Re: Subject / Object / ?

Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:

> On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 17:34:32 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>
> >It also seems a priori unexpected - why would not one's subconscious grasp
> >of one's native grammar suffice, when it clearly does for speaking? At
> >least I "say" what I'm going to write in my head as I type it, which makes
> >it hard for me to believe the mental processes involved in the production
> >of written and spoken texts are _that_ different.
>
> Spoken language is different from written language.
I believe I implied as much. Question is, different to what degree, and in what
respects. As far as my native Swedish is concerned, there seems to be very
little in the way of _grammatical_ differences - the chief differences are of
style and of higher level structure (eg, multi-clause sentences being more
common in writing).

I certainly do not normally carry out any conscious grammatical analyses when
writing a Swedish text. If having been taught formal grammar helps here, it
must be by sharpening one's subconscious linguistic competence.

> >> If your goal is just to allow all children to write SMS messages on their
> >> mobiles, then you're right that this is unnecessary. I personally think
> >> literacy should be a little higher than that.
> >
> >I would too, but I had never in my life suspected that that sort of
> >conscious grammatical understanding would be necessary or even
> >particularly helpful for achieving it.
>
> I've experienced this. In the gymnasium school (age 15 to 20), we had a
> very tough German teacher, that is, a teacher who teached us much of
> grammar, quite exceptional here in Switzerland (at least by impressionistic
> comparison to Linguistics university students). When we got a written text
> back, it used to be all red because of his corrections, even if it were
> written by the best students. He made us analyze thoroughly our errors,
> syntactical errors, logical errors, stylistical errors, errors of word
> choice, etc. We all hated it, but the awareness of syntactical ambiguities
> proved to be very useful for the better domination of the written language.
>
> I believe that the same effect can be achieved by years of reading practice.
The later might apply to me - in my early school years, my writing (particularly
spelling) was way below par, while by gymnasium age (16-19) it was well above*,
and I read _alot_ in the intervening years.

Anyway, of the types of errors you mention, only syntactical ones would seem
here relevant - at the very least, I'm gonna take plenty of convincing to
believe that teaching formal grammar helps against stylistical or lexical
errors, and I'm highly skeptical on logical ones too. The null hypothesis must
be that they're better fought by teaching the students logic and stylistics,
and expanding their vocabularies.

* If I'm forgiven for a possibly amusing anecdote, I once had a gymnasium essay
downgraded on the grounds it used "too advanced language"; it was to be written
as for inclusion in a youth magazine, and my teacher felt it was too tough for
the typical reader of such. My protests to the effect this was an insult to the
literacy of young people were rejected.

                                                  Andreas