Re: [xmca] Presidential Syntax a Shock

People watching the US elections in Australia immediately
recognised Sarah Pallin as your version of Pauline Hansen
(Hauling Pantsdown to her friends).

PH was famously interviewed while at the height of her
rancid racist powers by an ABC representative of the
latte-sipping chardonnay socialist elite, who asked her if
she was xenophobic. PH replied "Please explain".

These words are now legendary because with those two little
words she won several million votes and had consolidated her
place in history. Every uneducated person who hated the way
the world was changing, felt nostalgia for the good old days
when there weren't any bleeding foreigners in the street,
and resented peopple who could read a book and got all the
best jobs, etc., identified with her.

I think your Republicans choose people who can't give a
speech and don't even have a passport, let alone know where
to find Iraq on the map, so that the Cheneys of this world
can get on with running the country while all those people
who love their guns and bibles vote for the nice gal like us
who the journalists are always making fun of, ... etc.

Andy

David Kellogg wrote:
> The following utterly incompatible hypotheses are all held by prominent linguists of one kind or another. Not only that, there exists an extensive body of data which supports each one.
>
> a) "Wild grammars" of the sort we see when we try to diagramme Palin's sentences are humanly impossible. They are performance errors caused by lapses in attention, and therefore rare (Chomsky). For an unsuccessful attempt to diagramme the prose of Sarah Palin, see:
>
> http://www.slate.com/id/2201158/
>
> b) The vast majority of sentences spoken in everyday life are actually not sentences at all, but sentence fragments. Completing a sentence is actually quite rare. (Sacks)
>
> c) Spoken language is by nature more complex than written language, if we look at it syntactically and ignore complex vocabulary. Yet no matter how complex spoken sentences appear, they usually do work out grammatically. This is notoriously untrue of written language, as any proofreader knows (Halliday)
>
> d) Written language is by nature more complex than spoken language, if we look at it syntactically. It is also more accurate, and these two circumstances account for its greater prestige and lesser learnability. (Johnson)
>
> It seems to me possible that at various points of development I think ALL of these things are true, and therein lies a developmental theory. Education might be reconceptualized as a double reconstrual: first the child reconstrues complex discourse, the sort we seen when preschoolers nag their parents for hours on end, as complex grammar, to complex grammar, the sort we observe in older children and at school. Second, the child has to learn to reconstrue complex grammar as complex vocabulary in order to master literacy, and particularly scientific literacy. This is the school learning that Vygotsky talks about.
>
> What is true of education might even be true of historical development. Medieval poetry is characterized by complex text, and renaissance prose by complex syntax. This is reconstrued as modern scientific English (the syntax of which is actually quite simple) in the late renaissance, by Newton and Galileo.
>
> So development is not an illusion. Morphologically complex vocabulary and complex discourse cannot be said to "mutually constitute each other". Complex grammar is not a game everybody can play, and neither is esoteric lexis. There are certain stages of language development which imply and require earlier stages, and this dependency is not reciprocal.
>
> THAT'S why there is a general sense that Obama is more educated than Palin, although in fact I've found lots of grammar mistakes in his speeches, and even in the final exams he set as a professor at University of Chicago back in 1996.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
> --- On Thu, 11/20/08, cconnery@ithaca.edu <cconnery@ithaca.edu> wrote:
>
> From: cconnery@ithaca.edu <cconnery@ithaca.edu>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Presidential Syntax a Shock
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Thursday, November 20, 2008, 8:26 AM
>
> Actually, I think the article on Obama's use of syntax was written tounge-in
> cheek, as a spoof of Palin's garble. If one rereads it a second time, the
> message is a little clearer.
> Best,
> Cathrene
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-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 
Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm
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