[Xmca-l] Re: The Becomeliness of the Young

[David Kellogg]

Henry--

Yes, the distinction between phasal and semantic is Chapter Six of Thinking
and Speech, and it's in the context of foreign language teaching: in the
foreign language, we get the phasal aspects before the semantics, and in
native language learning it's the other way around. This is a much more
precise and useful way of thinking about it than "performance before
competence" (Courtney Cazden) or "competence before performance" (Chomsky),
both of which ignore the fact that children speak very small languages.

And that's where we really have to tweak the matrix of phasal (syntagmatic)
and semantic (paradigmatic) a little. Saussure did this by using
"associative" instead of paradigmatic: he thought that associations could
go every which way, and so it didn't make sense to think of a fixed menu of
options the way you really have to in order to arrive at a synoptic
description of what people are doing when they construct a clause. Besides,
associative psychology is a mug's game: as Vygotsky says, it's either
ridiculous or meaningless or both. But it DOES make sense to think of the
semantic paradigm as organized from concrete to abstract, or specific to
general, or sense to signification. And it does make sense to think of the
phasal syntagm as proceding always from given information to new, and from
the speaker's point of view to the necessarily more general one of the
hearer.

As we ascend the semantic axis towards the abstract, we do find that it
includes more and more information from the context of culture and less and
less from the context of situation, and this does seem to bend the axis
towards the syntagmatic (e.g. when the next idea that "follows on" is
actually an example, or an elaboration, rather than a new idea). Similarly,
as we follow the syntagmatic axis through proof-reading and proof-hearing,
we find that it bends in the direction of the paradigmatic (e.g. when the
discourse leaves the immediate context and seeks to generalize, as we've
been doing on this thread). This means that the two axes will eventually be
meet, as it were, at the antipode of the origin (e.g. number instead of
concrete object).

Do you know this Handbook of Educational Psych by I. Weiner? Well, Chapter
Seven is a very interesting paper by John-Steiner and Mahn which cites a
mysterious and enigmatic H. Shonerd on classroom meaning making in foreign
language teaching. Shonerd describes self-repair in the foreign language
classroom, and then he cites Wolfgang Klein: "Language learning is making a
raincoat in the rain". It makes more sense in Korean; there is a
traditional kind of rain coat here made of roofing rice stalks tied
together.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 8:55 AM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote:

