One Day in the Life of the English Language: A Microcosmic Usage Handbook - Hardcover

Cioffi, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691165076 ISBN 13: 9780691165073

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Generations of student writers have been subjected to usage handbooks that proclaim, This is the correct form. Learn it - books that lay out a grammar, but don't inspire students to use it. By contrast, this antihandbook handbook, presenting some three hundred sentences drawn from the printed works of a single, typical day in the life of the language - December 29, 2008 - tries to persuade readers that good grammar and usage matter.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frank L. Cioffi is professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York, and has taught writing at Princeton and Indiana universities and at Bard and Scripps colleges. He is the author of The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers (Princeton), among other books.

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"One Day in the Life of the English Language is a welcome departure from the vast majority of grammar handbooks. Cioffi suggests that instead of memorizing tons of rules about sentence structure, students should internalize how sentences work—and with the motivation he gives, students have the incentive to want to write well. I truly love this book."--Elizabethada A. Wright, University of Minnesota

"One Day in the Life of the English Language is a book for all writers and teachers of writing—without getting mired in minutia. Cioffi examines the English language as it actually is written today, in the real world rather than how it ‘should’ be written—a simple but powerful concept that easily lends itself to any classroom. Cioffi knows his subject inside out."--Rebecca Chace, author ofLeaving Rock Harbor

"Students will find Cioffi's approach intriguing and refreshing, since he is not merely telling them what they should do, but describing options currently in print. They will also enjoy his humorous and casual tone."--Lydia McDermott, Whitman College

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"One Day in the Life of the English Language is a welcome departure from the vast majority of grammar handbooks. Cioffi suggests that instead of memorizing tons of rules about sentence structure, students should internalize how sentences work and with the motivation he gives, students have the incentive to want to write well. I truly love this book."--Elizabethada A. Wright, University of Minnesota

"One Day in the Life of the English Language is a book for all writers and teachers of writing without getting mired in minutia. Cioffi examines the English language as it actually is written today, in the real world rather than how it should be written a simple but powerful concept that easily lends itself to any classroom. Cioffi knows his subject inside out."--Rebecca Chace, author ofLeaving Rock Harbor

"Students will find Cioffi's approach intriguing and refreshing, since he is not merely telling them what they should do, but describing options currently in print. They will also enjoy his humorous and casual tone."--Lydia McDermott, Whitman College

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One Day in the Life of the English Language

A Microcosmic Usage Handbook

By Frank L. Cioffi

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-16507-3

Contents

Preface, xi, 
Navigation Tips, xix, 
Introduction, 
The Starting Idea: You and Your Audience, 1, 
Preview of the Following Pages, 7, 
December 29, 2008, as History, 10, 
Two Disclaimers, 20, 
On Using Sentences from the Real World, 23, 
Formal Usage—Its Rules and Value, 31, 
"If you don't have grammar, you don't have sense", 40, 
1 Actants, Actions, Ongoing States: Nouns, Verbs, and the Sentences They Form, 
Why Learn the Parts of Speech?, 45, 
Fundamentals, 49, 
Fine Tuning, 56, 
Deep Focus, 71, 
2 Words That Modify and Orient: Adjectives, Adverbs, Conjunctions, Prepositions, Articles, Interjections, 
The Power of Small Words Well Deployed, 88, 
Adjectives, 89, 
Adverbs, 99, 
Conjunctions, 114, 
Prepositions, 123, 
Articles, 128, 
Interjections, 133, 
3 Who Is He/She? Pronouns, 
A Whole Chapter on Pronouns?, 134, 
Fundamentals, 135, 
Fine Tuning, 150, 
Deep Focus, 160, 
4 Punctuation, Part I—The Comma: Promiscuous Uses, 
Introduction: Punctuation Substitutes for Oral Emphases, Facial Expressions, and Body Language, 167, 
Fundamentals, 169, 
Fine Tuning, 193, 
Deep Focus, 200, 
5 Punctuation, Part II—The Colon, Semicolon, and More Mysteries of Punctuation, 
The Colon and Semicolon, 207, 
The Apostrophe, 217, 
The Dash, 228, 
The Quotation Mark, 232, 
End Punctuation and Combining Sentences, 241, 
6 Diction: Sentences as Clockwork, 
On the Interconnectedness of Words, 254, 
Fundamentals, 258, 
A Microconclusion, 286, 
Appendix I: Fifteen Myths of Digital-Age English, 293, 
Appendix II: Using This Book to Teach College Writing: A Microguide, 301, 
Fifty Key Terms: A Microglossary, 317, 
Works Cited, 
General Sources, 329, 
December 29, 2008, Examples, 335, 
Index, 351, 

