When you want to explain something complex to a non-expert, there's no tool more useful than a good analogy. Sadly, there's are few tool more open to abuse than the humble analogy, and in a great many cases, the subject of this abuse is the humble automobile. There is a rule of thumb on the internet that says you should never trust a car analogy.
The
danger in analogy is that it comes to what appears to be a logical
conclusion, even when the analogy is false, but thankfully we've had
the conceptual tools to analyse logic since at least Ancient Greece.
Heck, even the words
“logic” and
“analogy” come from the Ancient Greek language.
Regular
readers will know that I'm not a fan of the “learning/acquisition”
distinction, or the school of thought that says that rules don't
matter, and that the only way to “acquire” is through exposure. Well,
recently I was reminded of that particular school-of-thought's own
pet car analogy, and I would like to dismantle it here.
Grammar,
they tell us, is unimportant. Do we need to know how a language
works in order to speak it? Well, they say, consider a car: do you
need to know how the engine works in order to drive it?
The
reasoning seems persuasive to those who are predisposed to listen,
but as with all analogies, the problem lies in the equivalence of the
analogised items.
Is
“how a language works” analogous to “how the engine works”?
Certainly not – it is analogous to “how the car
works”. Some commentators would suggest that the engine is
how the car works – I would like to argue against this.
To
a driver, a car is not the engine. From the very beginning, the goal
of the engineer has been to abstract away features that the driver
shouldn't have to think about and turn the engine into something of a
“black box” – you read the instrumentation, manipulate the
controls, and then the car responds in a consistent and predictable
way based on what you tell it to do. The driver does not need to
know what “RPM” means to recognise when they're over-revving the
engine – revolutions-per-minute, cylinder cycles... irrelevant –
but the driver does
have to be told that over-revving is a bad thing, and has to learn
the “rules” of reading the needle and listening to engine noise
to avoid doing it.
The
acquisition crowd are not, I hope, suggesting that you could put
someone in a car with no knowledge of the steering system, gearbox,
speed controls and indicator and just let them get on with it. The
end result of this would at best nothing, at worst a seriously
damaged car. OK, so you're not going to destroy someone's brain by
throwing them into a language at the deep end, but if they can't even
start the language's “car”, they're never going to get any useful
feedback at all.
So
we have three elements in the target of our analogy:
- The car as a whole
- The car's control system
- The car's engine
The
question is, is the grammar the “control system” or the “engine”.
Quite simply... urm... possibly maybe both....
Grammar as Control Sytem
Most
of the grammar of a language is unambiguously “control system”,
as the speaker must directly manipulate it in order to make himself
understood.
Consider
the spark-plugs in a diesel engine. Wait... a diesel engine doesn't
have any spark-plugs. But this doesn't matter – this makes
practically no difference to the driver. The accelerator works the
same as the accelerator in a petrol engine with its spark plugs, and
pressing it down harder makes the wheels spin faster. “The car”,
as an entity, is operated identically – as far as the driver is
concerned, it “works the same way”.
But
let's look at a grammatical distinction, and for the sake of the
argument I'll take the use of articles. English has them, Polish
doesn't. If articles were like spark-plugs, that would mean that the
article is entirely irrelevant to the manipulation of the language,
but this is patently false. If you don't correctly manipulate the
article, your sentence is wrong.
So
a great many grammar rules are undeniably part of the control system.
Grammar as engine
Grammar
as a whole has been a very expansive and extensive field of study –
in fact, I'm led to believe that grammar originally meant the
description of a whole language. Grammar today usually means
“everything except vocabulary, pronunciation and spelling”, so a
lot of stuff gets caught up in it which may be considered “engine”.
Historical changes, derivational morphology (the etymology of the
word presuppose
is of very little use to the average learner of English) and
distinctions like that between reflexive and impersonal/pronominal
pronouns in the Romance languages.
But
to use these few examples as a reason to throw out all conscious
description of grammar is hugely short-sighted.
My car analogy
So that's their car analogy disproven, and I'd like to replace it with one of my own.
To ask
someone to learn a language without grammar is like putting someone
in the driving seat of a car without drumming the words “mirror,
signal, manoeuvre” into their heads, and without telling them never
to cross their hands at the wheel.
On the
other hand, a lot of grammar-heavy teaching is like teaching someone
to drive by carrying out the exact same manoeuvre 20 times in
superficially different (but functionally identical) locations, then
moving on and doing the same thing with a different manoeuvre.
This
is not what any good driving teacher does.
A
driving teacher takes the beginner to a safe, simple environment (eg
an empty car park) and teaches the basic rules of operating the
vehicle. The learner won't even be allowed to start the engine until
they've started building the habit of checking all mirrors. Then
they will learn to start and stop. A bit of controlled speed, then a
bit of steering. The complexity increases steadily, and the
instructor chooses increasingly complex environments so that the
learner has to apply and combine the rules in ever more sophisticated
ways. Rules are introduced gradually, as required, and then applied
and manipulated as the situation demands. The teacher initially
picks routes that don't require turning across traffic, then picks a
route with a safe across-traffic turn, then adds in crossroads,
traffic lights, roundabouts, filter lanes etc one by one. But these
features are never treated as discrete items to learn individually –
they are elements of one continuous whole that must be practised in
the context of that whole.
This
is what a good driving teacher does, and this is what a good language
teacher does. Listen to one of Michel Thomas's courses1
and you'll see that's exactly what he does: an increasingly
complicated linguistic environment, and no language point ever
treated in isolation beyond its basic introduction. That's proper teaching, and it's all built on grammar and rules.
1I
mean a course that he himself planned and delivered, not one of the courses
released after his death.
31 comments:
I would like to propose another car analogy. In my experience learning a language is like building a car from scratch then learning how to drive it. The pieces are the words, their functions the meanings. The grammar is the list of instructions with the name of the pieces and where they fit. Assembling the car represents the comprehension phase (reading/listening) while learning how to drive corresponds to the production phase (writing/speaking).
>> Grammar, they tell us, is unimportant. Do we need to know how a language works in order to speak it? Well, they say, consider a car: do you need to know how the engine works in order to drive it?
Who are you talking about? A reference would be good.
Personally, I use grammar to learn languages, I use it as a tool to help me notice the features of the language faster. It is absolutely NOT the main part of my learning process but it IS certainly an accelerator which I consult a lot at the beginning then less and less until I do not need it anymore. In my opinion grammar is not indispensable: like you could build a car without the instructions (harder but no impossible), you can learn a language without grammar. But of course this is less efficient... a lot less. However you do not have to learn the rules separately. The goal is not to learn the rules but the language.
Many people seem to have forgotten that a grammar is not a reference but a model which attempts (more or less accurately) to describe the structure of a language. The grammar comes from the language not the other way around. This means that the reference is the language itself and more specifically how the speakers use it. In other words: usage is the engine not grammar. This also means that learning the grammar is not learning the language. To use my car analogy: if you memorize the instructions you still have to build the car. So unless you want to build a lot of cars this is mainly a waste of time. You are better off building the car right away using the instructions.
