The Prescriptive Period
The period of time when prescriptive grammar evolved in England was the second half of the 17th century and the early 18th century. It was known as the Prescriptive Period. England had been through many problems both politically and socially. There were three major forces that affected the intellectual climate of this period:
1. A desire to control and regulate society and language.
2. An increased interest in English rather than Latin.
3. A look to the past as a time of linguistic"purity".
Four literary figures went about the regulatin of language: John Dryden, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swife and Samuel Johnson. They had three goals:
1. To standardize English
2. To refine English
3. To ascertain English (to fix the language once and for all)
They felt the best way to do this was with an authoritative dictionary that could be used as a standard by which to judge usage. They planned to open an academy and through it the dictionary would be written and published. After numerous attempts were tried without success, the idea was dropped.
In 1755, however, Samuel Johnson did publish a dictionary that he hoped would fix the pronunciation of the English language. During this period, many grammar books were also published establishing rules of grammar.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
A Formula for Predicting Readability
According to Robert P. Gunning, the Wall Street Journal an award for having “the most readable front page in the country.” Gunning’s way of coming to this conclusion was simple, he had found the difficulty of other front pages by using a formula. After using this readability formula, he found that the Wall Street Journal was the “most readable.”
Until recently, the objective techniques used by journalist were mainly used in children books. These techniques, however, have been knows for about 25 years and have been written about in educational journals, doctoral dissertations, Masters’ theses, etc. One question that people are asking is, “What has caused people to start reusing these techniques?”
The war period has helped people to realize how important these techniques are. More people are having to fill out tax forms, buy war bonds and so on. These techniques for making articles more readably have made things so much easier.
There are a couple of different ways to determine the readability of an article. The Lorge formula was one of the first and easiest formulas to use. By using this, it only took a short time to predict the readability of an article and make it easier to read. This formula is used by counting the number of uncommon words, the average sentence length, and the number of prepositional phrases.
Rudolf Flesch produced another formula in 1943. With the use of correlation tables he showed that the Lorge formula failed to discriminate satisfaction between materials above the eighth grade level in difficulty. Average adults are usually around the eighth or ninth grade level, Flesch felt that there needed to be a better way of determining the difficulty readability. His formula provided three different techniques. The average sentence length, number of affixed morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, etc), and a relative number of personal references were his ways of determining readability. After using this formula while reading materials published by the National Tuberculosis Association, they formula was found adequate. But not everything was correct. The number of affixes came up different and was difficult to keep count of all of them and was very time consuming to keep counting. Flesch later dropped the count of abstract words in his formula.
The main objective to using the Dale List of 769 words was that it did not differentiate between the higher levels of difficulty. The second downfall to Flesch’s formula was the count of personal references. This is not reliable because in most readings, things we say are not abstract or general. In the article, American Psychologists by S.S. Stevens and Geraldine Stone reported that Flesch’s formula was not as accurate as people thought.
After viewing the downfalls to this formula, a more efficient way of predicting readability was found. The hypothesis was to find a larger word list instead of affixes, personal references don’t really add up to that much, and a shorter formula could be created to make this more efficient. After doing an experiment, it was found that certain words that scored higher in other formulas, weren’t really difficult words at all. After making several combinations of factors, there was a new and better two-factor formula. By using a factor of vocabulary load (number of words outside the Dale list of 3,000 words) and a factor of sentence structure, this was a good way of predicting readability.
After correcting the grade levels, it helped to interpret scores obtained by the formula. For adults, the corrected grade levels may be interpreted by the number of years of schooling required to read the material and understand it.
The article did not claim that the formula would be definitive. It is believed, however, that this is a short cut in judging the difficulty in material. This formula can also be an aid in simplifying text.
It is said that you must be cautious about “writing for a readability formula.” A formula is a statistical device and it means that longer sentences make comprehension more difficult. It states that a readers purpose in reading and interest and background must also be taken into consideration.
Until recently, the objective techniques used by journalist were mainly used in children books. These techniques, however, have been knows for about 25 years and have been written about in educational journals, doctoral dissertations, Masters’ theses, etc. One question that people are asking is, “What has caused people to start reusing these techniques?”
The war period has helped people to realize how important these techniques are. More people are having to fill out tax forms, buy war bonds and so on. These techniques for making articles more readably have made things so much easier.
There are a couple of different ways to determine the readability of an article. The Lorge formula was one of the first and easiest formulas to use. By using this, it only took a short time to predict the readability of an article and make it easier to read. This formula is used by counting the number of uncommon words, the average sentence length, and the number of prepositional phrases.
