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Articles Conference Reviews |
Session I4The New Wave of Grammars: Functional, Cognitive, Rhetorical. The Grammar/Genre Connection. The 2009 CCCC convened in the San Francisco Hilton under the guiding metaphorical auspice of “Making Waves,” a unifying metaphor that proved too tempting a titular support for a great number of its panels. So it was that by Friday – the third day of the convention – I was almost phobic at the proposition of entering another room with a wave-washed title. But Craig Hancock, panel chair for “The New Wave of Grammars,” quickly allayed these fears, empathetically conceding that he too had grown a bit weary of the oft-forced metaphor, but maintaining that the metaphor was nonetheless profoundly applicable to the movements being made in current grammar. Thus the panel began. The panelists, matched relevantly yet eclectically under the ûber-term “grammar,” were presented in this order:
The issues covered by this trio are important in today’s academic environment, since the fluidity with which they approach grammar encourages a definite change in tide from popular conceptions of grammar as a clinical follow-and-swallow practice; these panelists are pushing to bring kinetic, organic life back to grammar instruction. Hancock began by championing corpus grammar as the theoretical framework through which genres of grammar and vocabulary (as a unified corpus) ought to be taught. Pointing to Systemic Functional/Cognitive Grammar, he reminded all present that the standards of grammar and vocabulary are broad and shifting, and that the mind loves creativity and the novel treatment of grammatical forms where meanings are woven into texts and interwoven into interactional contexts. Grammar and vocabulary are the representations of thought, so they evolve as the concepts themselves develop. “A sentence is not a complete thought,” Hancock reminded us. As we mentor students toward more refined understandings of grammar and vocabulary, we should always be playing with the boundaries of the sentence and “grounding” grammar with links to real discourse. He explained his fondness for taking truisms like “You should be grateful to your parents or everything they have done for you,” and developing/specifying the meaning in such statements. In life, parental gratitude is not an unqualified universal; it is a pliable concept dependent on the actions, motives, and context that constitute the parenting. So too a sentence in the real world is not merely an isolated linguistic structure, but a tool for expressing a concept, a sensation, a vision greater than itself. If language is to live, it should be taught with that vivacity in mind. In this same spirit, Noguchi focuses on written language as representation; the visual ties between form and meaning. For students raised in a visually-oriented world, and in turn confounded by school conventions like double-spacing which marginalize the visual coherence of academic compositions, such an approach could valuably aid their perception of grammar and make writing a much more approachable endeavor. Noguchi first addressed the concept of iconicity: that idea that written language temporally sequences and spatially positions its references (e.g. a video game would hotlink the word now in the sentence “Start your game NOW”). Next Noguchi addressed the Given/New (G+N) Principle: that known information should be placed before novel information. Noguchi noted that in our left-to-right sequenced English writing G+N becomes an icon of temporality for this given-plus-new structure. Finally, Noguchi introduced the Form Consistency Principle: that in general one should give similar form to items that are similar in meaning - this extending from the basics of syntactic parallelism (e.g. “I’ve got no corn, no oven, and no bread.”); to tonal elements like forms (i.e. contractions, active voice) and word choices (jargon, colloquialisms). To begin bringing issues of iconicity to the surface, Noguchi suggested classroom activities such as discussing the difference between a typed and a hand-written sympathy note. His central conceit is simple but important: “In writing, form matters.” Rosen-Knill makes a similar point, posturing herself in a qualifying dialog with the Nancy Sommers’ espousal of global revision, which can lead, problematically, to a marginalization of the aforementioned formal details. Through a series of sample paragraphs from student science writing, she made her point clearly and concretely: subtle sentence-level changes can make a great difference to the general meaning of a composition. She began by tracing the build-up of a paragraph’s information from New to Given-New to Given-New-End Focus. Then she offered several ways in which these later sentences could be re-arranged (maintaining the same global content) to alter one’s perception of which information was centrally important, and which was background. “All of these particles existed together for a few instants after the Big Bang” can become “After the big bang, all of these particles existed together for a few instants” without adding or omitting a word. Her presentation was an important reminder of the potential for great changes in meaning that come from small changes in form. These panelists all seem to concur in that grammar, like the tides, is meant to flex and conform to the content it roles across and the minds it flows into. Grammar must be taught in a way that acknowledges the particular vocabulary of which each idea is composed; must present grammatical principles in a way that modern iconographic minds can absorb readily, must remember the great rhetorical influence of minor linguistic details as it encourages holistic perceptions of composition. The panel framed grammar as a balance between global and local, space and time, fixity and flux. And I can still hear the tides moving. |