TEACHERS AND STUDENTS:  
SPONGES OR JOURNEYERS ON AN
 INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE?
TEACHING A NON-THEORETICAL COURSE
IN A THEORETICALLY ADEQUATE WAY
SO AS TO MAKE IT AN INTELLECTUAL
ADVENTURE FOR STUDENTS

© 2001 by Orchid Land Publications

C.-J. N. Bailey

[20011128 (bis)]

     In planning a course, a teacher should  have an aim that s/he pursues without too many diversions.  It goes without saying that different courses have to be planned differently.  Some materials stand higher or lower on a scale of being exciting.  It is harder to make an intellectual adventure out of an Indo-European course (it can be done, but one still has to absorb sponge-like a gazillion specifics) than out of a course in which students make their own grammars of the daughter languages of English.  (It is the same in other disciplines; it is duller to read and learn the items that some old theologian taught than to investigate the system--what, e.g., in his or her paradigm led him to teach such an absurdity as "God is wrathful at us over the sins of Adam that He Himself has attributed to newborns" (invented by Western, not Eastern, theologians)?  
     Doing one's own creative work can hardly be less than an intellectual journey, whereas mere data-absorption (even if done critically)  is the job of a sponge).  No one is saying that a student doesn't have to internalize a lot of already-known information (about a given subject) in any study in order to become competent in it.  But that is learning, not becoming educated.  While there is no point in a teacher's re-inventing the wheel (inventing categories or reasons for something already worked out) for oneself, helping a student to do that can be a profitable adventure in the hands of a good teacher.  At all events,  where creativity is lacking--something that one is helped tocome up with on one's own--adventure is lacking.  Here we are speaking of novices in a study.  As for advanced students, they know they the author of an article doesn't just present raw data (unless it is a newly dug up inscription or something of that sort); one organizes the data and then presents an analysis of the it.
    Some students would just as soon skip the adventure and get their degree.  Many of these students, those with list minds rather than system minds, go on to become teachers themselves.  This is not to say they lack critical minds; they can detect an error when they see it.  But errors of a systematic nature are harder to detect than mere list errors (like "Hey, he got the page no. wrong in that citation!").   A low-level example may make this clear.
    One of the most eminent of creolists called the posterior modality an "irrealis" in several creole languages.  But since  it is not found as such in a counterfactual conditional?  Does that not evoke puzzlement?  (Note that the posterior is irrealis--unless it is expectative--but much that is irrealis is not posterior.)  Actually, posterior modalities in creoles are formed with a combination of anterior and posterior--something that languages seem to find natural enough.  Cf. English, where we use the past of the posterior auxiliary will, viz. would, to make either a past or present assertion irrealis; e.g. If [or "in case] they would/should (or were to) decide in favor of that, . . . "  or "I thought/think that another picture would be [alternatively in past time:  "would have been"] more appropriate."  Note the resemblance of these to the plain past-posterior in "I thought she would/was going to do that yesterday."   