I think learning a language is acquiring a large number of reflexes. When you hear or read the language, those reflexes generate corresponding ideas in your mind for some sequences of words. In the same manner when you want to write or speak your ideas are automatically transformed in those sequences. You do not have to think about it (for the most part anyway) so that you can concentrate on the meaning. The more reflexes you acquire the better you become able to understand or speak.
As for the teacher, I believe the best kind is a coach which pushes you when you want to stop. Nothing less, nothing more.
O.M.
"You are better off building the car right away using the instructions."
Exactly. Too many people equate "learning grammar" with "memorising rules". I consider "learning grammar" to mean "learning to apply the rules.
What I disagree with, though, is the idea of a comprehension phase. I've said before and I'll say it again -- I believe we understand language by reflecting on what would make us say the same thing.
And there are several languages (all in the Romance family) that I can comprehend far better than actual learners of the language, and yet I cannot respond. I don't believe you have to understand first.
>> I consider "learning grammar" to mean "learning to apply the rules.
I see grammar more like a safety net: each time you are lost you can rely on it to get back on track (or close enough) and the more experience you have the less you need it. But as you well know you can easily produce perfectly grammatical sentences which are not part of the actual language, even if they have a perfectly valid meaning.
For example in French, you don't say: “Cet an est un bon an.” but “Cette année est une bonne année.” instead, despite the fact that both sentences are perfectly valid and have the exact same theoretical meaning. The first alternative just sound very strange to a native ear.
This simple example should be enough to convince you that it's not about applying rules. It's more about learning usage. As I said in my previous post, I think usage shapes the language not grammar. We use certain sequences of words because they make sense to us but also because they sound familiar (better). This creates a common knowledge shared among the speakers. And I believe language learning, for the most part, amounts to learning that knowledge.
>> What I disagree with, though, is the idea of a comprehension phase. I've said before and I'll say it again -- I believe we understand language by reflecting on what would make us say the same thing.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Are you saying that you can't understand something you can't say?
The comprehension phase is the period during which I don't really try to speak or write. I don't have enough experience with the language yet. Sure I learned some words and some rules, and I can build some sentences but like with the French example above, I can also create sentences that are not part of the language without knowing. In my experience it is a lot more effective to build my understanding of the language to a high enough level then start talking when I can say something meaningful and understand the answer. It's probably better to build enough of the car before trying to drive it.
>> And there are several languages (all in the Romance family) that I can comprehend far better than actual learners of the language, and yet I cannot respond. I don't believe you have to understand first.
You can't respond because you don't know how to speak, nothing too surprising here. When I say comprehension I mean that you understand the message clearly without any doubt and effortlessly even if you don't necessarily know the exact meaning of all the words. Also you must be able to know when a sentence does not sound right (or right enough). When you are at that stage, speaking become a lot easier simply because you can concentrate on pronunciation and speech patterns without worrying about the rest. And since you know when you say something strange, you can monitor yourself and improve quickly.
"For example in French, you don't say: “Cet an est un bon an.” but “Cette année est une bonne année.” instead, despite the fact that both sentences are perfectly valid and have the exact same theoretical meaning. [...] This simple example should be enough to convince you that it's not about applying rules."
There's a fairly simple rule in science regarding rules: if your rule makes incorrect predictions, your rule is wrong.
If I wrote my grammar book as a single rule that said "a sentence in English consists of a number of words equal to or greater than one," this rule would correctly predict infinitely many correct sentences, but it would predict a larger infinity of incorrect sentences.
So the rule is wrong, and the reason should be obvious: it doesn't account for word class. We cannot predict useful sentences without at least making a distinction between nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and determiners. But if we restrict ourselves to these classes, the rule that correctly generates "John ran up the hill" would also generate "me were to a importance".
"It's more about learning usage. As I said in my previous post, I think usage shapes the language not grammar."
Usage shapes the language, but grammar is the language. The rules in a grammar book are the observed rules of usage. If the rules do not match usage, they need to be rewritten in order to better describe usage.
The existence of bad rules does not prove the concept of rules is bad.
>> What I disagree with, though, is the idea of a comprehension phase. I've said before and I'll say it again -- I believe we understand language by reflecting on what would make us say the same thing.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly. Are you saying that you can't understand something you can't say?
Pretty much, except that the human brain has a remarkable ability to alter the input to match what it expects -- the filter of perception that I discussed recently.
"Also you must be able to know when a sentence does not sound right (or right enough). When you are at that stage, speaking become a lot easier simply"
Even if the "filter of perception" problem didn't ever block learners from noticing patterns that are different to their native languages (and it's easily visible that it does, even though not always and not always predictably), "sounds right" can be very misleading if you're not thinking about context and rules.
For example, the definite article in Scottish Gaelic takes multiple forms depending on grammatical gender and case, and on the first letter (and occassionally also the second letter) of the following word. These forms recurr in different places, so just about anything "sounded right" to me after several years with no active focus on the case system. I was watching TV, listening to the radio, going to Gaelic events and taking holidays in Gaelic-speaking areas. There was no "sounds right", and I had to actively learn it (and now I almost get it right).
By learning the rule and practising it, I've internalised it and now I have a much better feel for "sounds right" than any amount of listening ever gave me.
>> There's a fairly simple rule in science regarding rules: if your rule makes incorrect predictions, your rule is wrong.
Not exactly but close enough. So?
>> If I wrote my grammar book as a single rule that said "a sentence in English consists of a number of words equal to or greater than one," this rule would correctly predict infinitely many correct sentences, but it would predict a larger infinity of incorrect sentences.
This is a very minimal grammar but a valid grammar nonetheless. The ones we found in grammar's books are a little more precise of course but still very incomplete in comparison to the actual language they attempt to describe. And they too predict a larger infinity of incorrect sentences. The reason is that language is limited by meaning and usage while grammar is not.
My example illustrates the usage limitation.
>> So the rule is wrong, and the reason should be obvious: it doesn't account for word class.
Word class has nothing to do with it. I also choose this example because of that. Both sentences use the same word classes, at the same positions, with the same meanings and both are grammatically valid. Yet one is part of the language while the other is not.
This clearly shows that grammar cannot be used to predict if a sentence is part of the language or not. At best it can give you a hint. Nothing new here of course. As I said before language grammars are only models used to put in evidence some structures (more or less coherent) in the way we use words in the language.
>> We cannot predict useful sentences without at least making a distinction between nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and determiners. But if we restrict ourselves to these classes, the rule that correctly generates "John ran up the hill" would also generate "me were to a importance".
Sure. So?
>> Usage shapes the language, but grammar is the language. The rules in a grammar book are the observed rules of usage. If the rules do not match usage, they need to be rewritten in order to better describe usage.
