Descent into the advice literature
grano
In this week's mail: two observations from Stanford student Tommy Grano
on the perils of the advice literature on grammar, style, and usage:
one illustrating Do As I Say, Not As I Do, and one illustrating the Ad
Hoc Instruction. Both illustrate the unfortunate consequences of
approaching matters of usage through (largely unarticulated) "theory",
rather than by observing the practice of the relevant speakers and
writers.
First, on the question of using
while
as a logical connective ('(al)though') rather than as a temporal
connective ('during'), Grano writes:
I... had an unpleasant run-in with the
advice literature a few days ago while looking for a GRE prep book.
While one of them advised against using "while" as a logical
connective, I promptly found two such usages in the introduction to the
same book. Now how can I trust the book in other areas that I'm not as
savvy about??
An excellent question. Do As I Say, Not As I Do is regrettably
prevalent, in the advice literature on language as in parental advice
to the young. People who tell you to replace every occurrence of
restrictive
which by
that use restrictive
which in their own advice
manuals. People who tell you that possessives can't be
antecedents for pronouns use possessives this way in
THEIR
manuals. People who tell you not to strand prepositions strand
them all over the place; I mean, nobody says or writes things like
Of what could you have been thinking when
you wrote that? And on and on.
We're dealing with self-delusion here. The advisers have an
explicitly formulated "rule", which they subscribe to so thoroughly
that they believe they follow it themselves; in my experience, they
also believe that they notice all violations of the rule (though a fair
number pass by unremarked). But in fact, when they're not
consciously monitoring language, they mostly produce and process it
without reference to the rule.
Why should they think they do adhere to the rule? Usually because
they believe that there is a "theoretical" basis for the rule. In
the case of logical
while
(and its sibling, logical
since),
there are two supporting assumptions: that any potential for ambiguity
should be avoided, and that words should be used in their historically
"original" meanings. Now, neither of these hypotheses bears close
examination, in general or in the specific case of logical
while, but they are remarkably
difficult to dislodge, because a great many people believe that this is
the way language
OUGHT to be.
On to Grano's second tale from the world of the advice manuals:
Then there was one usage book saying
that in order to determine the grammaticality of a sentence, sometimes
you have to add words (e.g., he's as tall as me --> *he's as tall as
me am), and sometimes you have to subtract words (e.g., me and Sandy
went to the store --> *me went to the store). I found that
amusing...either add or subtract words, depending on which action will
result in whatever judgment the book was going after.
Taken at face value, these instructions do seem entirely ad hoc.
Expand here, trim there. Certainly, students must find this
advice baffling.
But there are justifications, rarely articulated with care, that lie
behind the instructions -- that there's a class of words in English
(one of which is
as) that
occur in combination with a NP only by ellipsis from a full finite
clause (with the elliptical version maintaining the formal features of
the full version), and that when NPs are coordinated, each must be
separately licensed in the context for the whole coordination.
Indeed, these justifications are widely assumed to be, in some sense,
universal, because they are taken to be logical necessities; this is
the way language
HAS to be. Once again, the
"theoretical" justifications don't bear close examination, but they are
remarkably difficult to dislodge, because they seem almost self-evident
to many people.
As a piece of practical advice, what I say to students preparing for
these exams is that they should get as many questions as they can from
actual exams (with answers) and study them to see what points of
grammar, style, and usage are in fact being tested. Their task is
to psych out the exam; the details of real (formal standard written)
English aren't exactly irrelevant, but when the crunch comes these
details might have to be set aside in favor of learning arbitrary
stipulations. It doesn't please me to be giving such advice; I'm
appalled at the way "grammar" is taught and tested. But to urge
students to revolt at exam time would only be to disadvantage
them. They are not the part of the system that needs changing.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 17, 2005 01:45 PM