why history matters in general
• Because culture is a product of history.
– just like everything else
• But cultures tend to exclude alternatives
synchronically.
• A diachronic perspective offers:
– alternatives
– explanations
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Culture, the world and education
education
history
past
culture
socialisation
present
minds
experience
the
world
science
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Why history matters in linguistics
• Because linguistics is a culture.
• "The distinctive ideas, customs, social
behaviour, products, or way of life of a
particular society, people, or period"
– OED
• Linguistics is part of academic culture
– and has its own sub-cultures
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Linguistics subcultures
• History reveals the alternatives, e.g.:
• Language is 'out there', part of culture
– or it's in the mind.
• Language is unique
– or it's just ordinary cognition.
• Linguistics is useless
– or it's useful.
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Is linguistics useful?
• In speech pathology?
– yes
• In computer science?
– yes
• In language preservation?
– yes
• In education?
–?
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A brief history of grammar for
education
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Babylon
Greece and Rome
Middle Ages
Grammar schools
Sweet
Tesnière
The Dark Ages
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Babylon, 2000 BC
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Becoming literate in Babylon
• The problem:
– scribes needed to learn their trade
– in two languages:
• Sumerian (dead)
• Akkadian (alive)
• The solution:
– analyse the languages (= earliest linguistics)
– teach the analysis to trainee scribes.
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NB person: 1 – 2 – 3, consistently in that order!!
We – you – they
Sumerian
Akkadian
English
menden
ni:nu
we
menzen
attunu
you
enene
šunu
they
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Greece and Rome
… the text Tékhnē grammatiké (c. 100 BCE,
…), possibly written by Dionysius Thrax, lists
eight parts of speech, and lays out the broad
details of Greek morphology including the case
structures. This text was intended as a pedagogic
guide (as was Panini) …
(Wikipedia)
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The Middle Ages
• Grammar was driven by the need to teach
Latin as L2.
– e.g. 'insular' (Britain) grammars (7-9c)
– invented parsing (9c – Luhtala 1994)
• Grammar was the first of 7 Liberal Arts
• Oxford and Cambridge offered a Master of
Grammar degree for teachers at …
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Grammar schools
• for teaching languages …
– mainly Latin
• … and the Trivium:
– Grammar
– Logic
– Rhetoric
• 'a school in which the learned languages are
grammatically taught'
– Samuel Johnson, 1755
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Sweet 1891
Practical teachers, who generally confine
themselves to one book and one method, are
often hardly able to realize how unsettled
grammar still is. I remember once reading a
paper on grammar before the Philological
Society, in which I modestly advanced the
view that cannon in cannon-ball was not an
adjective. When I had finished my paper, an
English philologist, who was also a teacher
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Sweet continued
• got up, and told me that my criticisms were
superfluous, as no practical teacher possessed of
common sense would think of calling cannon in
cannon-ball an adjective. Thereupon another
eminent philologist, who was not only a
schoolmaster, but had written an English grammar,
got up, and, to the intense amusement of the
meeting, maintained that cannon in cannon-ball
was an adjective and nothing else ....
– (New English Grammar, v)
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Sweet again
• "until our whole system of teaching [the
history of English, starting with OE] has
been radically reformed, the Extension
movement cannot be put on that definite
footing which every true friend of education
wishes it to assume."
(NEG, x)
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And again
• "one of the most direct practical uses of
English grammar is that it serves as a
preparation for the study of foreign
languages" (NEG xi)
• The Practical Study of Languages (1899)
– about language teaching.
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Meanwhile, in our schools …
Nesfield, 1898
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and in the USA
Reed and Kellogg, 1877
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still in 2011
1aiway.com/nlp4net/services/enparser/
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Verdicts on sentence diagramming
• Gertrude Stein:
– "I really do not know that anything has ever
been more exciting than diagramming
sentences."
• Google:
– "I hate sentence diagramming"
• 239 examples
– "I love sentence diagramming"
• 1180 examples
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Tesnière
• Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959)
– to simplify grammar for didactic purposes.