There is no way grammar can be the language. The rules in a grammar book are only a subset of all the possibilities that are in use. Unless you fix the language once and for all and you force everyone to follow the rules absolutely you can never describe it fully. The language is the sum of the words + the way we use them. Grammar is an attempt to fix some of the usage.
Now, maybe you have a different definition of grammar...
O.M.
>> Pretty much, except that the human brain has a remarkable ability to alter the input to match what it expects -- the filter of perception that I discussed recently.
Sure it's easy to see or hear what we want. However I don't like the term filter. I find it misleading because our brain does not filter, it classifies. In your example it misclassified. Your goal is not to remove some filter but to refine some categories. It reminds me of a user of duolingo who could not here the difference between “nosotros” and “nosotras”. He was convince that the poor quality of the recordings was the problem, so he decided to stop (if I remember correctly). I was in the exact same situation at the time but I persevered instead. And after a few days trying my best to hear the difference between the two, I began to be able to tell them apart easily.
>> Even if the "filter of perception" problem didn't ever block learners from noticing patterns that are different to their native languages (and it's easily visible that it does, even though not always and not always predictably), "sounds right" can be very misleading if you're not thinking about context and rules.
Yes “sounds right” is a tricky concept. The thing to realize is that it's just a perception based on experience. So if your experience is limited or wrong too often your perception is of course not really reliable. That's why massive exposure is a very important part of language learning. I believe reading is the most efficient way to go because you can take your time to observe the features of the language while understanding enough of it to make the learning process interesting. Also I think that trying to speak before you have enough experience can hinder the development of this perception.
>> By learning the rule and practising it, I've internalised it and now I have a much better feel for "sounds right" than any amount of listening ever gave me.
This is a question of preference: I get the same result through exposure. In those situations I study the relevant passage of the grammar, summarize the rules in a table, print it out, pin it on my wall and look at it when I'm reading to help me make sens of the chaos. After a while I don't have to look at the table anymore. Now your method only works when the number of rules is manageable. What do you do when there is no rules or too many of them? How would you learn genders in French for example?
O.M.
Grammar is not what you see in a grammar book -- grammar is a fundamental part of how we process language. What sounds right is always either grammatically correct or a phrase so common that it has become irregular.
What is in grammar books is not always an accurate model, no, so you can't take a particular grammar book as gospel. Some oversimplify "to make it easy for learners" and some overcomplicate in order to conform to standard practices.
An oversimplified grammar doesn't subdivide wordclasses sufficiently. We've got "countable" vs "uncountable" in nouns, but often the distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" is dropped.
The difference between an and année is a matter of wordclass, because you can classify an with jour, matin, soir and you can classify année with journée, matinée and soirée. Then you also have to consider that other Romance languages have the same distinction, although as always the specifics of usage vary between languages. (And all the ones I've seen to date use the feminine past participle ending to make that distinction.)
There's a rule, or a pattern, or whatever you want to call it. A rule or a pattern must be learned as such, and starting with the explicit rule is much quicker and more reliable than trying to devine the pattern through exposure.
But even if you couldn't just Google an année difference in usage and find explanations of the rule online, and were stuck with a single, small grammar book, I still don't see why you shouldn't be learning the grammar first.
The process of learning a language is a process of approximation and constant refinement, and even if your grammar book overpredicts possible sentences, it gives you the opportunity to get a pretty sophisticated first approximation, and it gets you interacting with the language, so you have much more of an opportunity to find out what sounds right.
"Also I think that trying to speak before you have enough experience can hinder the development of this perception."
I'm of the opposite view. Full comprehension does not always require full perception, because language is full of redundant features that evolved on this principle.
There are no words in English differ by voiced vs unvoiced TH, and yet they are distinct phonemes. A learner therefore does not need to learn the distinction to understand the sentence, so is never forced to notice it. (The only minimal pair I know of is this'll vs thistle, but the context -- in particular the large difference in grammatical class -- will disambiguate.)
So we have to speak first because while we can't force ourselves to hear the difference, we can force ourselves to say it. And once we can say it (even if with crappy pronunciation), our brain will start to hear it.
Now, you've been talking about exposure, but one particular thing you say stands out:
" I believe reading is the most efficient way to go because you can take your time to observe the features of the language"
That doesn't sound like just "exposure" to me, it's actually something deeper, more abstract and more intellectual. I would suggest that you are actively looking for the patterns, so that you can actively learn the patterns.
That's grammar, isn't it...?
After a while I don't have to look at the table anymore. Now your method only works when the number of rules is manageable. What do you do when there is no rules or too many of them?
Simple: one at a time.
The number of rules is never "manageable" if you attempt to learn them all at once, and a skilled teacher should introduce them in a logically progressive way that allow rapid progress.
"How would you learn genders in French for example?"
Again: one at a time. One word, or one suffix (starting with one word).
>> Grammar is not what you see in a grammar book
Sounds silly. Now if you mean that grammar's books are incomplete, I agree.
>> -- grammar is a fundamental part of how we process language. What sounds right is always either grammatically correct or a phrase so common that it has become irregular.
So those common irregular phrases are at the same time part of the language and outside your grammar. But you said before that your grammar IS the language. Seems to me that your definition
of grammar is broken. And what is the point of defining grammar as an alias for language?
Also I don't see how this can help you learn a language.
>> What is in grammar books is not always an accurate model, no, so you can't take a particular grammar book as gospel.
I never said accurate. I just said model and models are not accurate. We build them to help us solve problems that are difficult to solve without. Models are abstractions (simplification) of the original problem, they have rules, limits and some degree of precision. To use them correctly you have to stay inside the limits, use their rules and be aware of the precision of the results. You can then map the results onto the original problem. It doest not mean you have an exact solution of the original problem.
>> An oversimplified grammar doesn't subdivide wordclasses sufficiently. We've got "countable" vs "uncountable" in nouns, but often the distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" is dropped.
You must realize how insignificant the distinction between “abstract” vs '”concrete” is in comparison with the number of wordclasses possible. Ultimately you have a class for each word with each meaning. But then the concept of wordclass becomes pointless. So you have to put a limit somewhere for the concept to remain useful without loosing yourself in the details. Details which are easily learned through exposure as long as you pay enough attention.
O.M.
>> There's a rule, or a pattern, or whatever you want to call it. A rule or a pattern must be learned as such, and starting with the explicit rule is much quicker and more reliable than trying to devine the pattern through exposure.
First, we are very good at guessing things. For example very often we know what will be the next word of a sentence. Yet we never learned any explicit rule for that. We learned it by exposure.
Second, I said from the beginning that I use grammar rules as an accelerator. You can learn everything through exposure alone but it's much faster with grammar rules to show you explicitly when there are some patterns to pay attention to. So I think we both agree that having the grammar rules is better. Where I disagree is when you suggest that we must learn the patterns in isolation and outside the language. Like I said from the beginning I do not learn grammar rules explicitly, what I learn is usage.
