_Verum Et Factum Convertuntur_ (or: Surprised By Syntax)

_Verum Et Factum Convertuntur_ (or: Surprised By Syntax)
1 June 2005

(( Now all we need is Bernard Shaw write a play about it so it catches
on, at least outside besottedly materialistic circles. ))

Devoid of Content // By Stanley Fish
(Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at
Chicago.)

<< http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html >>

We are at that time of year when millions of American college and high
school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and
set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a
clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer
is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English
sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are.

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize
content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas
long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously)
follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it
should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this
assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the
semester each group will be expected to have created its own language,
complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the
text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The
language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of
English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions -
between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English
enables us to make.

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is
something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a
rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest
idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think
I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each
group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and
precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over
the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A
sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form,
this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately
supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words
randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence." (The first time I did this
the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time
at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all
quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that
you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a
sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but
finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one
another."

Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question
almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working
with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two
things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and
second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between
actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions.

The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by
which English indicates and distinguishes between the various
components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing
something to someone or something else, how does English allow you to
tell who is the doer and whom (or what) is the doee; and how do you
know whether there is one doer or many; and what tells you that the
doer is doing what he or she does in this way and at this time rather
than another?

Notice that these are not questions about how a particular sentence
works, but questions about how any sentence works, and the answers will
point to something very general and abstract. They will point, in fact,
to the forms that, while they are themselves without content, are
necessary to the conveying of any content whatsoever, at least in
English.

Once the students tumble to this point, they are more than halfway to
understanding the semester-long task: they can now construct a language
whose forms do the same work English does, but do it differently.

In English, for example, most plurals are formed by adding an "s" to
nouns. Is that the only way to indicate the difference between singular
and plural? Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell them,
must have some regular and abstract way of conveying that distinction;
and so it is with all the other distinctions - between time, manner,
spatial relationships, relationships of hierarchy and subordination,
relationships of equivalence and difference - languages permit you to
signal.

In the languages my students devise, the requisite distinctions are
signaled by any number of formal devices - word order, word endings,
prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name it.
Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point is that they know
what it is they are trying to do; the moment they know that, they have
succeeded, even if much of the detailed work remains to be done.

At this stage last semester, the representative of one group asked me,
"Is it all right if we use the same root form for adjectives and
adverbs, but distinguish between them by their order in the sentence?"
I could barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a question
like that one, they had already learned the lesson I was trying to
teach them.

In the course of learning that lesson, the students will naturally and
effortlessly conform to the restriction I announce on the first day:
"We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not
interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an
anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't
exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we
think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or
relative pronouns function." The reason we don't do any of these things
is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from
the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or
that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about
abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the
death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of
understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by
the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull
arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show.

Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are
the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do,
that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will
improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning
nothing they couldn't have learned better by sitting around in a dorm
room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything
about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works
they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone
else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own.

In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only fleetingly; for
as soon as students bend to the task of understanding the structure of
language - a task with a content deeper than any they have been asked
to forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and spontaneously
enact the discipline I have imposed. And when there is the occasional
and inevitable lapse, and some student voices his or her "opinion"
about something, I don't have to do anything; for immediately some
other student will turn and say, "No, that's content." When that
happens, I experience pure pedagogical bliss.

==

Admitting a little philosophical material, this nifty
tertiary-educationalist ploy raises an interesting question about Prof.
Vico's relationship to The Master.

Dr. Fish must get the priority of form over matter from Aristotle,
but how does that fit together with the human inability to comprehend
anything that humans did not make? Does intelligibility pertain only
to socially constructed vessels, then, without reference to whatever
(in itself, meaningless) fluid may be poured into them?

(Meanwhile, the language student in me wonders whether Dean Stan lets
his patients invent exceptions and irregularities also. It would not
quite do for the kids to emerge from _his_ tuition preferring to read
_Paradise Lost_ in an Esperanto translation.)

.