Re: Subject / Object / ?

From:    "Ph. D." <phild@...>
> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> > Rodlox wrote:
> > > what is the difference between Subjects, Objects, and
> > > something that might be confused with them?
> >
> > Is Rodlox American? Is the education system where he
> > lives so bad?
I'll try to ignore this rather gratuitous comment.  As far as
the logic of this complaint is concerned, those of us on the
list who are actual professional linguists might as well say
the same thing of many of the rest who can't tell their EPP
from their ECM, and again from their OCP -- but we generally
don't, because we realize that that's not the point of the Conlang
list, and that there are other things in the world besides linguistics
which are interesting and worth investing time in, too.

> [...]
> > This is nothing against Rodlox. He isn't responsible if he
> > wasn't given that information before. But I shudder at the
> > kind of education that leaves such simple (and necessary
> > if you want to be able to even begin analysing a sentence)
> > notions out.
>
> In the United States, the education establishment in the
> public schools (i.e. primary and secondary schools) considers
> it old-fashioned to teach grammatical concepts such as
> subject and object and how to analyse a sentence.
This American is only 25, a rather recent product
of its public education system, and the teaching of basic
grammatical principles was still firmly in place during
my whole primary and secondary education.  I realize this
is not the case in all places, but this just goes to show
that one cannot generalize easily about an "American"
education system. Public education in the US is profoundly
decentralized: the existence of a fad in one school
district in a city may find the contrary tendency in
an immediately neighboring school-district in the same
city.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637