Are you the kind of persons who takes a verb, conjugates it in every possible way then learn the whole thing? I think this is a complete waste of time for language learning purposes.
>> But even if you couldn't just Google an année difference in usage and find explanations of the rule online, and were stuck with a single, small grammar book, I still don't see why you shouldn't be learning the grammar first.
Of course you can always make up some rules (with a lot of exceptions) but the reality is: there is no differences between “an” et “année” other than the fact that we use “an” in some cases, “année” in some others, sometimes they are interchangeable, and in some corner cases it depends on who you ask.
You said grammar IS language, so what “grammar first” means?
>> The process of learning a language is a process of approximation and constant refinement
I agree with that.
>> , and even if your grammar book overpredicts possible sentences, it gives you the opportunity to get a pretty sophisticated first approximation, and it gets you interacting with the language, so you have much more of an opportunity to find out what sounds right.
Are you serious? To build your perception of what sounds right, you need massive exposure. No book alone can give you enough exposure. And certainly not a grammar book with only a few hundreds of sentences without any context.
Like I said from the beginning: there is no point in learning the instructions to build the car separately if your objective is to build the car. Just build the car.
O.M.
>> I'm of the opposite view. Full comprehension does not always require full perception, because language is full of redundant features that evolved on this principle.
Well this is not the opposite view. First because I agree and Second, this is not what I was trying to say, so let me clarify a little:
Students are often pushed to speak when the only real experience they have is their native language. So they take a sentence in their native language, use the few words they already know, put them in some order they think looks like the target language and pronounce the result out. If you do that too often while your exposure is minimal (which is the case in classes) some of those (broken) sentences will become familiar to the point they will sound right. This, is a problem.
>> So we have to speak first because while we can't force ourselves to hear the difference, we can force ourselves to say it. And once we can say it (even if with crappy pronunciation), our brain will start to hear it.
You don't have to speak for that. Knowing there is a difference is enough. Just keep listening, after a while you will hear the distinction. People often abandon after only a few attempts forgetting that learning a language is a long term commitment. You have to be patient and not stop each time you do not understand something.
Now I'd like to add that I take pronunciation seriously from the beginning. I first learn the different sounds of the language then use forvo.com a lot when I'm reading, after a while you become able to pronounce words you never met before with a good accuracy.
>> That doesn't sound like just "exposure" to me, it's actually something deeper, more abstract and more intellectual. I would suggest that you are actively looking for the patterns, so that you can actively learn the patterns.
This is not passive exposure, but this is exposure. I think learning through passive exposure will take you forever. But you are right this is more intensive than just reading. You can view it this way: my long term objective is to learn a language, my short term objective is to understand a text. But of course for a long period I can't just read, I have to look up words that I don't understand, make sense of whole sentences once I know the meaning of each words. Use grammar books if I still don't understand, use google translate if I'm completely lost. Sometimes search through my corpus to find other instances of the same word or phrase. Use google image with some words.
It may sounds painful but we are in 2013 and a lot of the boring work is done by my computer. Also I do not learn words or grammar rules explicitly, my main focus is to understand the text I'm reading.
>> That's grammar, isn't it...?
No, this, is the language.
>> The number of rules is never "manageable" if you attempt to learn them all at once, and a skilled teacher should introduce them in a logically progressive way that allow rapid progress.
Rapid progress in learning the rules, or in learning the language?
O.M.
"So those common irregular phrases are at the same time part of the language and outside your grammar."
"Irregular" is a dangerous word, because it makes too hard a distinction between "the rules" and "everything else".
A while ago a wrote a post about this, suggesting that we need to stop thinking of irregularity as a digital on/off distinction, but as a scale.
"But you said before that your grammar IS the language. Seems to me that your definition of grammar is broken. And what is the point of defining grammar as an alias for language?"
But that's not what I said. I said "grammar is a fundamental part of how we process language."
Grammar usually is taken to mean syntax + morphosyntax, and the brain processes these things. The brain needs a model of these things. A grammar.
The rules/patterns/whatever that a learner needs to learn need to end up there, somehow or other. The quickest way is surely best, isn't it?
"I never said accurate. I just said model and models are not accurate. [...] Models are abstractions (simplification) of the original problem, they have rules, limits and some degree of precision."
The complexity of a model is arbitrary -- it's the modeller's choice.
"You must realize how insignificant the distinction between “abstract” vs '”concrete” is in comparison with the number of wordclasses possible."
Oh yes, I do. I was saying that many grammars and teaching materials stop abstracting far too early.
"Ultimately you have a class for each word with each meaning."
Perhaps, but whether you consider this "vocabulary learning" or "grammar learning", you still have to learn it somehow.
In reality, there are very few words that are so irregular as to be totally unique in their usage -- language relies on generalisability to stay manageable.
"But then the concept of wordclass becomes pointless. So you have to put a limit somewhere for the concept to remain useful without loosing yourself in the details."
Well I wouldn't argue against that, but the question is where that limit is.
"Details which are easily learned through exposure as long as you pay enough attention."
"First, we are very good at guessing things."
But I would argue that. Who is "we"? If "we" is everybody, why do so many people fail in language learning? Because they're "not paying enough attention"? Because they're not "trying hard enough"? Sorry, no. I've seen people try really hard, and still fail, because they're doing the wrong thing, because they're doing what they've been taught to do, and that's the wrong thing.
In high school, I was successful in French, while most of my classmates weren't. I was given the same lessons as them, the same material as them, but the difference was what I did with it, and that is something that wasn't taught to me.
The difference was essentially that when presented with the grammar, I attempted to "learn it" (ie. to spontaneously recall on demand) whereas my classmates attempted to memorise the rules and tables, and recall through mechanical processing or silently reciting the list of verb forms until they reached the desired conjugation.
"For example very often we know what will be the next word of a sentence. Yet we never learned any explicit rule for that. We learned it by exposure."
I'm not necessarily talking about explicit rules, though: grammar can be taught implicitly (an idea that is related to my latest post). But it needs to be taught, because language without grammar is nothing more than a jumble of words.
"Where I disagree is when you suggest that we must learn the patterns in isolation and outside the language. Like I said from the beginning I do not learn grammar rules explicitly, what I learn is usage."
That's not what I said. Grammar in isolation and outside the language is worthless, because grammar only exists in the wider context of the language. Several years ago I wrote about the distinction between what I call naturalistic and expository writing in language materials, and how this is often used to attack a particular method, when in fact it is a problem that is independent of method.
"Are you the kind of persons who takes a verb, conjugates it in every possible way then learn the whole thing? I think this is a complete waste of time for language learning purposes."
