[Xmca-l] That on That

[David Kellogg]

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