      To catch the error of confusing the posterior subset of irrealis with the full set of irrealis items requires minimally that one should recognize that a past-posterior ("They had been/were going to do it by yesterday" . . . /. . . or . . . "by tomorrow") or present-posterior ("They  will  have done that  before now" . . . /. . . or . . . "by the time we get there tomorrow")  can happen either in past or non-past time.  While not complicated, this can take a bit of reflection.   Some creolists have confused anteriority with pastness or with completeness (a perfective modality).  English grammars speak of the present-perfect, even though an action like "has been doing that since 1999" can be, and often is, still going on--not yet finished!   The French have named their pasts more realistically.  Some analysts of English cannot distinguish why English cannot say "They have done it at noon" although "They've always done it at noon" is quite in order.  They of course haven't marked out the basic temporal categories of English, of which one of the marked ones (the exochornous modality) is unique to English.  They call certain forms duratives even though they may disallow a durative statement; e.g. in English and the Romance languages that I have checked, "Troy was standing (or:  "useta stand") 600 years"--which requires local dixis (e.g. "there") to be acceptable.  Even with this taken care of, one must distinguish where a grammar requires--or merely allows--past action, say, with a special grammatical modality.
     I used to teach a proseminar on daughter languages of English.  Students were given the same chapter out of the New Testaments of seven or eight English-derived creoles.  ( Reasons for such texts:  (i) The New Testament or only parts of it constitute the only published text in many daughter languages of English. (ii) The parallelisms allowed us to compare how different languages expressed parallel meanings--often with only a difference in the English or local function word the language selects; thus, the perfective can be oready, pau ("finished" in Hawai'ian), pinis (from "finish[ed]"), etc., or their equivalents in daughter languages of French (te from été) or Portuguese (kaba).  We then learned how English itself began when the Normans came to England, how many aspects of the structure of Old French that could not have been borrowed but  must have been "inherited" were calqued with Anglo- Saxon (Germanic) function words and other words (the total English vocabulary is 28 per cent Anglo-Saxon according to those who've checked).   The students could see how historians who don't understand structure decided that English was derived from Anglo-Saxon, when in fact only the prosodics and punctuation came from the oppressed populace, along with their words used to calque words in the language of the dominant people.  It also shows when and why new languages are born--the conjunction of very different languages spoken by conquerors and conquered.  Afrikaans is a ready example.  
      Looking at at our productive English morphology, we find from Anglo-Saxon only -ness (and -er, agentive/instrumental; very recently, -ster; agentive -er was originally borrowed by Germanic languages from Latin, and -ship is sporadic).  We do not use the comparative -er the Anglo-Saxon way.  Students can see how Germanic fore and for mostly disappeared in favor of calqued "in front of" and "for the sake of, because of, in place of, on behalf of" and four or five other expressions . . . how laquelle was calqued as "the which" . . .  how English is like the Romance structure in the unborrowable difference we have in "a longer table" and "a table longer by two feet."  Note the English difference between attributive "It's the rarest usage of the two" and predicative "Its the usage [that is]  more rare [than the usage in your example]."  (You won't find an explanation in your usual grammar.)
     Of course, without good analytical tools, the grammar soon gets ahead of a naïve analyst.  Why does English say "John and me/myself did it"?  Why does the Queen speak of "to we British" or anyone "Someone--probably me--will read it"?  Why do very educated people on the media say "to he and she" when they would no more say "to he" (or "to she") than they would say "Me did it?"   To understand that in Romance and English alike, one needs a carefully formulated version of W. Mayerthaler's  two-decade-old theory of reversals in marked contexts.  (Cf. Bailey, ibid., Chh. 5-6.)  How else can we explain the way irrealis should become factual in "I'm (not) disgusted [or "I'm [not] surprised"] that he should be doing that sort of thing"?  One needs the three-valued analytical features [expectative] and [desiderative] to analyse this, just as one needs the former to understand the various types of posterior posterior clauses in English--neutral surrealis, non-expectative, and expectative (in order of their increasing markedness).  In the following examples, IF stands for If, In case, etc.; When, As soon as, Until, Before, After, etc./What(ever), Who(ever), Whichever, and their relative-pronoun equivalents, as well as non-factual (Al)though (even though is factual):
--"IF it happens tomorrow, . . . " (neutral) 
--"IF it happened, should happen, we to happen" tomorrow, . . . " (increasingly non-expectative) 
--"IF it will/is gonna happen tomorrow, . . . "   (expective, marked and overmarked) 
      Knowing how to analyse English in this manner provides both a discovery method (what to look for) and an analytical format for studying a creole.  Some do make the foregoing distinctions, even though in English some speakers don't distinguish a past-irrealis from a past-factual hypothesis clause.

     Just as there are different approaches to teaching, so there are different kinds of student responses to them.  Some just want their diplomas; they may not respond very well to analysis that seeks what is correct rather than what is accepted (and easier to get certain kinds of jobs with).   For them, truth is secondary to what passes for utility.  When those students in turn become teachers, don't look for adventure; look to be filled with what passes for the known.  (One has read one head of a department labeling the length of libel in Southern States English "long."  Either he can't hear the longer sound (acoustically identical) in liable; or he is claiming a three-way length difference in the phonetology of Southern States English--even though English has got only two degrees of phonetological length (and perhaps only one or two known languages have three degrees of phonetological length; for phonetic length, a different matter, see Bailey, English phonetic transcription (Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington 91985], pp.  74-79).   Shoddy scholarship is more the norm than one might think.  It doesn't bother a lot of people.
     But for students who seek an intellectual adventure and teachers who would like to and are able to satisfy that desire, more is needed.  It does not seem to be a difference in ability--nor simply just a craving for the new.  The teacher I've known that most resisted any new knowledge  was the possibly the most radical in political and social matters I have known.  The excitement that the teacher in question offered students consisted of the "dirty words" of the English vocabulary, not how to make sounds that they had been unable to achieve--something easy enough to do, but exciting for one who previously had not known how to do it.   Novelty is not necessarily exciting, though  I doubt that there is no one that has never found learning something new wholly lacking in some kind of excitement.  But often those who could be excited study under teachers that don't stir them in this manner, perhaps because they present everything as already done--never showing them how to discover something new for themselves. 

STILL UNDER CONSTRUXION