Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric

[jgx]

About a week ago I picked up a copy of The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric....Understanding the Nature and Function of Language.

And since my job right now is to grab you (the reader's) attention I will dive right in.

1. Society is absorbed, saturated with rhetoric. That is, everybody has an opinion, an argument to state but the two classic subjects that are intended to be taught before one makes rhetorical arguments, grammar and logic, are in very short supply.

2. Grammar in this context does not just mean the dry description of words, sentences...the ability to figure out what is a run-on sentence or what is the correct use of the word "however".

In classical education grammar is the first subject taught and it is simply an education about the nuts and bolts of how language works. Before logic(if A then B) and way before rhetoric (the ways we use language to prove a point) we need to know the essence of the tool we are using and in this case the tool is language, words.

I would love other forum members to drop by this thread and add whatever questions, ideas, information...

The author, now deceased, Sister Miriam Joseph writes in the book that grammar can be thought of as tasting a book; logic can be thought of as eating the book and rhetoric as digesting it.

That is, if you are reading a non-fiction book the first way of getting familiar with the book, and its premises and arguments, is to understand how terms, words, sentences, verbs, paragraphs are used.

Then logic helps you see the larger arguments being made by the words, sentences, paragraphs. If A then B but not C if A.

And the rhetoric of the book is how the author uses language to prove his points or illustrate his thesis. You can write "The President resigned because of a secret exposed by his brother" in many many different ways. And each way would lend it a slightly different meaning. Rhetoric is the study of how this occurs in a piece of writing.

I guess the difference between how we are usually taught grammar and what grammar means in this case is that usually we really are not given much info as to why this is important to understand. But in this book grammar is directly connected to how we want to express our ideas, emotions...We are not learning the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb just because we should know that. We must learn it because the essence of a verb that has an object is fundamentally different then a verb (an action) that does not have a direct object. We are learning the philosophy of grammar...the meaning of the rules so that we are able to use them well.

Anyway, I will stop now and...well...the floor is open.

[Virgil]

A very good post jgx. I have felt that we do not teach grammar correctly in schools, at least in the U.S. Somehow in the last 40 years whoever establishes teaching methodology have decided that we can magically be inpsired to understand grammar. The medevilists had a better approach: drill, drill, drill. It may not be the most imaginative approach, but it was the best approach. Here's a related thread on teaching grammar: http://www.online-literature.com/for...ad.php?t=18248

[SheykAbdullah]

I think it is important to teach grammar in a mathematical way, but not necesarily by drill (I know that most math nowadays is taught in a drill, but I think it is an inefficient system. I learned much better when taught mathematics in a more free-flowing way based on proofs, properties, axioms and postulates and then applying them).

What I mean is that grammar, like math, has certain rules and certain systems that can be plugged into certain other systems and thus create meaning. However, with English we must be careful about what kind of grammar we teach because there is no one accepted school of grammatical thought within English, i.e. unlike Spanish, French, Arabic and many other languages we have no academy to fix grammatical structues, thus learning what place a realtive clause has in a sentence and where direct objects are used, the grammar you were referring to JGX, is more important than when to use 'who' vs 'whom' or 'can' vs 'may.' Grammar, like you said, is a flowing thing that can take many forms and knowing when to use a prepositional phrase, for example, is as important as knowing when to apply, for example, the distributive property, where as learning when to use 'who' or 'whom' has mroe bearing on social acceptibility than clarity in communication, meaning their confusion does not hamper the ability of the listener/reader to understand the syntactical and semantic ordering and point of the sentence.

[Redzeppelin]

2. Grammar in this context does not just mean the dry description of words, sentences...the ability to figure out what is a run-on sentence or what is the correct use of the word "however".

Cool topic. I have posted elsewhere on the value of grammar. I totally agree that grammar is more than just "mechanics" of language. It really is foundational to being able to manipulate language in an effective manner.

Second, it is absolutely true that our contemporary society has virtually no ability to argue (in the sense of disputation, not in "I'm going to raise my voice at you"), and even if people try, their attempts are less than effective because the basis of the argument (the language) is ill-handled. I wonder what kind of society we would have if students were taught like the old days where rhetoric, grammar and logic were required study.

