I'm sure you've noticed the decline in English usage in society. Even people who communicate for a living don't seem to know, for example, that it's one criterion, and more than one two or more criteria. Making sure the subject and the verb agreed with each other in number used to be automatic. Nowadays, it's depressingly common to read or hear of one person doing something with "their" possessions. [Oops. Edited 12/19.]
In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky developed a theory of transformative-generative grammar (TG) to deal with the "deep meaning" of English sentences.
English is perfectly capable of generating ambiguous sentences, such as "Visiting relatives can be boring." TG can elucidate the deep meaning of such sentences, teasing out the difference between "Relatives who visit can be boring" and "Going to visit relatives can induce boredom". (Another example, two sentences with identical structure but very different deep structure: "Alice is easy to please" / "Alice is eager to please" / Proper-noun, copula, adjective, verb infinitive. The two sentences are exactly opposite in terms of who is the recipient of the action in the infinitive phrase.)
TG is a very powerful and useful theory, and became the standard way of diagramming sentences in linguistics. Unfortunately, it was adopted into grade school curricula, and attempts were made to have students learn it instead of traditional grammar.
Unfortunately, TG was developed as a tool for understanding grammar, not for teaching it. The effect of trying to teach TG was like trying to have students learn to read whole words at once before they had mastered phonics, or learn number theory before they had learned basic arithmatic. Students come away with a knowledge base that doesn't relate to anything they know, and not knowing the basic material they need to relate to what they were actually taught.
In the 60s and 70s, students still had teachers who had mastered grammar. Now, the next generation of teachers never learned the stuff, and have long forgotten the TG they did learn. The blind lead the blind, and the teaching of English has fallen into the ditch.
2 comments:
"Even people who communicate for a living don't seem to know, for example, that it's one criterion, and more than one criteria."
Oops. More than one criterion, or several criteria.
But yes indeed, current teaching of reading and writing is even worse than when I was in grade school in the Fifties.
And now there is discussion about whether or not it is EVER proper to use the em-dash (hyphen = N-dash: M-dash is a break, would be a pause in speaking usually followed by emphasising the next phrase) and the ellipsis (another pause, either followed by a continuation without emphasis or not followed at all, leaving it to the reader/listener to continue.) They may be over-used, and used improperly, but banning them does not seem the proper response. At least, not to me...
You got me there. That's what I get for rushing, rather than waiting for the best phrasing to come to me.
"One *criterion*, two or more *criteria*."
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