This course introduces innovative approaches to learning and teaching, with a focus on the use of e-learning and social web technologies.
10.2 Traditional Grammar and Its Impossibilities
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Из курса от партнера University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Multimodal Literacies: Communication and Learning in the Era of Digital Media
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Module 2: Making Meaning by Reading + Making Meaning by Writing + Making Visual Meaning
This module begins with an overview of the conventional focus of literacy pedagogy – reading and writing. In its second half, the module applies a parallel set of tools to analysis of visual meanings.
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Dr William CopeProfessor
Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, College of Education
Dr Mary KalantzisProfessor
College of Education
From the point of view of our design process for speaking and writing,
we regard writing as a specific kind of mental effort.
It's a different way of thinking about meaning making from speaking.
In speaking, we tend to do it together.
Generally in the same time.
It is linear.
It is repetitive and redundant.
We make errors and we correct them as we go along.
It generally comes in clusters of clauses, and
quite often has gesture also associated with it.
>> How do we describe writing?
What I'm going to do is go through three types of grammars,
which are traditional and well known.
And then a fourth grammar, which is our own reconstruction of a multimodal
grammar, a new grammar that we call a grammar of multiliteracies.
But let me talk about four famous, well known systems of grammar at first.
The first grammar I'm going to talk about is traditional grammar.
And that's what most conventionally we've learned in schools.
At school, I did Latin because in those days it was a good idea to do Latin.
And the way to describe the structure of Latin was around these
ideas of traditional grammar, and in fact I think I learned more traditional grammar
by learning Latin at school than I did learning it in English.
But in both places, traditional grammar was taught.
Now I'm going to describe what's in traditional grammar, and
then I'm going to say how traditional grammar is kind of impossible as well.
So let me just start with the conventional description of the elements of
traditional grammar.
So in traditional grammar,
at the most basic level we have tiny units of meaning called a morpheme.
So let's say the word impossible, right?
I've got possible, which is a stem, and im, which is a prefix.
So these two ideas of im meaning not, possible meaning possibility.
These two things come together and
each of those units is a morpheme, it's a unit of meaning.
We can also have suffix.
Like jump is a stem, jumped, ed on the end,
adds something, an element of meaning to the stem.
And the element of meaning is that it turns it into the past tense.
So in other words, we have these distinct elements which are parts of words.
In other words, the basic meaning units in a language
like English are not words, they're actually morphemes, okay?
What we can also do is we can then modify words by number,
we put an s on the end of cats, right?
So we can number verbs by tense.
The past tense, future tense.
In fact, there's all kinds of tenses in English.
English has present, present continuous, perfect, past, pluperfect,
there are all these crazy technical words,
a lot of which have now been forgotten to describe different types of tense.
For example, perfect tense is, I have walked.
Pluperfect is, I had walked.
I have walked is, might be something you're still continuing to do,
past continuous.
Whereas pluperfect is something that's completed.
I had, yesterday, finished walking before something happened.
So these are, there's all these different tenses.
We also have different moods.
For example, the indicative mood, which is I am doing something, or
the subjunctive mood which is conditional.
I would, I may do something.
And we also have different voices, which is active voice and passive voice.
Active voice is, I hit such and such,
and then passive voice is such and such, so and so was hit by me, kind of thing.
So in other words, that's active and passive.
So what we have is we have these elemental ways in which we take
a basic semantic stem and we add all these layers of meanings to them.
That's the world of morphemes.
Then what we have is what we're very concerned about in traditional grammar,
is parts of speech.
We have nouns, which is naming things, proper nouns, common nouns,
we have pronouns which stand for that like he, she, it.
We have adjectives which describe nouns, we have verbs which are action words,
we have adverbs which qualify action words, we have prepositions.
We have conjunctions like and and but, which join things up.
So, we name all these part of speech.
So it seems straight forward, in fact there are lot of terms to describe all
these things, and I'm just giving a very schematic view of those things.
But we're going to say in the second, look, it gets even more complicated to
the point where it gets almost impossible, we'll get to that in the moment.
But I'm going to go a little bit above parts of speech.
I'm going to be talking about syntax, so
in syntax which is how we connect words into grammatical structures.
We have phrases which don't have a verb.
We have clauses which do have a verb.
We have sentences which are independent clauses.
And also what we do syntactically is we have agreement across the whole sentence.