[Silv]

I guess the difference between how we are usually taught grammar and what grammar means in this case is that usually we really are not given much info as to why this is important to understand. But in this book grammar is directly connected to how we want to express our ideas, emotions...We are not learning the difference between a transitive and intransitive verb just because we should know that. We must learn it because the essence of a verb that has an object is fundamentally different then a verb (an action) that does not have a direct object. We are learning the philosophy of grammar...the meaning of the rules so that we are able to use them well.

That's actually what caught my attention, the concept of a book teaching you grammar not for no purpose (e.g. drilling, useless memorization), but for the goal of increasing your understanding of the language itself and the role grammar plays in enhancing writing. I think I'll try and pick up a copy of that book, it has piqued my interest.

[jgx]

I thought I would use this thread as a kind of launching pad for all things grammar, rhetorical and logical. Or to put it another way...the book I mentioned in the opening post is quite good but not easy and I figure this as good a place as any to write a bit about what I am reading and see where it goes.

One point that has really stuck with me is the idea of "oral punctuation" That is, the myriad of ways we add meaning when we are speaking. A louder voice, a pause, a gesture with ones hand. We do these all the time. Written grammar is simply describes the ways we can add meaning when we are writing instead of speaking.

I think this is obviously a critical idea here in web land where the words represent some midway point between the immediacy of the spoken word and the more lasting quality of print. I often find that it is this very character of the web that is what attracts so many but also creates such confusion.

You know, the smiley faces and the emoticons are a sort of pop grammar...oh...and the...I don't know the formal term...but abbreviations for longer statements like: omg/lol/lmao/imho...

If there was ever a need, even with the above pop linguistic creations, for a deep understanding of how we can express ourselves clearly and with the intended connotations it is now when so much dialouge is occuring here...right here on the monitor you are looking at and the shapes and symbols you are reading to extract meaning from my post.

[SheykAbdullah]

If you are interested in the phenomenon of linguistics on an abstract level, ie the processing of linguistic data by the mind in formulating meaning, I would recomend you check out Chomsky, the Transformation Grammar and theoretical linguistics. There is a particular book I like called The Language Instinct which is very good, if long. There is a guy around here, Vili, that is really knowledgeable about these kinds of things. By nature and study I am actually an linguist and an anthropologist, though my specialty in linguistics in not theoretical, ie dealing with the nature and process of language, rather I am descriptive and ocasional compartive linguist, concerned with the actual form of language and the interrealtion of various languages.

It is interesting how written language varies so extremely from speech. Even the sentence forms vary quite consderably with written speech, at least among those used to it, being generally more directed and less transgressive. The smiley faces represent an interesting facet of online communication, though as symbols they do not represent a grammar, rather they are symbols representing emotions in a similiar way to the gestures used in everyday speech. I think it will be interesting to see how this emotional abbreviation develops in the future as I believe it will inevitably become more complex as typing gains importance in communication.

My one question to you, JGX, is what do you mean by 'written grammar'? Do you refer simply to punctuation? Because written grammar is essentially the same as spoken grammar, the only difference being written grammar may take place at a higher register of speech.

[vili]

Approaching this issue from a theoretical linguist's point of view, I must point out that on the basic linguistic level language is not logical, and therefore the study of language or grammar per se is not really going to lead you to better argumentation or even better language use. This is basically also why analytic philosophy has attempted to distance itself from natural language, and has concentrated on dealing with the world with the help of formal logic.

But I think that this is somewhat beside the point that jgx's original post is actually making. What he and most others in this thread are referring to as "grammar" is what we theoretical linguists tend to call "school grammar", i.e. not a representation of the way the language actually works, but a popularised view of this process, and one that is usually argued to be rather mistaken in most of its assumptions.

"School grammars" in fact tend to be prescriptive, i.e. they tell us what is considered correct and what is not. However, one should remember that they don't actually teach us language (humans don't need to be taught their mother tongue, as we simply acquire it when we are young), but instead simply a standard way of using it. To take a typical example, there is nothing inherently ungrammatical about something like double negation ("I didn't see nobody"), but for some reason a large part of the post 18th century English speaking world has decided that it is non-standard. This is a social contract, and one that in the end has very little to do with our linguistic abilities.