I don't do that, because yes, it is a complete waste of time. If you know the grammar, if you know how to conjugate, so by definition, you don't need to do perform all conjugations to know them. In my whole time speaking Spanish, I doubt I've used all the conjugations of all the verbs I know, but I would have no problem making that conjugation from my internal model of the grammar.
"You said grammar IS language, so what “grammar first” means?"
No, a PART of language. Grammar first means rapid progress. Once you know all the basics (conjugations, articles & adjective agreement etc), you can start to expose yourself to more and more vocabulary in real contexts. But if you haven't learnt all the verb tenses, you're going to be unable to read anything, as most material uses a whole range of them. You can look up words in a dictionary if you know the grammar, you can't look up grammar as easily if you just know the words.
">> , and even if your grammar book overpredicts possible sentences, it gives you the opportunity to get a pretty sophisticated first approximation, and it gets you interacting with the language, so you have much more of an opportunity to find out what sounds right.
Are you serious? To build your perception of what sounds right, you need massive exposure. No book alone can give you enough exposure. And certainly not a grammar book with only a few hundreds of sentences without any context."
How can you expose yourself to massive amounts of input if you don't know your conjugations? Where are you going to find natural language that doesn't use at least half of the available tenses? So at the most basic level, you need the grammar before you can get that exposure.
Secondly, there is the question of generalisation. If I am exposed to a pattern with a particular word X, but I don't realise that word Y is in the same class/category as X for this usage, I cannot generalise the pattern. Languages are often surprisingly symmetrical at a deep level, and every rule/pattern fully mastered teaches us more about the underlying logic of the language, to the point where eventually new patterns become unsurprising.
"Students are often pushed to speak when the only real experience they have is their native language. So they take a sentence in their native language, use the few words they already know, put them in some order they think looks like the target language and pronounce the result out. If you do that too often while your exposure is minimal (which is the case in classes) some of those (broken) sentences will become familiar to the point they will sound right. This, is a problem."
Yes, this is a problem. But the solution isn't to avoid speaking, it's to provide more useful and flexible language. Spending an hour or two memorising: "Bonjour, je m'appelle Niall, j'ai onze ans et j'ai un chat" is a waste of time, precisely because it's not teaching me to apply grammar.
"You don't have to speak for that. Knowing there is a difference is enough. Just keep listening, after a while you will hear the distinction. People often abandon after only a few attempts forgetting that learning a language is a long term commitment. You have to be patient and not stop each time you do not understand something."
Stop blaming the student. The brain is the most efficient processing device on the planet. It makes generalisations and takes short cuts to produce the correct answer with the least effort. Some people are passionate or obsessive enough to fight against their brain, but that is an inefficient way to learn. Optimally efficient learning is effortless, because it works with the brain. Sadly no teachers are optimally efficient, so no learning is effortless, but we can remove some of the effort.
But we need to get away from the idea that effort, frustration and confusion are necessary suffrances for the aspiring learner. They are obstacles, and should be removed or reduced wherever possible.
"Now I'd like to add that I take pronunciation seriously from the beginning. I first learn the different sounds of the language then use forvo.com a lot when I'm reading, after a while you become able to pronounce words you never met before with a good accuracy."
I don't believe you. Not that I don't be you can't do it, but your suggestion that anyone can just doesn't ring true. It is again implying that people only fail because of lack of patience or effort, and I've seen lots of people put more patience and effort than me into their languages and guess what? They're not as good as me. Learning that requires effort is inefficient.
"It may sounds painful but we are in 2013 and a lot of the boring work is done by my computer. Also I do not learn words or grammar rules explicitly, my main focus is to understand the text I'm reading."
My main focus is to learn a language. It the task at hand (that of reading the book) slows down the process of learning, I'm not interested. If you enjoy the process, do it. But other people don't, and it's not fair to tell them that this means they're lazy when in fact they are just statistically normal human beings.
"Rapid progress in learning the rules, or in learning the language?"
The language, of course. Grammar taught by application, in the correct order, opens up the possibilities of the language.
>> But that's not what I said. I said "grammar is a fundamental part of how we process language."
Well, this is what you wrote in you second response. I quote: “Usage shapes the language, but grammar is the language.”. Maybe this is not what you wanted to say, so let's move on.
>> Grammar usually is taken to mean syntax + morphosyntax,
Sadly, the number of definitions for grammar is almost equal to the number of people talking about it. So let's try to see where we stand on that. I think languages have some underlying structure. That structure is not fully coherent, has no clear limits and evolves with the language.
From what I understand this is what you call grammar. This is what I call usage.
Then people try to extract information from that structure and present it in some more or less organized way. This is what I call grammar. A common definition, by the way.
What I don't understand with your definition is how this can help you learn a language. To learn your grammar you have to learn the language. Since your goal is to learn the language in the first place why not do just that. Also if you try to extract your kind of grammar to learn it first, then it looks a lot like my kind of grammar. And I see no point in learning that grammar upfront. Your concept seems superfluous.
O.M.
>> and the brain processes these things. The brain needs a model of these things. A grammar.
I really don't think the brain uses any rules that looks, even remotely, like a grammar rule. My intimate conviction is that the brain is a really powerful classifier. It's main activity is to sort through the amount of perceptions we experience all the time. Perceptions that looks alike are “linked”. And what we call memories are “just” some combination of our previously “linked” experiences. This is a very simplistic description, of course, but it is enough for our discussion. I don't think we really know a lot more than that, anyway.
So no, I don't think our brain need a model because our brain creates a model for itself. I don't see how you could teach your brain the model. You can certainly learn the model but this not the same thing.
The rules of addition constitutes a model. Note that addition exists in the numbers without any model. But this model helps us to learn how to add numbers. Sometimes we also memorize tables which improve our response time, most us don't go farther than that. We are then capable to add any numbers, using the rules of the model at a reasonable speed. Now let's compare with someone that add numbers all day long for several years, at that stage that person do not use any rules of the model any more. She instantly knows the answer because her brain has build it's own model. Partly from memory, partly from some internal rules to find the answer.
What I want to emphasize here is the fact that you do not need to learn the mathematical model to arrive at the same level. You could just use a calculator every day. After several years you will be able to do the same thing as easily without the calculator. The difference is that if you are asked to add two numbers you never added before, you are stuck while the first person can go back using the rules. Now if you are smart you will learn the rules, use the calculator and your brain.
What we can learn from this example is that we start from a specific model but at the end our brain creates it's own internal model, anyway. A model a lot faster for all the cases we encountered often enough. Now memorizing the rules of additions takes only a couple of minutes, learning them is a no-brainer. While learning the underlying structure of a language takes a very long time. That's why I prefer to learn the language directly using an abstract grammar to guide me and to give me enough structure so that I do not get stuck in unknown territory.
Seeing the structure helps our brain to build it's own internal model by providing some strong parameters that it can use to classify better.
