Emergent Grammar PDF

EMERGENT GRAMMAR Paul Hopper John Jay L. Morido, MA ELL, LPT As explorations in ‘functional grammar’ accumulate in volume and significance, it has become a standard tactic of supporters of sentence syntax to claim that the very study of discourse is an unreasonable agenda so long as any...

EMERGENT GRAMMAR Paul Hopper John Jay L. Morido, MA ELL, LPT As explorations in ‘functional grammar’ accumulate in volume and significance, it has become a standard tactic of supporters of sentence syntax to claim that the very study of discourse is an unreasonable agenda so long as any problems remain outstanding from the study of sentence- level syntax. The woman died in 70,000 BC who invented the wheel. I find a certain irony in such a use of the terms ‘function’ and ‘functionalism’, since the very restriction of the investigation to an artificially defined level of ‘sentences’ seems to me to be quintessentially anti-functionalist. Be that as it may, I am concerned in this paper with the more fundamental problem of the assumptions underlying the critique, especially the assumption of an abstract, mentally represented rule system which is somehow implemented when we speak. Victoria Fromkin, was asked by the editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education to submit a brief state-of-the-art report on linguistics, to be featured in a two-page spread of similar reports by representatives of other disciplines. Here is part of what Fromkin wrote: “In human speech production and comprehension, the speaker-hearer accesses not only the mentally represented language system, but also other cognitive systems and knowledge of the world ( Fromkin, 1985).” But I am concerned more with the basic scenario, the one which provides for a logically prior — perhaps eventually even biologically prior — linguistic system which is simultaneously present for all speakers and hearers, and which is a pre-requisite for the actual use of language. It is, in other words, the scenario that when we speak, we refer to an abstract, mentally represented rule system and that we, in some sense, ‘use’ already available abstract structures and schemata. Emergent Grammar The term ‘emergent’ itself I take from an essay by the cultural anthropologist James Clifford, but I have transferred it from its original context of ‘culture’ to that of ‘grammar’. Clifford remarks that ‘Culture is temporal, emergent, and disputed’ (Clifford 1986). Emergent Grammar Emergent Grammar is a conception of linguistic structure that proposes to bypass the problem of a fixed, pre -discourse adult grammar, with its attendant problems of necessarily 'degenerate' input for both child acquisition and adult maintenance of language, by relocating structure, that is, 'grammar,' from the center to the periphery of linguistic communication. Grammar, in this view, is not the source of understanding and communication but a by-product of it. Grammar is, in other words, epiphenomenal. Emergent Grammar I believe the same is true of grammar , which like speech itself, must be viewed as a real-time, social phenomenon, and therefore is temporal; its structure is always deferred, always in a process but never arriving, and therefore emergent; and since I can only choose a tiny fraction of data to describe, any decision I make about limiting my field of inquiry (for example in regard to the selection of texts, or the privileging of the usage of a particular ethnic, class, age, or gender group) is very likely to be a political decision, to be against someone else's interests, and therefore disputed. Emergent Grammar Grammar is hence not to be understood as a pre -requisite for discourse, a prior possession attributable in identical form to both speaker and hearer. Its forms are not fixed templates but are negotiable in face -to-face interaction in ways that reflect the individual speakers' past experience of these forms, and their assessment of the present context, including especially their interlocutors, whose experiences and assessments may be quite different. Moreover, the term Emergent Grammar points to a grammar which is not abstractly formulated and abstractly represented , but always anchored in the specific concrete form of an utterance. Emergent Grammar It is not intended to be a standard sense of origins or genealogy, not a historical question of ‘how’ the grammar came to be the way it ‘is’, but instead it takes the adjective emergent seriously as a continual movement towards structure, a postponement or ‘deferral’ of structure, a view of structure as always provisional, always negotiable, and in fact as epiphenomenal, that is at least as much an effect as a cause.  Emergent Grammar Considering the example of the English indef inite article a /an, if we consider the history of this form, we find that from Indo-European times a cognate form has meant the simple numeral ‘one’, singularity. This was still a common meaning of án in Old English. It is seen in such examples (from Bosworth and Toller 1898, sub án) as: Emergent Grammar In other words, real live discourse abounds in all sorts of repetitions which have nothing to do with grammar as this is usually understood: for instance, idioms, proverbs, clichés, formulas, specialist phrases, transitions, openings, closures, favored clause types, and so on. There is no consistent level at which these regularities are statable. For example: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. (A bird in the hand is worth more than two in the bush) Better late than never. (It is better to be late than never to show up.) The proof of the pudding is in the eating. (The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it.) If it ain’ t broke, don’ t fix it. (ain’ t and isn’ t)  Grammar There is no question that ‘grammar ’ is an infuriatingly elusive notion, and that it is very easy to have a clear idea about what ‘grammar ’ is in the sense of being able to give an abstract def inition of it, but quite another to apply that def inition consistently in practice. This asymmetry suggests that the notion of grammar is intrinsically unstable and indeterminate, relative to the observer, to those involved in the speech situation, and to the particular set of phenomena being focused upon. It suggests also that we need to question the supposition of a mentally represented set of rules, and to set aside as well the idea in Fromkin's statement which I quoted earlier, that speakers possess an abstract linguistic system ready and waiting to be drawn upon — ‘accessed’! — in case they should ever need to speak. Thank you for listening! Emergent Grammar Paul Hopper