> Dude,
> I was going to go for a walk, having done more thinking today than usuall
> because I get literally feverish. But let’s play in a child’s way, without
> exactly naming the game, but implying it with gesture in language. With
> emails so much dependent on timing and sequencing of the posts, the calls
> and responses. This is syntagmatics and forms its own field and vice versa.
> This is our dialog relating our takes on this and that. Pointing subtly
> (ha!), like my Navajo friends, with their lips slightly pointing by
> pouting, at the name of the game, thus telling a story instead. Here’s a
> move, a gesture for you, that Halliday and Langacker can, through us, talk
> to each other, even if neither one of us can talk respectfully (at least
> yet) with Chomsky. I have already been humbled on this chat for my
> presumptiousness in critcizing Chomsky. I confess anyway that I don’t
> entirely understand what you said about Chomsky. If I understood better,
> maybe I could understand how I could talk to him without making a damn fool
> of myself. So, I won’t name the game, but that’s my drash on what it is
> we’re playing. “drash” in Yiddsh, is a clipping from Herbrew “midrash”,
> translated broadly as “exegesis.” All of this gesturing makes me think that
> when we say syntagmatic it is not two dimensional. Not just sequencing
> along a single temporal line, but across zeitgeists. All of these nods to
> linguistics should not mean we are playing at linguistics. That would be
> naming the game.
>
> Finally, or this will never end, I appreciated your whole damned email.
> Got to go for that walk!
>
> Henry
>
> > On Apr 3, 2018, at 4:00 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks, Henry--you read a lot better than I write: I didn't actually
> > mention free will, but of course that IS the highest form of behavior and
> > the Central Neoformation of adolescence! I also much appreciated the
> links
> > to reviews, as I never watch Western movies (not because I can't stay
> awake
> > but because they sometimes trigger a recurring nightmare of my own--I
> guess
> > we have all led interesting lives somewhere...).
> >
> > I do hope that Peter (Feigenbaum) hasn't ghosted on this conversation,
> > because I think that the emergence of free will in adolescence ("coming
> of
> > age", in most cultures) is related to the issue he raised earlier, the
> > issue of whether conscious awareness precedes or follows decision making
> > and all of its consequences. In the days of Chomskyan hegemony in
> > linguistics, this was thought of in terms of "performance before
> > competence", as opposed to "competence before performance".This way of
> > posing the problem, however, inevitably introduces an unhelpful dualism.
> > Since competence is really only accessible through performance, it is (as
> > Laplace remarked to Napoleon a propos the use of God in his cosmology) a
> > hypothesis of which we have no need. All we really need is the notion of
> > meaning potential, something that is constantly being made meaning actual
> > and thus activating new potential in turn. Awareness isn't something
> > separate from this cycle; it forms part of it at every point. This is not
> > just Halliday; it's the way that Vygotsky introduces "deliberate
> > semantics" in Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech, and thus forms
> another
> > important NEW point that is lost when we focus only on what is OLD in
> > Vygotsky.
> >
> > Why does Vygotsky distinguish between "phasic" and "semantic" aspects of
> > speech? It turns out that the "phasal" properties of language are ALL the
> > syntagmatic ones--not just syntax, but also the stringing together of
> > morpho-phonemes into lexeme-syllables, of  lexeme-syllables into
> > clause-utterances, and even of clause-utterances into paragraphs. It is
> all
> > the stuff that "follows on" in language, including transitivity and
> > ergativity. But the way you "follow on" is by choosing stuff that "fits
> > in". You get to choose (for example, you get to choose whether you will
> say
> > "Let's play a game", as adults do, or just "Let's play" as little
> children
> > do, and if you choose the "game", you can choose to name the game or
> leave
> > it to others. Both choosing and not choosing are choices, and such
> choices
> > happen at every level: when we spell a word, when we make a sentence,
> when
> > we write a posting for xmca. It's free will, because at every point there
> > is a recognition of necessity.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Sangmyung University
> >
> > Recent Article in *Early Years*
> >
> > The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
> > child’s first interrogatives
> > <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>
> >
> > Free e-print available at:
> > https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Apr 4, 2018 at 12:54 AM, HENRY SHONERD <hshonerd@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> David,
> >> I was thinking about ergativity, free will and the becomliness of the
> >> young thanks to your post and the movie that my wife and I watched last
> >> night (at home): Lady Bird. Here’s a review of the movie:
> >>
> >> http://www.indiewire.com/2018/03/lady-bird-the-florida-
> >> project-coming-of-age-movies-oscars-1201936864/ <
> http://www.indiewire.com/
> >> 2018/03/lady-bird-the-florida-project-coming-of-age-movies-
> >> oscars-1201936864/>
> >>
> >> I was wondering whether you or others find this triangle (ergativity,
> free
> >> will and the becomliness of the young) compelling, or even interesting.
> >> Lady Bird is about the coming of a girl in her senior year at a Catholic
> >> high school in Sacramento, California, coincidentally where I went to
> >> college as an undergraduate. The movie resonates with Stand By Me, a
> coming
> >> of age movie I liked a lot.The difference is that Lady Bird is about an
> >> adolescent-to-adult transformation of a someone becoming a woman and
> Stand
> >> by Me is a boy-to-adolescent transformation of a boy. Another big
> >> difference is that adults are majorly present in Lady Bird and
> non-existent
