1. ANALYTIC STRUCTURES AND EMERGENT GRAMMAR MATT MACUTEK AND HIROKI TSUCHIMOCHI

2. OVERVIEW Chapter 3 looks to understand how English grammar exists today through two lenses of language change: –(1) Socio- historical –(2) Theoretical and 'usage-based' "Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak" - Sapir

3. FIRST ARGUMENT "High contact language varieties like lingua francas, pidgins and creoles, and any other varieties involving adolescent and adult L2 learning, tend over time to replace synthetic structures with analytic ones, to show reduction in redundancy, and to increase regularity." (pg 35) –Analytic: independent words used to express different concepts, along with fixed word order, rather than inflections, derivations, modifications of roots, etc. EX: more lovely is more analytic than lovelier. What is meant by the term, "high contact language"? Why is this significant to the argument?

4. FIRST ARGUMENT CONT. English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has resulted in a simplification of the English language. ELF speakers have the freedom to change ENL constructions and its patterns to reach greater clarity and simplicity. –Simplifications of the "difficult" or "idiosyncratic" aspects of English grammar. For example, zero marking of the 3rd person singular present tense, different patterns of verb complementation (infinitives instead of gerunds, different prepositions, etc.). pg 36. –Is simplification a sign of a well developed CUCB? Why or why not? –As ENL educators, how should we approach simplifications in the classroom? Should we correct them directly or indirectly?

5. FIRST ARGUMENT CONT. The effect of the critical period on language simplification: –Post adolescent and adult learners want regularity and transparency in language learning. –"It has been found that learners from vastly different L1 backgrounds have the tendency to omit structures that are obligatory in the target language, such as inflectional affixes, articles, and prepositions..." (pg37). –Pidginization results in the regularization of irregularities and in increase in lexical and morphological transparency. –Reduction: less of a language is used compared to what is used by native speakers. –Admixture: interference or transfer of language. Do either reduction or admixture indicate multicompetence?

6. FIRST ARGUMENT CONT. Trudgill: "Any high-contact language that is widely learned by adolescents and adults is likely to change from a synthetic to analytic structure, and to become more regular..." and "most major contemporary languages bear the mark of post-adolescent second-variety acquisition." (pg. 38) Therefore to explain ELF's functions, it should be viewed in a longer history of language change. –For most of the 100,000 years of human language use, it has been in small social networks with little contact with different languages. Resulted in more complex language features (esoteric). –Languages used esoterically are acquired at infancy and processed using formulaic sequences and fixed expressions. "Reliance on shared knowledge, pragmatics and common practice" (pg 38). –For adult outsiders past the critical period, they are incapable of acquiring esoteric languages. –Wray and Grace suggest esotericity is the more natural setting for human language.

7. FIRST ARGUMENT CONT. Exocentric languages: develop and maintain linguistic features that are logical, transparent, phonologically and morphologically simple. Simply put: they are learnable for adults. Historically, this is a recent phenomenon: "simplification is actually not normal. If it were normal, all languages in the world would by now have been maximally regular and maximally transparent. [Trudgill suggests] that it is actually complexification that is, in an important sense, more normal. If languages are 'left alone,' the normal tendency is for them to accrue more and more complexity." - Trudgill (pg, 39) Do you agree with Trudgill's assertion that when left alone, languages become more complex? In what ways can any given language become more linguistically complex?

8. FIRST ARGUMENT CONT. Reasons to explain how the English language has changed: (1) Adults tend to find certain grammatical features hard to learn and apply in use, subsequently, they simplify the language. –Children then learned the adults' imperfectly acquired L2 as their L1 and thus had the modified target language passed onto them. Eventually the simplified version of the language became dominant.

