Why do we teach prescriptive grammar?

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 12:52 am

Yes, I told you, I'm now focusing on Chinese and not TEFL. (Hadn't you noticed!?) As Revel says, the rotten teachers always quit..... Shuntang is giving me private classes.

So what, oh tetchy one, well, that means that objective past and subjective present are all bundled up together in the present perfect continuous bag, innit?

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 12:58 am

Hallelujah! The right-hand margin has reverted to its rightful place, so this page 5 is now the spiffy standard size we all know and love. (Actually, I was waiting for that to happen. Sad, eh!).

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 1:27 am

You resemble Shun a little yourself, by the way, in posting habits. He could have a fine long chat with himself too!

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 1:30 am

Stop talking to yerselves, woody!!!

Scott.Sommers · Post by **Scott.Sommers** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 11:46 pm

My brother has pointed out that there are national security reasons for the concern about prescriptive grammar.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/techn ... 3next.html

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 1:37 am

WHAT'S NEXT
With Terror in Mind, a Formulaic Way to Parse Sentences
By NOAH SHACHTMAN
Published: March 3, 2005
A company has developed a method to parse electronic documents almost instantly, and diagram all of the sentences inside.

That's all that's initially available at the link you provided, Scott. Can you explain a little more (and perhaps save me needing to become a registered member, if you are one already)?

It just seems a little strange to suggest that a person's syntax would allow anybody to identify that person as a terrorist, potential or otherwise. I'm imagining that the article is very much in the "popular" science mode (that is, "science fiction"), and that the intelligence agencies will need to continue to closely read e.g. emails between actual suspected terrorists in the US (and it is unlikely they are using English to communicate, unless they are the "homegrown" sort of terrorist), and then, "read between the lines" more often than not.

http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=2776

A somewhat related story:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 1940#11940 ('Brain changes between telling truth and lying', as summarized on the 'Does Chinese take more brain power?' thread).

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 1:44 am

A-HA!
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/language ... 01955.html

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 2:23 am

From the NYT's article itself:

"We have guys who can crack hard drives," Mr. Alexander said. "Getting the information out is easy. The hard part is sharing it, and organizing it, so that everybody in an agency, even nonexperts, can use it."

That Mr Alexander sounds like a very scrupulous guy.

Attensity's algorithms can do more than get a document ready to categorize, however. The software ferrets out meaning in sentences as they are being diagramed. If the word "purchase" is used as a verb, the person doing the buying is tagged as a possible customer. If the phrase "plastic explosive" is used as an object, the subject is labeled as a potential enemy.

If I was a terrorist I'd be inclined to use silly, ever-changing names like "(Mr) Cupcakes", and codewords (again, ever-changing) such as "plasticine" or "textbooks". That way, I could divert the intelligence agencies into arresting lots of totally innocent Dave's ESL Cafe users.

I could just about understand what Mark Liberman had to say about the NYT article:

Shachtman seems to think that "diagramming sentences" is a matter of assigning part-of-speech labels to words. But actually, it's a kind of parsing, which assigns structural labels and relationships, recursively, to groups of words. On the other hand, "subject" and "object" are not "parts of speech", but rather (simplifying a bit) relationships between a noun phrase and verb. So Shachtman is recursively confused -- "diagramming sentences" is more than "picking out parts of speech", but two of the four examples he gives of "parts of speech" are actually examples of the type of relationships among groups of words that "diagramming sentences" is supposed to describe. And showing "all the actors, objects and actions in a document" would be another level of analysis entirely.

I think I'll need to scurry back to my Kennedy (he discusses tagging at least in some detail)!

This seemed a "good enough" summary by Martha Palmer:

It looks like good ol' muc technology, souped up regular expression pattern matching....w/ some pos tagging and some semantic grammar rules...

(and lots of hype, or course!)

Oh, I loved the title to Liberman's article ('Computer does something-or-other to Moby *beep* -- in 9.5 seconds')!