Rule, pattern, and meaning in the second-language teaching of grammar

Abstract

This is a position paper aimed at the interface between meaning-oriented linguistics generally and instructed language learning. The alliance between usage-based linguistics and form-focused instruction in language teaching stands to benefit from advances on both sides: a recognition by theoretical linguists that systematic meanings of grammatical forms are responsible for observed, emerging patterns of usage; and a greater willingness on the part of advocates of the teaching of grammar to engage in focusing upon individual, meaningful grammatical forms, as distinct from unanalyzed, holistic form. Explicit knowledge of forms and their meanings can usefully guide the practice of teachers and, potentially, the performance of learners. Pending the wide availability of practical analyses, teachers' and learners' focused grammatical inquiry on authentic discourse can yield useful insights about both language structure and discourse.

Keywords::

• second-language instruction
• rule
• pattern
• meaning
• emergent grammar
• usage-based linguistics
• functional linguistics

Acknowledgements

The Seminar of the Columbia School Linguistic Society was helpful in commenting upon earlier drafts of this paper. Anonymous readers provided very useful comments and sources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Each of these forms has a different function, independent of signaling time, in other grammatical domains; specifically, each is a form of subjunctive mood. The form signaling non-past is also sometimes used for events happening “right now” (Look! I see a bald eagle!), but that effect is often better achieved with an active participle in the predicate complement position, presumably due to the meanings of those two grammatical forms (the construction traditionally called the progressive tense or aspect: Help! I'm losing my grip!).

² The classic grammatical rule is a “correspondence” between linguistic elements (Crystal 1985, 268) and thus precludes choice. Attempts to have both rule and choice, such as to say that one must know how to choose which rule to use (Larsen-Freeman 2002), are making use of the term rule in a quite different – even orthogonal – way, for example as a label for the relationship between a form and its meaning (Davis 2009).

³ See Contini-Morava (2011) and Reid (2011) for a critique of that view of the nature of syntax, such as is represented by other papers in that volume.

⁴ While it might appear that the UG-type exceptionless formal rule is a straw man, and that the existence of many exceptions is widely recognized in SLA, the situation is actually more dire: a disagreement between two views of the fundamental nature of grammar: one in which the basis consists of formal correspondences that are essentially autonomous of meaning (a rule), with exceptions that are motivated by or explained by meaning, versus one in which grammar is thoroughly meaningful, across the board. The view that one holds – whether consciously or not – will affect not only how one talks about language but how one approaches teaching it (Larsen-Freeman 2003).

⁵ There may be a priori theoretical justifications. In traditional grammar (see Diver, Davis, and Reid 2012, for a critique) or in mid-twentieth-century formal linguistics (e.g., Chomsky 1957, 1965), the construct of rule is part of the machinery of the formally defined sentence, the assumed basic unit of structure. More recent formal linguistics (e.g., Chomsky 1995) rejects the rule as part of linguistic structure, and some other theories (e.g., Columbia School, see Reid 2011) do not assume either sentence or rule as components of structure.

⁶ Huffman (2002) offers a form-meaning hypothesis for the two subject-verb orders in English, one having to do with the relative degree of Focus accorded to the event and its participants in the narrative.

⁷ Junot Díaz, “The Money,” The New Yorker, June 13 and 20, 2011, 76. For this count, the following types of tokens were excluded: pronouns modified by adjectives; predicate adjectives following copula; and numbers, determiners, and certain other words (same, only, next) before the noun. These are effectively invariable in position, though that is probably due to the compatibility of their meanings and the meanings of two orders. The following illustration of the orders NA and AN (our front door unlocked/our unlocked front door) depends only upon observed surface order. One analytical response, the one assumed here, is that the two orders are signals of two opposed grammatical meanings (cf. Huffman 2001, 56); of course a syntactic analysis involving constituency would represent a different response.

⁸ The varying strengths of the patterns may beg to be explained, but that is an analytical task beyond the scope of the point being made here: that rules are just strong patterns.

⁹ 5a and 5b do not represent the only way to express these messages (one could say Five dollar bills were and An amount of five dollars was), but the acceptable, target-like utterances in 5a and 5b make the point about rule and meaning in a more straightforward way than other options would.

¹⁰ The latter would be what Strauss, Lee, and Ahn (2006, 186) term a “fuzzy” rule.

¹¹ The encoded grammatical number meanings contribute to a holistic interpretation of countable dollar bills versus mass dollar amount (it is not that there is a noun dollar that means ‘count’ and a noun dollar that means ‘non-count’).

¹² I use the terms meaning and message in the Columbia School sense: meaning as the encoded semantic content of a grammatical signal, message as the discourse-level inference made or intended by the joint presence of linguistic forms in context. See, e.g., Huffman (1997, 16–19), Davis (2009), Diver (2012a).

¹³ These examples (from The New Yorker, February 11 and 18, 2008, 34) and many others were analyzed in a course I teach on the structure of English.

¹⁴ A random distribution of tokens of disagreement at the rate of one per hundred would create about twice as many errors as opting for uniform agreement, since, in every hundred, the verb thus selected to disagree would almost always be infelicitous, and so would the verb that should have been selected to disagree.

¹⁵ “Long Distance” by Jane Smiley, The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 259, no. 1, January 1987, 69–75. Accessed July 20, 2008, at www.theatlantic.com/issues/87jan/distance.htm.

¹⁶P(at least one error) = 1 − P(no errors) = 1 − P(agreement is always felicitous) = 1 − 0.992⁶¹⁸>0.99 (assuming independence of felicitousness from token to token).

¹⁷ Data from an unpublished study by this writer conducted at the School of Education of the City College of New York 2000.

¹⁸ The paper that is considered the seminal work in Columbia School is Diver (1969).

¹⁹ See Diver, Davis, and Reid (2012) on the three traditional definitions of subject.

²⁰ See Note 17 in Davis (2009) for references to some analyses that explicitly state hypotheses for forms and meanings for other grammatical systems.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Davis

Joseph Davis is a member of the faculty of The City College of New York, where he teaches linguistics in the School of Education. He is a founding member and Vice President of the Columbia School Linguistic Society.