The point I am therefore trying to make is that it is not the teaching of language but rather the impact of language that I think we are really talking about here. As was mentioned in the first post, something like "The President resigned because of a secret exposed by his brother" can, indeed, be expressed in a number of ways, but we must bear in mind that the impact that those different ways have is not only dependent on the words and grammatical constructions chosen, but also to a very large degree on the contexts in which they are uttered.

To give a short example, "Good afternoon, Sir" is an utterance that bears more or less the same informational content as does "Yo, bro!" (that is me pathetically trying to sound hip ). Obviously, depending on their contexts these utterances will have very different impacts, as well as meanings. For, when uttered in the "appropriate" contexts they are in many ways equivalent, but try saying "Yo, bro!" to the King of Denmark, and I think the interpretation will not be the same as is the case in "Good afternoon, Sir".

What I then ultimately want to say is that if we really wish to become more capable in our use of words, it is not the natural grammar or even the school grammar that we should turn to. Instead, what we need is some sort of linguistically relevant cross-cultural awareness, and the understanding that goes with it. (And when I write 'culture' I refer to communities rather than nations.)

Finally, let me also add that while Pinker's The Language Instinct that SheykAbdullah recommended is a fascinating and rather well-written book, to get both sides of the argument I would suggest that you also take a look at Geoffrey Sampson's The 'Language Instinct' Debate. While Pinker's book takes the Chomskyan point of view according to which our language abilities are innate, Sampson's book is basically a long counter-argument against this widely held belief.

[jgx]

My one question to you, JGX, is what do you mean by 'written grammar'? Do you refer simply to punctuation? Because written grammar is essentially the same as spoken grammar, the only difference being written grammar may take place at a higher register of speech.

Hey, ask as many questions as you want. I actually started this thread because the book is quite a challenge and the more opportunities I have to try and answer questions and ask questions the better my reading and comprehension of the book will be.

Now...I guess I never actually stopped and thought of it in the way you present it. But now I see it. There are always 'subjects' and 'predicates' in either speach or written language, always nouns that are concrete or nouns that are abstract.

And so, yea, I guess it is the punctuation that is different. I think one of my goals here is to gain as much facility with the written word as I have when I am speaking. Which, by the way, is quite a bit. I am a rather powerful speaker, or so I have been told.

[jgx]

"

School grammars" in fact tend to be prescriptive, i.e. they tell us what is considered correct and what is not."

It's kind of funny. I have a book called Mindful Learning which is a wonderful and short...almost an essay...on the harm a top-down....just listen to the teacher kind of education can do and has done to many many students. And she suggests quite a few rather insightful suggestions as to changing this.

And then there is a very dry, quite long, book written by a Catholic nun on Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric.

My stuggle is precisely what you have been writing about. I want to understand all the tools available to me when I am writing so that I can use them instead of the rules using me...or misusing me.

And yet, your example is perfect. I have known for a long time that there is nothing wrong with "I didn't see nobody". In fact, not only is nothing wrong with it but it may be the perfect sentence to use in a movie or story or novel or poem or memoir or whatever.

My fear is that if I lean too far towards the logical, rational, "correct" school then I could make it more difficult to 1) just write any damn way I want to without some dread that I will be judged or criticized 2) I do not want to loose the ability to write in many different ways depending on the specific situation I am in both in terms of the context and in terms of my intention.

On the other hand I sense a need to have a deeper understanding of language and how it is used so that I have all the information at my disposal when I want to convey a specific thought or emotion in a specific way.

I suppose it is the two sides to art....the technical information and then the ability to apply the information versus the creative element whereby you now know how to drive the car with confidence and so you can drive fast, slow, make large turns slowly or small turns quickly.

Any thoughts folks might have on this inherent tension/dialectic are welcome.

jgx
aka
ghideon

there is nothing inherently ungrammatical about something like double negation ("I didn't see nobody"), but for some reason a large part of the post 18th century English speaking world has decided that it is non-standard. This is a social contract, and one that in the end has very little to do with our linguistic abilities.

[vili]

I suppose it is the two sides to art....the technical information and then the ability to apply the information versus the creative element whereby you now know how to drive the car with confidence and so you can drive fast, slow, make large turns slowly or small turns quickly.