One thing I'd like to make clear is that the structure of the language is not a cause but a consequence. This is the result of a constraint: we use words to convey meanings. This simple constraint (called language) is enough to give rise to a structure. But that structure does not define the language. Trying to learn it outside the language is like trying to catch waves in an ocean.
O.M.
>> The rules/patterns/whatever that a learner needs to learn need to end up there, somehow or other. The quickest way is surely best, isn't it?
Sure. In my experience reading a lot of content of your choosing is the quickest way to obtain a very high level of comprehension.
>> Perhaps, but whether you consider this "vocabulary learning" or "grammar learning", you still have to learn it somehow.
I call it “usage learning”. Like I do not learn grammar explicitly, I do no learn vocabulary explicitly either. I used to have several Anki decks a few years back that I used every day for about a year. The results were good. But with time I realized that reading every day meaningful content was a lot less boring and as effective if not more, so I stopped. I think that SRS are very powerful if you want to learn a finite list of some kind but there are too many words in a language to learn them effectively that way.
>> In reality, there are very few words that are so irregular as to be totally unique in their usage -- language relies on generalisability to stay manageable.
This is an advantage of learning comprehension by exposure. It does not make any difference whether a word is irregular or not. They are irregular only if you try to compare them.
>> But I would argue that. Who is "we"? If "we" is everybody, why do so many people fail in language learning?
Given that I'm not a teacher my experience is probably limited in that respect. The only thing I can do is to give you my personal opinion build on my own achievement and what I can see around me.
The main problem I think is that many people have absolutely no idea what learning and learning a language in particular is all about. There are classes about a lot of subjects but none about learning how to learn. I think many people just learn the wrong things. Learning grammar rules by heart is certainly one of them. Also they often abandon too soon to see the result of their work. A lot of people do not really want to learn a language, they want to have already learned it. How many people talk about putting grammar rules in an SRS to learn them by heart? Or ask what to do after finishing ? Or where to find new words to learn? They are clueless.
>> Because they're "not paying enough attention"? Because they're not "trying hard enough"? Sorry, no. I've seen people try really hard, and still fail, because they're doing the wrong thing, because they're doing what they've been taught to do, and that's the wrong thing.
Hum, I should have read that before. Glad to see we agree. ;-)
>> In high school, I was successful in French, while most of my classmates weren't. I was given the same lessons as them, the same material as them, but the difference was what I did with it, and that is something that wasn't taught to me.
Well, I was successful too. However I have to add that my level back then was nothing compared to my level today. I even thought I was good but I was wrong. This was a only a promising start.
>> How to do an addition VS adding automatically.
Dammit! Again?
O.M.
>> I'm not necessarily talking about explicit rules, though: grammar can be taught implicitly (an idea that is related to my latest post).
I think I agree with you on the big picture. However I'm not really convinced by your example. Seems like a minor detail to me. It does not look very different from the way I was taught and the results where quite poor.
>> But it needs to be taught, because language without grammar is nothing more than a jumble of words.
I can't agree with that. Like you said before language contains a lot of redundant informations. The context + the meanings of each words is often enough to get a reasonable level of understanding.
Then you can refine if you feel like it until you are satisfied.
>> I don't do that, because yes, it is a complete waste of time. If you know the grammar, if you know how to conjugate, so by definition, you don't need to do perform all conjugations to know them. In my whole time speaking Spanish, I doubt I've used all the conjugations of all the verbs I know, but I would have no problem making that conjugation from my internal model of the grammar.
You learn the conjugation mechanism explicitly, though. I don't. This is the kind of thing I put on my wall and use when needed while I'm reading. At the end I can conjugate anything too but I also have seen countless of meaningful examples in context, from real language with real patterns. And if I have not retained everything I have assimilated a lot of it. This is what I call learning usage in context.
>> But if you haven't learnt all the verb tenses, you're going to be unable to read anything, as most material uses a whole range of them. You can look up words in a dictionary if you know the grammar, you can't look up grammar as easily if you just know the words.
Of course you can read and understand without knowing all the verb tenses. It's harder if you take one sentence to study it in isolation but it is perfectly doable within a text. The context will give you all you need. And if you are really stuck, the whole Internet is waiting for your questions.
I use all the tools I can find to help me. For example, I use morphological analyzers to break words into pieces, so that I can look up the base forms in a dictionary, look up the prefixes, suffixes and what not in a grammar. Take note of the relevant informations in that context (I use a software for that), then move on.
>> Where are you going to find natural language that doesn't use at least half of the available tenses? So at the most basic level, you need the grammar before you can get that exposure.
There is so much content accessible this days, it is really not difficult to find something to read in your target language. You can pick a blog talking about a subject that interest you, for example. In my experience it is more effective to start with one source about one subject with frequent new articles. One source to reduce the style differences, one subject to limit the range of vocabulary and frequent so that you always have something new to read when you want to.
>> Languages are often surprisingly symmetrical at a deep level, and every rule/pattern fully mastered teaches us more about the underlying logic of the language, to the point where eventually new patterns become unsurprising.
Nothing surprising here. Everything that carry information has a structure because the structure comes from the information.
I think we almost agree on what must be learned but disagree on how it can be learned.
O.M.
>> I'm not necessarily talking about explicit rules, though: grammar can be taught implicitly (an idea that is related to my latest post).
I think I agree with you on the big picture. However I'm not really convinced by your example. Seems like a minor detail to me. It does not look very different from the way I was taught and the results where quite poor.
>> But it needs to be taught, because language without grammar is nothing more than a jumble of words.
I can't agree with that. Like you said before language contains a lot of redundant informations. The context + the meanings of each words is often enough to get a reasonable level of understanding.
Then you can refine if you feel like it until you are satisfied.
>> I don't do that, because yes, it is a complete waste of time. If you know the grammar, if you know how to conjugate, so by definition, you don't need to do perform all conjugations to know them. In my whole time speaking Spanish, I doubt I've used all the conjugations of all the verbs I know, but I would have no problem making that conjugation from my internal model of the grammar.
You learn the conjugation mechanism explicitly, though. I don't. This is the kind of thing I put on my wall and use when needed while I'm reading. At the end I can conjugate anything too but I also have seen countless of meaningful examples in context, from real language with real patterns. And if I have not retained everything I have assimilated a lot of it. This is what I call learning usage in context.
>> But if you haven't learnt all the verb tenses, you're going to be unable to read anything, as most material uses a whole range of them. You can look up words in a dictionary if you know the grammar, you can't look up grammar as easily if you just know the words.
Of course you can read and understand without knowing all the verb tenses. It's harder if you take one sentence to study it in isolation but it is perfectly doable within a text. The context will give you all you need. And if you are really stuck, the whole Internet is waiting for your questions.
I use all the tools I can find to help me. For example, I use morphological analyzers to break words into pieces, so that I can look up the base forms in a dictionary, look up the prefixes, suffixes and what not in a grammar. Take note of the relevant informations in that context (I use a software for that), then move on.