Rudolf Flesch produced another formula in 1943. With the use of correlation tables he showed that the Lorge formula failed to discriminate satisfaction between materials above the eighth grade level in difficulty. Average adults are usually around the eighth or ninth grade level, Flesch felt that there needed to be a better way of determining the difficulty readability. His formula provided three different techniques. The average sentence length, number of affixed morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, etc), and a relative number of personal references were his ways of determining readability. After using this formula while reading materials published by the National Tuberculosis Association, they formula was found adequate. But not everything was correct. The number of affixes came up different and was difficult to keep count of all of them and was very time consuming to keep counting. Flesch later dropped the count of abstract words in his formula.
The main objective to using the Dale List of 769 words was that it did not differentiate between the higher levels of difficulty. The second downfall to Flesch’s formula was the count of personal references. This is not reliable because in most readings, things we say are not abstract or general. In the article, American Psychologists by S.S. Stevens and Geraldine Stone reported that Flesch’s formula was not as accurate as people thought.
After viewing the downfalls to this formula, a more efficient way of predicting readability was found. The hypothesis was to find a larger word list instead of affixes, personal references don’t really add up to that much, and a shorter formula could be created to make this more efficient. After doing an experiment, it was found that certain words that scored higher in other formulas, weren’t really difficult words at all. After making several combinations of factors, there was a new and better two-factor formula. By using a factor of vocabulary load (number of words outside the Dale list of 3,000 words) and a factor of sentence structure, this was a good way of predicting readability.
After correcting the grade levels, it helped to interpret scores obtained by the formula. For adults, the corrected grade levels may be interpreted by the number of years of schooling required to read the material and understand it.
The article did not claim that the formula would be definitive. It is believed, however, that this is a short cut in judging the difficulty in material. This formula can also be an aid in simplifying text.
It is said that you must be cautious about “writing for a readability formula.” A formula is a statistical device and it means that longer sentences make comprehension more difficult. It states that a readers purpose in reading and interest and background must also be taken into consideration.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Excursion in Recursion: Language & Cognition in the Piraha
In the May 2006 Der Spiegel, Rafaela von Bredow profiles the Piraha people of Brazil. Over three decades ago, linguist Daniel Everett stumbled across an anomaly in the Brazilian forests: a band of around 350 tribal people known as the Piraha. He kept his “find” to himself because as he puts it “I simply didn’t trust myself.” What he didn’t trust was his initial analysis of their language. He admits that their language is “tremendously difficult to learn.” Given the well-known errors of linguistic anthropologist of days gone by who are all but too eager to plant their academic “flag” on a new discovery only to have their work debunked by the next generation, caution is a good sign. Fellow linguist and Piraha scholar, Peter Gordon, is "concerned the Piraha will simply become one more scientific oddity, to be exploited and analyzed right down to their feces."
An example of academic overconfidence involves the Eskimo language. Yes, I know that there is no such thing as an Eskimo; indigenous people of the Arctic are Inuit and Yupik, if they are found in our hemisphere. Although many social science textbooks still state otherwise, it is not the case that they have 50, 100 or even 500+ words for “snow.” The truth is that their languages are what linguists term agglutinative. This means that they can string morpheme after morpheme together in a seemingly endless line and call it a word. In other words, anthropologists might hear “snow-that-fell-the-night-before-when-the-moon-was-full” and call it a new “word” for snow. (German is also known to be an agglutinative language, but I will bow to our native speaker to expound on that.)
I started to question whether von Bredow's confident assertion that the Piraha "have no history, no descriptive words, and no subordinate clauses." I “Wikied”--I know that Wikipedia isn't proper in formal research, but thought it would be okay for blog purposes--the Piraha, and discovered that their language is, indeed, agglutinative. To an English speaker like me, those agglutinated words might as well be subordinate clauses, because that is how I perceive their function. I also discovered that males and females have different languages. This is not uncommon in cultures with strict gender-defined roles. Another aspect of their language that may prove difficult for the native English speaker is the tonal element. Everett notes two tones that are meaning-laden. Other linguists claim three or more. Since they don’t agree, they are not hearing the same thing that the Piraha are. This makes me wonder what else they might not understand.
So although I question their lack of recursion and also question von Bredow's arguments on that score, some of her points were, indeed, valid. Whorf has been resurrected from mid last century in order to explain their lack of a counting system. The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that states that words help us think our thoughts. This idea dates back to the dawn of linguistics in the writings of classical Indian scholars Pingala and Patanjali, but it took the British 2,000+ years to "discover" it, and plant their own flag. Yes, in fact, proving that words matter!
I don't doubt the influence of language on thought, but I am not convinced that Whorf's theory is the operative agent in the phenomenon that is the inability of the Piraha to count to ten.