9. FIRST ARGUMENT CONT. (2) Simplification is language change rather than imperfect language. –Janina Brutt-Griffler: "any language is the linguistic expression of the speech community that speaks it... it is contradictory to claim that a speech community can speak its own language in error" (pg 39). –SLA is a social process and dynamic. Language then changes as a result of its acquisition by a speech community. Brutt-Griffler asserts that, "there cannot be error as between two separate speech communities, but, rather, difference" (pg. 40). –Trudgill argues that, "even if native speakers do not 'own' English, there is an importance sense in which it stems from them... and resides in them' (pg. 40). How can Brutt-Griffler and Trudgill's ideas about language use shape our understanding of ELF in terms of English as a Global Language or World English?

10. SECOND ARGUMENT THEORETICAL AND USAGE-BASED Grammar is not a fixed set of rules Our utterances are based on previously heard utterances, rather than grammatical rules, and the ways people speak change over time according to needs and circumstances. Grammar is forever emergent "Emergent" refers to "perpetual process producing forms" (pg36) Since utterances are based on previously heard utterances, it is a matter of course that ELF speakers can be expected to speak differently from NESs.

11. SECOND ARGUMENT In the field of Linguistics, 1950-80 was all about Generative Grammar. The prominent scholor was Chomsky. Chomsky describes a language as "a set of structured descriptions of sentences" "Language=grammar" Hopper opposed "Generative Grammar". He views grammar as "the name for a vaguely defined set of sedimented recurrent partials whose status is constantly being renegotiated in speech and which cannot be distinguished in principle from strategies for building discourses" "Everything anyone says is partly new too." (pg41)

12. SECOND ARGUMENT The basic assumption of usage-based approaches is "rather than being innate, language structure and linguistic knowledge initially derive from comprehension and production of specific utterances on specific occasions of use"(p41) The opposite position is Chomsky's "Nativist Position" which argues that humans innately have "Language Acquisition Device" (LAD). "Minimalist Program"="What speaker actually needs to acquire is minimal." In Contrast, Usage-Based approaches propose that languages consist of conversational inventory of units or construction including grammatical patterns. (Could be described as Maximalist program!) DQ: Which approach do you agree with, minimalist or maximalist program? As a teacher should we start from teaching perfect core grammar to let the students be able to generate infinitive sentences or teaching "routinized" or "sedimented" language use based on socialization?

13. SECOND ARGUMENT Construction Grammar = "the basic units of language are constructions, or form and meaning pairing, which are mentally stored along with information about register, formality and dialect variation." Children construct their language grammar and internalize it by listening several millions of adult utterances. DQ: As teachers what steps can we take to provide the students with enough genuine socio- cultural input in L2? Is it feasible to assume that L2 learners can acquire the same socio- cultural experiences as L1 speakers? Considering the constructionist approach, what kind of resources are available to EFL students as compared to ENL students?

14. SECOND ARGUMENT Idiosyncrasies = characteristics which are particular to individuals in language use. Descriptive Pattern Grammar attempts to capture the English language as a whole by means of corpus. Through these approaches, it turns out there are many idiosyncratic language uses. Ex) provide sb with sth, provide sth to sb (analogy of "give") Even NSs have variety of idiosyncrasies let alone ELF speakers. Because many ELF speakers have variety of socio-cultural backgrounds to depend on to speak English, they are less likely to routinize their English language use. In other words, ELF users tend to hear, accommodate to, and produce a variety of forms.

15. SECOND ARGUMENT "Competence" Pennycook argues that "the individual only comes to exist in a given utterance or in the performance of language". (p48) Pennycook uses Hopper's account of speech as "a vast collection of hand-me-downs" Chomsky defined competence as "perfect knowledge of a language" by means of, "an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous community" (pg. 48). Hymes introduces "communicative competence", which places focus on context and the interlocutors involved in speech. Hymes asserts that we vary our performance in speech depending on the circumstances we are in.

16. SECOND ARGUMENT Author's argument: –We cannot speak without having prior knowledge of a language, "in either a conformist or transgressive way" (pg. 49). –Language or languages must pre-exist our linguistic performances. –"in everyday speech of any person living in society, no less than half of all the words uttered by him will be someone else's words (consciously someone else's) transmitted with varying degrees of precision and impartiality..." (pg. 49).