>> Where are you going to find natural language that doesn't use at least half of the available tenses? So at the most basic level, you need the grammar before you can get that exposure.
There is so much content accessible this days, it is really not difficult to find something to read in your target language. You can pick a blog talking about a subject that interest you, for example. In my experience it is more effective to start with one source about one subject with frequent new articles. One source to reduce the style differences, one subject to limit the range of vocabulary and frequent so that you always have something new to read when you want to.
>> Languages are often surprisingly symmetrical at a deep level, and every rule/pattern fully mastered teaches us more about the underlying logic of the language, to the point where eventually new patterns become unsurprising.
Nothing surprising here. Everything that carry information has a structure because the structure comes from the information.
I think we almost agree on what must be learned but disagree on how it can be learned.
O.M.
>> Yes, this is a problem. But the solution isn't to avoid speaking, it's to provide more useful and flexible language.
Maybe I shouldn't have said “speak”. Yes the problem is not exactly speaking, the problem is pushing people to create sentences out of thin air. More useful and flexible language certainly can help but only a little bit. I think people should learn to be independent, they should learn how to monitor themselves, they should be able to know what sounds right or not. They must be able to understand what they are saying in comparison to what they want to say. So they must achieve a high level of comprehension first. The easiest and quickest way is to read.
>> Spending an hour or two memorising: "Bonjour, je m'appelle Niall, j'ai onze ans et j'ai un chat" is a waste of time, precisely because it's not teaching me to apply grammar.
This is a waste of time because you spend two hours on just one sentence. Maybe it can help with your pronunciation, though.
>> Stop blaming the student.
Let's be clear. I'm not blaming anyone. This is a testimony about my personal experience and what I observed around me. I'm not here to teach anyone anything. I'm here to give a different perspective and compare it with others. I'm not a teacher, my experience is as a successful learner that was a student at some point. Everyone is free to take or reject what he wants from it.
>> Sadly no teachers are optimally efficient, so no learning is effortless, but we can remove some of the effort.
I don't think learning can be effortless. It will always take some times and some effort. But yes, we can certainly minimize them.
>> But we need to get away from the idea that effort, frustration and confusion are necessary suffrances for the aspiring learner. They are obstacles, and should be removed or reduced wherever possible.
No arguments there. :-)
>> It is again implying that people only fail because of lack of patience or effort, and I've seen lots of people put more patience and effort than me into their languages and guess what? They're not as good as me. Learning that requires effort is inefficient.
I think people fail when they confuse effort with efficiency. Many people believe they learn better when they can feel the difficulty. They are wrong, of course. I think a teacher is the perfect person to explain those kind of distinctions.
O.M.
>> My main focus is to learn a language.
Yes, this is my long term goal. But in the mean time I need a more short term goal to keep going because the learning process in itself is not enough. Reading interesting things is what gives me the energy to continue day after day.
>> It the task at hand (that of reading the book) slows down the process of learning, I'm not interested. If you enjoy the process, do it. But other people don't, and it's not fair to tell them that this means they're lazy when in fact they are just statistically normal human beings.
I don't read books at the beginning. In general books are too long, and use a vocabulary too wide. I prefer short texts (between 200 and 300 words) coming from the same source. Later when my level of comprehension is high enough (I can read fluently), I will read books. But my goal is not to read, my goal is to build my comprehension. In the end, I want to understand spoken language and speak with a level comparable to my native language.
I don't see how that can slow you down. And for the record I am lazy. I'm pretty sure most people are and I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing. Laziness is what pushes me to find more efficient ways.
>> The language, of course. Grammar taught by application, in the correct order, opens up the possibilities of the language.
How do you know which order is the correct one? Do you think the same order works for everyone? And how do you know it really works? One thing I am sure of is that testing accurately the level of a student is no simple task.
O.M.
First: the problem with most grammar books is that the rules have been written to suit the paper, not the brain. The verb table is a perfect example: it looks neat and tidy, but it hides the patterns that recur across tenses (example already given) by having them spread apart, so they're never taught. The problem is that the paper version doesn't actually model the patterns exploited by the native speaker's internal model.
Your arithmetic example is just circular logic: you've applied your beliefs to another domain, claimed this unproven hypothesis to be true, then used it to back up your argument. Has anyone studied learning arithmetic through calculators with no conscious instruction of rules? I sincerely doubt it.
"It does not make any difference whether a word is irregular or not. They are irregular only if you try to compare them."
Sorry, but regular and irregular exist. Regular verbs are not just a coincidence – the brain processes them identically as it's much more efficient to use a rule that to memorise every single case. And irregular verbs are there for a reason too, and again it's efficiency: if you use a verb regularly enough, it is quicker to memorise the paradigm... but not all of it. Have you ever noticed that verbs in a lot of languages are most irregular in the frequent present and past tenses, and then less irregular in the rarer conditional?
The brain generalises, categorises and classifies. But there are cases that interfere with that. For example, Spanish "false masculines" – a word with an initial stressed A takes the definite article "el", usually reserved for masculine words (eg "el agua" and "el águila"). It is easy to incorrectly classify these as masculine based on the evidence, which interferes with the ability to generalise -a endings as feminine.
"There is so much content accessible this days, it is really not difficult to find something to read in your target language."
That's not what I asked. I did not ask about length, interest, or author. I asked where you'd find any source of language that doesn't use at least half of the verb tenses.
The only correct answer I can think of now is sports commentary, and I don't like sport.
"One thing I'd like to make clear is that the structure of the language is not a cause but a consequence."
That's false. Language is both cause and consequence. I learn a language that already exists because it already exists.
"The context + the meanings of each words is often enough to get a reasonable level of understanding."
Structure is a hugely important part of the context. Many studies have shown that most people fail to understand text containing unknown modals, and that it is extremely difficult to learn modals from context alone. Most advocates of exposure just chalk this down as "modals are difficult", but they're actually fairly easy to teach explicitly.
"You learn the conjugation mechanism explicitly, though."
What do you mean by "learn explicitly"? I put an explicit focus on learning them, yes, but I do not learn to recite the rules. In fact, if I had to discuss a rule, I would often embarrass myself by getting it wrong, even though I had learned to apply it right. As I said, I learn to apply the rule.
"At the end I can conjugate anything too but I also have seen countless of meaningful examples in context,"
Define "end". An expert teacher can teach conjugations in a few days, and you won't have seen countless meaningful examples by the end, but you've still got time. And if you know your conjugations, then it's much quicker to read a book, and you won't have need of a morphological analyser, so you can read more.
"How do you know which order is the correct one?"
You make an educated guess based on the internal structure of the language, the frequency of occurence of terms and structures, and the communicative needs of the learner.
After that it's trial and error.
"Do you think the same order works for everyone?"
In theory, I would say I believe there is an order of teaching that is near optimal for everyone.