• Criticised traditional grammar
• Formalised dependency grammar
– But very similar ideas existed in 19c Germany
• Introduced a new diagramming system
– Did he know about Reed and Kellogg?
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Stemmas
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So what?
In the Good Old Days,
• schools took syntax seriously
• some linguists tried to help
• some schools accepted the help
• some schools did their own thing
• but schools really needed expert help.
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The Dark Ages in the UK
1900-1990
• Grammar research died after Sweet
• Grammar teaching deteriorated and died in
English:
– removed from O-level c 1965
• 'Grammar-translation' replaced in foreign
languages by 'Communicative' approaches
– GCSE is grammar-free
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Linguistics since the Dark Ages
• Linguistics lost contact with schools
– schools didn't want historical linguistics
• but still taught 19c grammatical analysis
– linguists lost interest in schools
• But 1960s: Quirk and Halliday saw the need
for linguistics in schools
– influenced schools and educationalists
– but (in general) not linguists
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Chomsky 1991
• "You're a human being, and your time as a
human being should be socially useful. It
doesn't mean that your choices about
helping other people have to be within the
context of your professional training as a
linguist. Maybe that training just doesn't
help you to be useful to other people. In
fact, it doesn't."
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The Rebirth of school grammar?
• Governments asked how to teach about
language in English teaching.
–
–
–
–
1921: Newbolt Report
1975: Bullock Report
1988: Kingman Report
1989: Cox Report
• 1990: the National Curriculum
– for English (revised 1995, 1999, 2007, 2011)
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English (writing, KS3)
Language structure and variation
The study of English should include …:
a. the principles of sentence grammar and wholetext cohesion, and the use of this knowledge in
pupils’ writing
b. variations in written standard English and how
it differs from standard and non-standard spoken
language …
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What is sentence grammar?
The principles of sentence grammar and whole-text
cohesion:
These should include:
• word classes and their grammatical functions
• the structure of phrases and clauses and how they can be
combined to make complex sentences (eg through
coordination and subordination) …
• the use of appropriate grammatical terminology to reflect
on the meaning and clarity of individual sentences.
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Foreign languages
Learning languages gives pupils opportunities to
develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing
skills and to express themselves with increasing
confidence, independence and creativity. They explore
the similarities and differences between other
languages and English and learn how language can be
manipulated and applied in different ways. The
development of communication skills, together with
understanding of the structure of language, lay the
foundations for future study of other languages and
support the development of literacy skills in a pupil’s
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own language.
BUT
• How can teachers teach grammatical
analysis if they were never taught it?
• Result: school leavers know less
grammatical terminology now than in 1986.
• For instance, …
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A new BA French student, 2009
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Three failures of history
• Governments failed to see the effects of
grammar-free schooling on teachers.
• School teachers failed to see the need for
grammar (and linguistics).
• Linguists failed to notice schools:
– in their teaching.
– in their research.
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Towards a happy ending?
• The Linguistics Olympiad
– 2009: 600 pupils, aged 12-19
– 2010: 1200 pupils
• Easy: 10 Abma sentences with translation
– translate new examples both ways
• Harder: 10 Tangkhul, 10 unordered
translations
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Responses
• From schools: great enthusiasm
– 80 schools
– including ambitious independent schools
• From linguistics: great enthusiasm
– 20 volunteer markers
– £1K per year from LAGB, BAAL and PhilSoc
• Maybe this is a bridge, at last?
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So what?
• Education needs linguistics.
– for analyses, ideas, descriptions
• Linguistics needs education.
– for dissemination, i.e. IMPACT
– for future students (and researchers)
• History tells us that the 20c split is
abnormal.
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A future linguistics
• Bigger (compare maths).
• Teaching relevant to school teachers.
• Research relevant to education, e.g.
–
–
–
–
school-age language development
relations between speech and writing
effects of teaching on language development
methods for teaching grammar
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Thank you
• These slides can be downloaded from:
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/talks.htm
• More on the Olympiad:
www.uklo.org
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