We have agreement around tense and around number and around, so the sentence
actually holds together around words agreeing with each other in form.
Okay, so that's a quick tour of traditional grammar.
So, firstly what's missing?
Well what's often missing from traditional grammar is you don't get much beyond
sentences, right?
So, and in fact, one of the things that applied linguists
have become very concerned about is the meanings of text are in the whole text.
So the difference between a narrative and
a report is not something traditional grammar captures or is even interested in.
So it has this very narrow view of doing things correctly within sentences and
doesn't really have a good view of the whole of text and
how whole of text works to make to make meaning.
But even at the level at which it operates, traditional grammar or
language is incredibly complicated and starts to defy even traditional grammar.
>> Writing, on the other hand, happens generally at a distance.
It's created in a specific space.
It's structured in a hierarchical way with sentences and paragraphs.
It's concise, or at least that's one of its affordances.
Errors are usually edited out of the finished text.
It's multilinear.
And it can be aligned with images.
>> I'm going to talk about just a few of the complications that make traditional
grammar really, really problematic and really, really hard.
Firstly, we have a whole series of what I would call transpositions going on.
So in other words, you might take a work like quick, which is an adjective, and
a word like quickly, which is an adverb, but
in fact in any one sentence like, I was walking quickly down the street,
my walk was quick, that's not terribly well expressed, I know.
I'm actually saying the same thing but using an adjective and an adverb.
And what we can do is we can transpose adjectives into adverbs,
nouns into verbs and actually a classic move to make your writing
seem more highfalutin and more scientific or
more academic is, find a verb, and turn it into a noun.
It's a process called normalization.
So other words all these words which appear in these different
grammatical places in a sentence, they can all be swapped around.
You can transpose one thing for another.
And it produces meaning shifts, which are interesting, but also at the same time,
sort of saying the same kind of thing.
It's a kind of a subtle shift that's going on.
Another area where there's incredible complication is around the simplest
words are often the hardest ones, the hardest ones to understand the meaning of.
Prepositions, for example, are not semantically clear, stable things.
The meaning of prepositions happens from context.
Like, take the word in.
I'm in a pickle.
I'm in a room.
I'm in, what in means in each of these cases is very,
very different, and in fact is not pick upable by the nature of the preposition.
It's actually the nature of the words around it, and
the nature of the context in which those words are added.
So what use is the word preposition other than to produce some silly rules, which
I'm going to come to in a moment, which prove not to be terribly helpful as well.
But also these units, they say the basic unit of meaning is the morpheme,
the smallest element of meaning is a morpheme.
But you have a morpheme that stands for a big meaning, or
you can have whole texts which stand for the same meaning.
So, what are the units of meaning that we're talking about in these places, and
it's the difference between a morpheme and a hold of it, morpheme and
the whole of the text as a meaning unit is it's problematic, it's complicated.
And finally, these are just examples, is metaphor.
So in other words, what something means
is not transparently obvious a lot of the time, it has a whole pile of associations.
And we invoke those associations every time we use metaphor.
So these other concepts of transposition, of contextual meaning
out of prepositions, of the unit of thought and of metaphor.
These other things become in some ways more powerful
ways of understanding what kinds of meaning is being made and
how it's being made, than the terms in traditional grammar.
They actually end up, traditional grammar ends up being abstract, boring, and
a bit irrelevant.
Here are some old fashioned grammar rules.
So one of the reasons why we learned traditional grammar is to have
a few rules.
I'm going to mention a few grammar rules, and
just say look, they don't work a lot of the time.
So the first one is, a sentence must have a verb.
Well, it's not always the case that sentences should have a verb.
Sometimes a sentence can be something where you want to be emphatic, and
you don't have a verb.
Always put the subject at the beginning of the sentence.
Well, here's a simple sentence where the subject's not at the beginning of
the sentence.
It's me, I come to the door and I say, it's me.
It's me is a sentence, but the subject is not at the beginning of the sentence.
Never use a double negative, they don't know,
well of course there are vernaculars where you don't know is actually correct.
And never end the sentence with a preposition, the house that I'm living in.
Well, we say that all the time and we use it all the time.
So, traditional grammar is full of all these rules,
where they're actually a bit stilted and a bit formal.
There's a lot more rules like this.
And every single rule, there are perfectly reasonable exceptions to that rule.
So traditional grammar is not all that helpful.
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