All sources agree that the Piraha are intelligent people. They are genetically related to neighboring tribes that do have counting words in their vocabulary. Their language is an isolate, a remnant from a group that is extinct but for their branch. It is documented decisively that they are counting impaired. What other conclusion could be reached?
At least, two things bother me about this picture. First, it is also stated that they have two color words that indicate light and dark. Sounds strange to us, but this is more common that you may think. It also indicates a classic linguistic progression. Their language would have the next color word added indicating red. Does this mean that they are color-blind? No. Linguistically, orange would not be a "color" word in English because it has a juicy, citrus fruit as its primary referent. Second, I posit Piaget, Montessori, and Steiner pedagogies of learning numbers may be more relevant in exploring the Piraha deficiency. If number concepts were so hard-wired into our human brains, would we spend so much preschool time exposing them to our own children? If language acquisition has windows of opportunity, perhaps, counting has an even more rigid time frame.
If it does hold true that these tribal peoples are without past or future and that they live absolutely in the present, then they will be of interest not only to the academics of the world, but also the Zen monks who strive for decades to achieve what the Piraha have as a birth right: Present Mind. My fears run along with Peter Gordon, that the tribal people may have more to suspect from the "friendly academics" than they do the ethically-suspect traders from "civilized" Brazil. The perils are too numerous to count.
An example of academic overconfidence involves the Eskimo language. Yes, I know that there is no such thing as an Eskimo; indigenous people of the Arctic are Inuit and Yupik, if they are found in our hemisphere. Although many social science textbooks still state otherwise, it is not the case that they have 50, 100 or even 500+ words for “snow.” The truth is that their languages are what linguists term agglutinative. This means that they can string morpheme after morpheme together in a seemingly endless line and call it a word. In other words, anthropologists might hear “snow-that-fell-the-night-before-when-the-moon-was-full” and call it a new “word” for snow. (German is also known to be an agglutinative language, but I will bow to our native speaker to expound on that.)
I started to question whether von Bredow's confident assertion that the Piraha "have no history, no descriptive words, and no subordinate clauses." I “Wikied”--I know that Wikipedia isn't proper in formal research, but thought it would be okay for blog purposes--the Piraha, and discovered that their language is, indeed, agglutinative. To an English speaker like me, those agglutinated words might as well be subordinate clauses, because that is how I perceive their function. I also discovered that males and females have different languages. This is not uncommon in cultures with strict gender-defined roles. Another aspect of their language that may prove difficult for the native English speaker is the tonal element. Everett notes two tones that are meaning-laden. Other linguists claim three or more. Since they don’t agree, they are not hearing the same thing that the Piraha are. This makes me wonder what else they might not understand.
So although I question their lack of recursion and also question von Bredow's arguments on that score, some of her points were, indeed, valid. Whorf has been resurrected from mid last century in order to explain their lack of a counting system. The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that states that words help us think our thoughts. This idea dates back to the dawn of linguistics in the writings of classical Indian scholars Pingala and Patanjali, but it took the British 2,000+ years to "discover" it, and plant their own flag. Yes, in fact, proving that words matter!
I don't doubt the influence of language on thought, but I am not convinced that Whorf's theory is the operative agent in the phenomenon that is the inability of the Piraha to count to ten.
All sources agree that the Piraha are intelligent people. They are genetically related to neighboring tribes that do have counting words in their vocabulary. Their language is an isolate, a remnant from a group that is extinct but for their branch. It is documented decisively that they are counting impaired. What other conclusion could be reached?
At least, two things bother me about this picture. First, it is also stated that they have two color words that indicate light and dark. Sounds strange to us, but this is more common that you may think. It also indicates a classic linguistic progression. Their language would have the next color word added indicating red. Does this mean that they are color-blind? No. Linguistically, orange would not be a "color" word in English because it has a juicy, citrus fruit as its primary referent. Second, I posit Piaget, Montessori, and Steiner pedagogies of learning numbers may be more relevant in exploring the Piraha deficiency. If number concepts were so hard-wired into our human brains, would we spend so much preschool time exposing them to our own children? If language acquisition has windows of opportunity, perhaps, counting has an even more rigid time frame.
If it does hold true that these tribal peoples are without past or future and that they live absolutely in the present, then they will be of interest not only to the academics of the world, but also the Zen monks who strive for decades to achieve what the Piraha have as a birth right: Present Mind. My fears run along with Peter Gordon, that the tribal people may have more to suspect from the "friendly academics" than they do the ethically-suspect traders from "civilized" Brazil. The perils are too numerous to count.
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