Упоминавшаяся статья про Хомского (на англ. яз.)
Вот вся статья полностью
http <http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041215-085728-5559r.htm>
://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20041215-085728-5559r.htm
Why the bad grammar? By Veda Charrow
Have you ever wondered why so many reporters don't know that "criterion" is
singular and "criteria" is plural? How many times have you read something
like this in a magazine: "The student who brings a knife to school to peel
their orange may be expelled"? How many times have you heard a newscaster
saying, "The new phone bill is different than your previous bills"? Or
hypercorrections like "The judge admonished the driver whom everyone knew
had struck the cat"? In short, have you ever wondered why so many people who
should know better make grammatical errors? Earlier in the 20th century,
professional writers and educated speakers could be expected to make few, if
any, grammatical errors. Newspapers and magazines were edited not only for
content and length, but for grammatical correctness. This is no longer the
case. Newspapers, magazines, newscasts and, of course, the Internet are rife
with errors like the ones above.
I have no doubt that the reason for this profusion of grammatical errors is
that most American elementary and high school students aren't taught English
grammar anymore. And I'm afraid that my own discipline, linguistics, may be
largely to blame.
Linguistics is a social science whose goals, among others, are to describe
languages and dialects, to show how various languages are related, to
explain how children acquire their native language, to discover how language
is understood and to demonstrate how different forms of a language are used
in different situations.
Linguists are trained not to make value judgments. Thus, if asked whether a
non-standard variety of English is worse than standard English, we would
unhesitatingly say "No." As a result of linguists' refusal to be
prescriptive, non-standard usages have crept into areas where they would not
have been allowed 30 years ago, and have become accepted. The effect has
been to lower the bar for students and their teachers.
But even more damage to the teaching of grammar was wrought by the
misuse of a linguistic theory called transformational-generative grammar,
which was developed by Noam Chomsky.
Mr. Chomsky, better-known today for his anti-Israel and anti-Iraq war
stances, originally made his name as the father of
transformational-generative grammar, or T-G. In the '60s, Mr. Chomsky, a
prominent MIT linguistics professor, proposed a theory of grammar that could
easily explain the different meanings of an ambiguous sentence such as
"Visiting relatives can be boring." Traditional grammars would have some
trouble providing different grammatical explanations (and sentence diagrams)
for the meaning "Relatives who are visiting can be boring" vss. "When one
visits relatives, it can be boring." But Mr. Chomsky's method could
elegantly explain the "deep structure" of such sentences - the underlying
conceptual relationships among actors, actions and objects. His method of
diagramming sentences became standard in linguistics.
Transformational-generative grammar was the beginning of the end of the
teaching of grammar in the schools. Since it was the up-and-coming thing,
and since Mr. Chomsky had great charisma, T-G spread to other fields in the
humanities, and particularly to university and college education
departments.
Attempts were made to incorporate T-G into elementary and high school
curricula. But educators and writers of school textbooks had missed the
point that T-G was a theory of grammar, and not a pedagogical tool. Using
T-G to teach elementary school students grammar was like using the General
Theory of Relativity to teach school children about gravity.
Teachers did not understand T-G, or found it too complicated for their
students, and were unable to teach it. Students viewed it as another
incomprehensible subject like "new math." Fortunately, in the 1960s and '70s
most teachers knew the English grammar that they had been taught, and so
could help their students learn at least some grammar. Within a number of
years, however, grammar ceased to be taught as a separate subject, and was
just sprinkled through basal readers. Somewhat later, even fewer grammar
rules were to be found in school textbooks. But, went the thinking, why
should American children have to be formally taught their own language?
Twenty years later, the elementary school students who had not formally
learned English grammar were now teaching English. They had never been
exposed to the traditional grammar books of the 1940s and '50s, so they
could not explain even rudimentary grammatical forms. (What is a dangling
modifier? What is the difference between a clause and a phrase?) The
grammatical "herd immunity" conferred on teachers in the '60s and '70s by
their own exposure to traditional grammar had worn off, and there was no one
to teach grammar to our children - who have become today's reporters,
journalists, writers and newscasters.
It's time again to formally teach traditional grammar in the schools.
(And, yes, I know I split an infinitive, but English doesn't have true
infinitives, so it's OK.)
Veda Charrow, the principal investigator on numerous federally funded
linguistic and psycholinguistic studies, is the author of a leading
textbook. She is currently employed by the federal government. The views
expressed in this article are her own and do not represent the views or
positions of any federal agency
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