Re: Subject / Object / ?

Quoting Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>:

> En réponse à Andreas Johansson :
>
>
> >* This is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely curious as to why you
> >apparently see a need for primary schools to teach kids how to analyze
> >sentences in their native language.
>
> Because that's the only way to make them able to reliably and consistently
> build and understand complex sentences in their own language. I remember
> reading the results of a survey that proved that illiteracy was caused in
> part by a lack of teaching the basic analytic tools necessary to analyse
> sentences in one's native tongue. It was in dead tree form, so I don't have
> a link to it (nor do I have it here). Note that I'm referring to illiteracy
> here (the inability to understand texts of medium to high complexity), not
> analphabetism, which has other causes.
I must say this much surprises me. Particularly since I know plenty of people
who could not grammatically dissect the simplest sentence (altho they likely
could for a while during their school years), yet can read and write texts of
highish complexity perfectly well.

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.

> 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.

> >** Granted, both make a nom-obl distinction in pronoun, but it's practically
> >identical in the two languages, and so represents no problem.
>
> I was lucky to know how all those concepts when I started learning English.
> The structure of the English sentence is different enough from the
> structure of the French sentence that being able to fall back on a
> structured system of analysis helped me learning much faster.
I'm told that having an abstract understanding of grammar is helpful from about
puberty and on, but before that children learn better if they're, so to speak,
thrown into it without preparation and forced to swim.

What, if any, observational data underlies this, I do not know. I've heard it
from a variety of sources, incl some of my language teachers over the years.

> Even with
> languages I learned later, it helped: for instance, I am better at writing
> Dutch than my friend, who is a native Dutchman. I make more spelling
> mistakes than him and my vocabulary is limited (and I constantly confuse
> genders), but my sentences are usually better built than his, and when it
> comes to grammatical rules I'm much better at expressing them than he is,
> and thus much better at *using* them.
Well, looking at just two people does not make for particularly convincing
statistics. I was taught English with the help of very little in the way of
grammatical analysis, yet it's fairly easy to find natives whose written
English is much worse than mine. I'd be tempted to suspect that your success
owes at least as much to greater interest in, and perhaps greater native talent
for, sentence structuring and grammatical rules.

FWIW, IME, I'm often better at _stating_ the rules of a language than a native
while being worse at _applying_ them.

> But learning foreign languages isn't the main reason for learning simple
> grammatical concepts, as all those things I've been describing apply to
> your native language as well, especially in a literate civilisation like
> ours.
So it may be, but this far I have very little reason to believe it to be the
case, beyond your assertion that it is. It contradicts both what my intuition
tells me and the assumptions implicit behind most of my language education, so
I hope you will forgive me a certain skepticism.

If anyone has a link to an online article dealing with the matter, I'd be
interested.

                                                       Andreas

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