I think you have hit the nail on the head here.

Like you, I have for years struggled to come to understand the tools that are at our disposal as writers. And in the end, I think, it is a lost battle. There is no way we can fully control the reader so as to guide him or her to understand our meaning in the way that we would intend. Of course, this does not mean that we shouldn't fight back.

One of my favourite authors is the Australian novelist Patrick White, who is often considered overly pompous and unnecessarily ambiguous, indeed a writer of "verbal sludge" as one influential critic who shall remain unidentified once so kindly pronounced. (This was, of course, before White won the Nobel Prize.)

At one point I became really interested in the internal mechanics of White's novels, and especially their metaphorical systems, which are extremely complex to say the least. I went through his lesser known (and I perhaps wrongly presumed also less complex) work The Tree of Man, mapping its metaphors and attempting to understand how they functioned within the 500-page piece as a whole.

What I learnt, or at least think I learnt, was something about how White manipulates his readers through his writing. He serves us empty metaphors, and pompous and even prophetic statements that he quickly refutes, but they all seem to serve a purpose -- for the lack of a better explanation (and I am a linguist after all), they activate certain metaphorical mappings or conceptual links in your brain, which he then makes use of later on in his work. The way he thus manipulates the reader's expectations works primarily on a level unconscious to the poor reader. I believe that there is much to be learnt about this from White and other writers like him.

[SheykAbdullah]

As an interesting note on written language, it need not be any different than normal speech for comprehension, meaning in order to understand something puncuation is not needed and there are several languages that do not use it. Traditionally neither Arabic nor Persian use puncuation, no periods, commas, question markes, semi-colons, nothing. Reading it is sometimes confusing to a non-native speaker, especially not used to unpunctuated script, but it is still comprehensible.

[vili]

As an interesting note on written language, it need not be any different than normal speech for comprehension, meaning in order to understand something puncuation is not needed and there are several languages that do not use it. Traditionally neither Arabic nor Persian use puncuation, no periods, commas, question markes, semi-colons, nothing. Reading it is sometimes confusing to a non-native speaker, especially not used to unpunctuated script, but it is still comprehensible.

Well, one must remember that writing has relatively little to do with language. It is just a way of recording it, and is therefore more of a technology than a linguistic device.

That said, I do love seeing cultural differences in punctuation. Just take a look at how quotation marks (") differ in different written standards, from English to Japanese, Finnish to Hungarian... All very similar, but each one slightly different than the other.

[SheykAbdullah]

That said, I do love seeing cultural differences in punctuation. Just take a look at how quotation marks (") differ in different written standards, from English to Japanese, Finnish to Hungarian... All very similar, but each one slightly different than the other.

Most certainly, but as an addition to the curios of punctuation, the Spanish sometimes and the Arab script languages use much larger quotation marks and sine the Arabic script is read opposite to Latin all the question marks are reversed.

[blp]

To pick up on a small point, 'I didn't see nobody' literally means the opposite of 'I saw nobody.' So it means, 'I saw somebody.' But of course, we all know what is really meant by someone saying 'I didn't see nobody.' Not only that, but in Italian and Spanish, the double negative construction is the correct grammar for conveying a negative.

Even so, vili, what you rather damn as 'school grammar' has an elegant functional logic to it that I'm in no hurry to dismiss. I work a lot as a copy editor and my understanding of grammar has served me well in unravelling serious knots and identifying severe lacunae in other people's writing. I may not constantly be referring to these problems in grammatical terminology any more than a professional musician is necessarily constantly counting off the beats, but I learned the rules once and they inform everything I do. The great discovery for me has been that poor grammar usage is almost always inseparable from poor thought. Knowing this may not guarantee that I become as good as Patrick White, but it at least gets me a foot in the door.

I'm also learning German at the moment and, as in the various examples quoted above, the grammar is significantly different from English grammar. But that's an argument for knowing grammar, not binning it. My knowledge of English grammar gives me a jumping-off point that's invaluable in understanding the new material. If I didn't know what a verb or a conjunction were, I'd be lost when I learned that in German, the verb goes to the end of a clause that begins with a conjunction other than 'and' (und) or 'but' (aber).