CHAPTER 1

Actants, Actions, Ongoing States: Nouns, Verbs, and the Sentences They Form

Why Learn the Parts of Speech?

Nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions—isn't all this just mumbo jumbo? Words just stand for things, right? So why bother with all this jargon?

In Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift deals with this very issue. The "scientists" in part 3 of his 1726 novel have worked out a curious system of communication: people can carry around objects that they can show one another and thus mutely communicate. Speaking words wears out the lungs, the scientists have concluded. No need for multiple parts of speech here—people just show each other objects (nouns) and get their ideas across through those things. Only "women ... the vulgar and illiterate ... the common people" rebel against this innovation. Swift's joke is that nouns can't convey meaning by themselves, so using the system burdens one with donkey-loads of items.

Here is how he describes it:

The other project was a scheme for entirely abolishing all words whatsoever.... since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on. And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion, unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, many of the most learned and wise adhere to the new scheme of expressing themselves by things, which has only this inconvenience attending it, that if a man's business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in proportion to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those sages almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the street, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other to resume their burdens, and take their leave. (Swift)

The joke is that in a materialistic culture, the things that people own speak louder than what they say. As we acquire more stuff, we become more communicatively burdened or blocked—less articulate, maybe less human.

It's also fairly clear that whatever "communicating" is taking place has to be fairly primitive. From a linguistic perspective, the whole project of communicating through only nouns would be limiting, if not impossible. Swift's scientists have engineered a ridiculous method: that's also what makes the passage funny. In English, fortunately, words are not just denotations of things. We use words for action, for joining, for emphasis, for description, and even for abstract ideas. Perhaps wealthy "sages" don't have to do too much communicating and have all the time in the world, but the rest of us regular folks, Swift's "common people," don't. So we need multiple parts of speech.

Naturally this leads to the complications inherent in language use, which Swift's "sages" seem to be rebelling against. One of the problems with parts of speech, for example, is that we can't definitively divide up the dictionary into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the like. Words find their ways into multiple categories. Any noun can probably be a verb, at least in some context: almost every day on my New Jersey Transit train, I hear the announcement, "The last car will not platform at New Brunswick," using a new verb, to platform, which means to stop at a place where, when the doors open, a platform will be right there, level with the floor of the railroad car. An example I recently heard on the radio also comes to mind. A man who bought his mother's old car complained about how much he had to pay her: he said, "My mom bluebooked me on the car" ("My Big Break"). (And, curiously, many verb-derived words, called "verbals," function as nouns, or as adjectives, for that matter.)

Some linguists don't see the parts of speech as being as separate and distinct as I do (or as distinct as perhaps you were taught). Rather, they envision nouns, verbs, prepositions, and the like as existing on a "quasi-continuum." This view, put forth in the 1970s by John Robert Ross, is sometimes called "squish grammar" or "fuzzy grammar," and in it Ross posits a kind of hierarchy of parts of speech: verb—participles—adjectives—prepositions—nouns:

Proceeding along the hierarchy is like descending into lower and lower temperatures, where the cold freezes up the productivity of syntactic rules, until at last nouns, the ultimate zero of this space, are reached. (317)

Verbs have many tenses and forms (conjugations), while nouns can be only singular or plural. Ross concludes that "the distinction between V[erbs], A[djectives], and N[ouns] is one of degree, rather than of kind" (326), an idea that you might find persuasive and possibly helpful in terms of envisioning how the language works.

To give you some idea of how slippery all these categories are, let's look again at "Garden Path Sentences," which I introduced above. These...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691165076
• ISBN 13: 9780691165073
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 392
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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