> >> in Stand By Me. My wife thinks Lady Bird was too long and fell asleep
> >> during several scenes. I’m glad I stayed awake, though the movie wasn’t
> the
> >> roller coaster ride of Get Out. (Which, by the way, is a coming of age
> in
> >> adulthood.) Anyway, I am very interested in what is called free will and
> >> making choices. All three of the movies I cite are about making choices,
> >> choices made by characters with agency, but would you call their choices
> >> out of free will. Or is it more an ergative process? Becoming, a form
> >> and/or a noun logogentically. It is not a subject acting on an object,
> as
> >> in “My mother made me do it". In Lady Bird both mother and father are
> major
> >> parts of the girl’s Social Situation of Development, but she is
> certainly
> >> making choices that conflict with the wishes of her mother. Yet, at the
> end
> >> of the movie, you can see her mom had a huge influence on her choices.
> Lady
> >> Bird was free in the sense of coming to understand these influences AND,
> >> arguably, free because she worked through the crises unalienated from
> her
> >> mother. I think I like this movie most because of how parents are an
> >> integral and positive (thought troubled) part of the becomilness of this
> >> young Lady Bird, somwhere between a girl and a woman. Perhaps you, or
> >> others, can think of other movies about the becomliness of other
> girls/boys
> >> becoming women/men . Or books. Or whatever.
> >>
> >> I realize now that your new subject line resonates totally with previous
> >> posts on activism out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas:
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjory_Stoneman_Douglas. <
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjory_Stoneman_Douglas> I want to
> >> remember her name, just as I remember the name of Amy Biehl, the name
> of a
> >> highschool in Albuquerque where my son is now teaching. (
> >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Biehl <https://en.wikipedia.org/
> >> wiki/Amy_Biehl>). Marjory lived to be old. Amy died young in South
> Africa
> >> in the fight against aparteid. I would live to tell anyone listening how
> >> she died. It will make you cry in joy and pain. But that’s for another
> >> post, if anyone cares.
> >>
> >> Herny
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Apr 2, 2018, at 3:40 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Both van der Veer and Zavershneva are textual historians; this creates
> a
> >>> strong bias, in the article recently circulated, towards what is OLD in
> >>> Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech and makes them overlook precisely
> >> what
> >>> is NEW and those precisely what is most interesting and specific to the
> >>> text. But in my previous rather incoherent comments, I simply focused
> on
> >>> the obvious fact that they left out my own reading of the chapter: how
> >> the
> >>> different planes of feeling, thinking, self-directed speaking and other
> >>> directed speaking fit into the overall argument of the book, which is
> >> first
> >>> phylogenetic, then ontogenetic, and at last logogenetic.
> >>>
> >>> Here's a better example. When I re-read Chapter Seven, what strikes me
> is
> >>> the emphasis on concepts as process not product, as energy and not
> >> entity.
> >>> In the Pedology of the Adolescent, there's something similar: Vygosky
> is
> >>> trying to show how all of the contradictions of the young are linked in
> >>> some way to a "Central Contradiction" which he will later call the
> Social
> >>> Situation of Development. That central contradiction is "the
> >>> non-coincidence of sexual, general organic, and sociocultural
> >> maturation";
> >>> in other words, the fact that in humans the ability to reproduce is
> >> getting
> >>> earlier and earlier but the ability to produce is getting later and
> >> later.
> >>> This produces a phenomenon we might call the "becomeliness of the
> >>> young"--the fact that the adolescent is always becoming and never
> >>> quite being.
> >>>
> >>> Mike promised us an anecdote on ergativity in Russian--that is,
> processes
> >>> that simply unfold through a medium, like "the door opened", where the
> >>> opening is something that unfolds by means of a door rather than the
> >>> product of an action on an object. In a weird way, this problem seems
> >>> related to me. English and other Standard European Languages (SAEs, as
> >>> Whorf called them) underwent a big transition in the sixteenth century,
> >>> from sentences based on heroic transformative actions ("We reached
> India"
> >>> or "We conquered America" or "We colonized Africa") to sentences based
> on
> >>> something like equations: "The angle of refracted light was in
> proportion
> >>> to the plumpness of the lens," as Newton wrote.
> >>>
> >>> But as Halliday points out, the Newtonian solution is not a stable one:
> >> in
> >>> the typical "to be" sentence on which scientific writing in English is
> >> now
> >>> based, "being" is construed as a process requiring two "be-ers" which
> are
> >>> iin some way equal but not redundant ("The rate of crack growth is
> equal
> >> to
> >>> the pressure exerted on the receptive surface"). This Newtonian
> solution
> >>> addresses but doesn't solve the problem of describing the environment
> as
> >> a
> >>> process unfolding in itself and in that process transforming us, not
> >> simply
> >>> an object to be transformed by us. The ergative transformation of
> English
> >>> is one way to try to solve this problem, it suggests, as Vygotsky did
> iin
> >>> Chapter Seven, a concept based on becoming rather than being.
> >> Adolescence,
> >>> like any other concept, is a process unfolding through a medium and not
> >> an
> >>> object being acted upon by a subject.
> >>>
> >>> David Kellogg
> >>> Sangmyung University
> >>>
> >>> Recent Article in *Early Years*
> >>>
> >>> The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and
> the
> >>> child’s first interrogatives
> >>> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>
> >>>
> >>> Free e-print available at:
> >>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full
> >>
> >>
>
>
>