[Xmca-l] Re: That on That

[mike cole]

Lots of interesting thoughts in your emails, David. "Essays on a
Hallidayan Pedology"
perhaps?

Have your read the Vygotsky notebooks? They must contain endless topics for
discussion.

mike

On Sat, Feb 17, 2018 at 7:32 AM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> Consider the following sentence, which was, according to the recent
> indictment, sent by a Russian agent posing as an American citizen to the
> Republican presidential campaign in 2016.
>
> "We gained a huge lot of followers and decided to somehow help Mr. Trump
> get elected."
>
> Of course, many American citizens write like this. But even staunch Trump
> supporters would find the word order oddly un-American sounding in at least
> two places, the noun group "a huge lot" and the verb group"decided to
> somehow help". And they would be right. But why?
>
> The answer is that elements in a noun or a verb group in English have a
> certain functional order. We sometimes teach this in very complicated ways,
> e.g. "size, color, age, material, function" to explain "big brown leather
> handbag". But describing the problem is too example-driven: it lacks the
> generality and generative power of theory: for example, it doesn't account
> for quantifiers like "many", "few", "a lot of" or for deictics like "this",
> "that", "these", "those", and "the", and it can't explain why things have
> that order in English. It also won't explain our verb group: it won't tell
> us why "to somehow help Mr. Trump get elected" somehow sounds more foreign
> than "to boldly go where no man has gone before". Finally, it won't tell us
> anything about how this order develops in children: what they learn first
> and what they learn next.
>
> Vygotsky will explain all this, with a little help from Halliday. In
> Chapter Five of Thinking and Speech, he argues that children learn
> syncretic "heaps" first ("That on that"). There are three kinds of these
> (purely syncretic, spatial, and two-stage) but what they all have in common
> is that they are "deictic"--the main purpose is "that on that". Then come a
> variety of complexes, which include the concrete, objective, "factual"
> properties: number, size, shape, etc. Only then do we find concepts, and
> these too come in two different varieties: everyday and academic. The
> everyday are distinguished by modifiers at the same level of generality as
> the concept (e.g. "leather handbag"), and the academic are distinguished by
> conceptual hiearchies that involve different levels of generality (e.g. "a
> type of personal accessory").
>
> In Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, we learn that groups are
> just like clauses. They start with a Theme (an element which is speaker
> oriented, the "point of departure" of the speaker) and they end with a
> Rheme (an element which is hearer oriented, the place where the speaker
> comes in). Like clauses, groups tend to go from me to you, from old to new,
> from deictic words to defining ones.That's why we start a noun group with
> "a", "the", or "some". That's why we continue it with numbers, and then
> with descriptors (which go from speaker-oriented-subjective to
> hearer-oriented-objective), and that's why scientific "classifiers" come
> after judgmental epithets. "A huge lot" is functionally misordered, because
> it starts with a deictic but then puts in a descriptive before the
> numerative (like "little three pigs" or "black four and twenty birds baked
> into a pie"). With verb groups, the modifiers can go before or after the
> verb, but not in the middle: "somehow to help" or "to help somehow". But if
> we say "to somehow help" it really appears that "somehow" is part of the
> meaning of the verb itself (as in "to boldly go") and not the means of the
> action.
>
> Halliday explains how they are ordered. But Vygotsky explains why.
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
> Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
> Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'
>
> Free e-print available (for a short time only) at
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full
>