In practice I say that this is irrelevant, because our current teaching is far from optimal, and therefore far from universal.
My goal in life is to get closer to the optimum and get closer to the universally efficient, but I wouldn't dream I'd ever reach it.
"And how do you know it really works? One thing I am sure of is that testing accurately the level of a student is no simple task."
Indeed. Most language assessment is quantitative (number of errors) when you're working closely with someone, you can make a qualatitive assessment (types of errors). There are certain errors that they wouldn't make if the structure had been taught correctly and completely. That's feedback I use to correct my understanding of the language I'm teaching.
For example, for most of the year I was struggling to work out why my students kept putting participial adjectives after nouns even though they had no problems with normal adjectives.
My approach to correction was inspired by Michel Thomas: I would get them to put a normal adjective in the correct place, and then get them to do the past participle, trying to actively encourage them to link and classify them correctly.
But then I finally realised that the problem was more complicated than that, because the participle is only before the noun when it's unqualified - compare:
the runnning man
the man running from the police.
So I must refine my rule so I can teach it better.
Much though I enjoy your blog, this kind of excellent debate ought to be somewhere that more people can see it. I thought about asking you if I could link to it on HTLAL, but sadly there are too many people there that would take advantage of the fact that you can't reply to score points. There are some good posters on that site about technical aspects of language learning, specific languages, learning techniques etc etc; but I don't know anyone on there posting about this kind of stuff probing the learning process. Besides, I'd say about 25% of HTLALers are good, interesting, informative posters, 25% people just looking for advice and the other 50% consist of a small number of cliques engaged in mutual backslapping these days :-(
I don't know what the solution to that is, maybe you should join unilang or something and post some of your best stuff there...dunno. Anyway, for what it's worth, great debate, I learned a lot.
Anyway, back on topic: are all unqualified participle adjectives really placed before the noun and are all qualified ones really placed after? I'm probably wrong (but hopefully wrong in an interesting way); but I didn't think this was so.
We can talk about a man working or a working man and to me they both seemed like participle adjectives. If you qualify them, they stay in the same place: she was helped by an unusually hardworking man vs she was helped by a man working on the house. In your example, " the man running from the police" doesn't feel to me like a qualified version of "the running man", but rather of "the man running". F you come across a man who has had his wallet stolen and you ask him who took it, and he points at a man running from the police in the distance, I think he is far more likely to say " that man running" than "that running man" If he qualifies it (very likely) it will stay in the same place: "the man running over there (points)" or "the man running from the policeman" etc etc. It seems to me that participles used as adjectives *before* nouns donot lend themselves to qualification, except of degree (a slow-running man). If I'm not wrong (and my apologies if I've made an embarrassing error), then you need to figure out this distinction made with participle adjectives (but not ordinary ones) and teach it to your students.
I don't know what this distinction is, my first thought was that participle adjectives placed before the noun were intrinsic; but then someone can be a slow-running man if he habitually runs slowly, even if he is perfectly capable of running fast. Then I wondered if it has to do with information structure as in the position if adjectives in Spanish. Or what about aspect? A running man seems to usually correspond to a man who runs; while a man running seems to correspond to a man who is running. Doubt it, though: I can imagine lawyer in court referring to "the running man" meaning "the man who was running", which has me thinking about information structure again. Hell, it's late and I'm babbling: let me know what you think.
Missed out a comma after an "if clause" (schoolboy error) that makes one sentence above ambiguous. It should read: "if you qualify it (very likely), it will, stay in the same place, with the comma after "(very likely)" and not after "qualify it". Hope that clarifies the sentence. Sorry.
There's a lot more to these participles than I've managed to get my head around yet.
This was all kicked off by errors students made mostly with past participial adjectives, which are generally clearer because unlike present participles, they're almost never nouns, so one less thing to worry about.
It was just one or two mistakes gave me the impression that they were tying the two participial types together, and I'm now trying to reconcile the two, but they're more different than I thought....
In the past, we have "a wanted man" vs "a man wanted for questioning". The latter is arguably an elided form of "a man who is wanted for question", so it's perhaps a different structure, just that in the Romance languages they've been generalised to the same thing.
Now as to the present: consider the usage of "the running man" vs "the man running". The first is an entity/person, the second is an action, as is clear when we add a verb:
I saw the man running (witnessed that he ran)
I saw the running man
Now if we change that to "dieing", it gets more interesting:
I saw the man dying of cancer (the dying man)
I saw the man dying in a ditch (the man dying)
Now instinctively, I don't like the first type, but I accept it as possible. In both cases, "who is..." is possible, but it doesn't seem to change the fact that the first is equivalent to an adjective in meaning, even if not form.
This is twisting my head, so your input is appreciated.
And don't worry too much about other people's reactions. If you want to share, share, and let people make of it what they will.
Oops... mixed up my dyes and my deaths there...!
Nah, I think you were right and I was just confusing the issue. It's true that you can answer who questions with participles placed after nouns, but they're still not adjectives.
When participles are placed after the noun they are a shortened form of a whole phrase, exactly as you said.
If on a visit to your place of work I ask you which of your colleagues (who I don't know) we are discussing and you wish to avoid pointing, you might answer "the one eating" (never the eating one) and this is obviously an elliptical form of "the one who is eating".
What confused me is that if you answered "the irritating one" (never "the one irritating"), that also seems like a contraction of "the one who is irritating".
What I didn't see was that "the one who is eating" does not correspond to "the one who is irritating", even though both SEEM to have the same form and both are being used to pick out or describe a noun.
One is a verb phrase used to describe a noun and the other a copula + adjective used to describe a noun (and as such the adjective will obviously go in the normal, pre-noun position when used attributively).
You can see this by considering that "he is eating" actually corresponds, not to "he is irritating", but rather to "he is BEING irritating"!
Now, for someone who merely managed to confuse an issue that it turns out you actually understood very well (better than me, anyway) I'm actually feeling pretty chuffed right now because I'd hazard a guess that what confused me is also what confuses your students!!!!!!!
:-)
If I'm right, what is confusing them is that participles used to describe nouns are not always adjectives and they will definitely have seen many of these participles being used after nouns to describe these nouns, due to ellipsis and constructions with "see" and "hear". If an educated native speaker like me (and one who actually studied this stuff on a CELTA course ha ha) can get confused over the superficial resemblance, it's not surprising that learners might to. Perhaps more confusing, indeed, is the fact that the same word can sometimes be an adjective and sometimes not: "the man irritating" is not impossible (though unlikely), but here "irritating" is not being used as an adjective:
Q: Who do you want to punch?
A1: the irritating man
A2: the man irritating my wife (who is irritating my wife).
I'd be really interested to know if this turns out to be what is confusing them! It's always risky having epiphanies at 2am: sometimes they still look great in the morning, other times you reread them the next day and wonder how you could have written anything so dumb ha ha.
:-)
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