There is a parallel confusion in the teaching of language that has never been straightened out. Professional linguists nowadays may know what’s what, but children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing, that a verb is an action word, and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself, not by its relation to other things. Most of us can remember being told that a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing. And we can remember the utter boredom of parsing or analyzing sentences. Today all that should be changed. Children could be told that a noun is a word having a certain relationship to a predicate. A verb has a certain relation to a noun, its subject. And so on. Relationship could be used as basis for definition, and any child could then see that there is something wrong with the sentence Go’ is a verb. I remember the boredom of analyzing sentences and the boredom later, at Cambridge, of learning comparative anatomy. Both subjects, as taught, were torturously unreal. We could have been told something about the pattern which connects: that all communication necessitates context, that without context, there is no meaning, and that contexts confer meaning because there is classification of contexts. The teacher could have argued that growth and differentiation must be controlled by communication. The shapes of animals and plants are transforms of messages. Language is itself a form of communication. The structure of the input must somehow be reflected as structure in the output. Anatomy must contain an analogue of grammar because all anatomy is a transform of message material, which must be contextually shaped. And finally, contextual shaping is only another term for grammar. Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 15:53:00 +0000