Linguistics v's Traditional Grammar; a desire to read and understand

Question

Hello,I am trying to improve my writing/english skills but have found the process quite difficult!I find it difficult to express myself as articulately as others. I would love to get into journalism but my essays and other written papers lack 'thought'. I find it difficult to read some newspaper articles, journal articles, etc because I need a dictionary to understand every second word! I would really like to work on being able to read a difficult article and re-write it in plain simple English. There are people out there who have acquired this skill and I would like to work on being able to do this also!In an attempt to be able to read an article and understand the meaning of it so that I can re-word it in my own words in plain simple English, I purchased a number of English Grammar books. I thought that the only way I was going to understand the pompous English used by some authors was to understand the grammatical rules so that when I looked up a word in a dictionary, I would be able to understand the meaning of the word, how to use it in a sentence and I would be able to use a thesaurus to find a simple word to use in its place when trying to re-word the article/passage/sentence into plain simple English.Learning the grammatical rules is not as easy as I thought it would be. I stumbled upon a book called 'Teach yourself linguistic' by Jean Aitchison and after reading the first few pages, it seems that I may need to study the English language first.Thoughts?Let me give you an example - a friend of mine referred me to an article where the author, in his introduction, wrote the following:"On an empirical level this article charts the introductin of a number of key reforms to the corporate policy. The author avers these reforms were shaped by the institutional power of big business. On a theoretical level the article contends that the essence of the recent legal reform process was underpinned by complex interdependence bewteen economic forces and the nature of corporations. The article criticises the distortions and mystifications of legal positivism that treats law in isolation from the economic infrastructure. .. The governing principle in any backlash against theoretical concepts dominant in the legal academy is the recognition that any changes in the doctrinal form of the law must be analysed against the backdrop of the fundamental dynamics of the social relations of capitalism and the lobby groups that express the will of capital".The start isn't so bad but there are paragraphs and sections throughout the article that are so difficult to understand because every second word needs a dictionary and some words have different meanings, so it becomes ambiguous and the meaning of the passage is lost in the process.Does anyone know whether learning linguistics would help me, eventually, comprehend the English language so that I will be able to read a difficult passage and understand the underlying meaning? I would very much like to be able to read such passages and re-word them into plain simple English. At the moment I can't even understand certain the difficult words some authors string together in a sentence, which destroys the underlying meaning..On page 61 of this linguistics book, it talks about inflections, constituent analysis of sentences and shows how they are made up in tree diagrams.Surely if I understood and could identify a verb phrase, noun phrase and a determiner, I would be able to pull sentences apart, like in the above passage, and undestand the underlying meaning? Does this make any sense to anyone at all??Is my problem that I don't read enough or is it that my foundations in the English language are so weak that attempts to understand difficult passages of English are made difficult?A writer isn't born, although I begin to question when people say this to me because when in my final year of high school, I went to school with a young 17 year old who was incredible in English. She was able to write copious amounts of any subject in a few minutes using very high level formal English. I know writing for some is a skill that one needs to work on to acquire, and while I am one of these people, I am struggling to understand why I have such a problem understanding judge language. I want to learn how to re-word such pompous English into simple, easy-to-understand English and I would really appreciate any ideas, links, books, feedback to help me on my journey!According to this linguistics book, linguistics differs from old school grammar. Apparently linguitics is descriptive, not prescriptive, and describes language but does not prescribe rules of correctness... so am I on the right track in learning how to be a linguist rather than learning every single grammatical rule? I wonder if reading the dictionary would be a better idea!

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Hello, I am trying to improve my writing/english skills but have found the process quite difficult! I find it difficult ... comprehend the English language so that I will be able to read a difficult passage and understand the underlying meaning?[/nq]
Linguistics will not help you to do this in the slightest degree. That would be like studying chemistry in order to sell motor oil. Like studying biology in order to follow the pork bellies market.
[nq:1]I would very much like to be able to read such passages and re-word them into plain simple English.[/nq]
Then what you need to do is get involved in (taking your quote as an example) academic and legal business circles. Get a degree in business law (actually, just study business law in some serious way), and then you should be able to understand what is being said in the quoted passage. Then it will be up to your innate language skills (which have nothing to do with your having or having not studied linguistics) how well you can manage to translate it into some kind of everyday English.
At the moment I can't even understand certain the
[nq:1]difficult words some authors string together in a sentence, which destroys the underlying meaning..[/nq]
Well, but that's just the point. It's written such that one has to be a member of the fraternity in order to understand it. Perhaps it's legitimate technical language, perhaps it's just gobbledegook to flim-flam the naive. Expertise in linguistics won't enable you to tell which it is.
[nq:1]On page 61 of this linguistics book, it talks about inflections, constituent analysis of sentences and shows how they are ... apart, like in the above passage, and undestand the underlying meaning? Does this make any sense to anyone at all??[/nq]
No, no, no. I can tell you that "legal positivism" is a noun phrase standing as the object of a preposition which is then expanded upon in a following relative clause, but that doesn't mean that I have the slightest notion what "legal positivism" actually means. I'd need to study some business law to figure that out.
[nq:1]Is my problem that I don't read enough or is it that my foundations in the English language are so weak that attempts to understand difficult passages of English are made difficult?[/nq]
It's not your expertise in English, that seems to be more than adequate. It's your expertise in business, or rather, academic theories of business or economics, or whatever field that passage fits into.
[nq:1]A writer isn't born, although I begin to question when people say this to me because when in my final ... a linguist rather than learning every single grammatical rule? I wonder if reading the dictionary would be a better idea![/nq]
Dude, ye're barking up the wrong tree. You need to understand grammar as it really is, not from some book, be it traditional or "linguistic".. You sure as **** shouldn't be "reading the dictionary". That ain't gonna do *** fer ya.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Dude, ye're barking up the wrong tree. You need to understand grammar as it really is, not from some book, be it traditional or "linguistic"..[/nq]
I agree with what you responded with, but even if I know something about the topic, it doesn't generally help...
"Plain English is clear, straightforward expression, using only as many words as are necessary. It is language that avoids obscurity, inflated vocabulary and convoluted sentence construction. It is not baby talk, nor is it a simplified version of the English language. Writers of plain English let their audience concentrate on the message instead of being distracted by complicated language. They make sure that their audience understands the message easily."
I want to be able to understand the difficult English and put it into simple, clear, straightforward expression..
From http://academics.tjhsst.edu/psych/oldPsych/language/struct.html;
"Sentence structure is studied by looking at noun and verb phrases seperately and then dividing the phrases further. From studying ambiguous phrases researchers realized that sentences have different levels of structure. Noam Chomsky examines sentences in terms of surface structure and deep structure. Surface structure is the actual words used in a phrase or sentence, so each sentence has one structure on this level. Deep structure is the meanings of the words in phrases or sentences, so each meaning of a sentence is a deep structure.

Sentences with different surface structures can have the same deep structure. Analyzing sentences only at the surface level structure is called the syntactic approach. The syntactic approach recognizes that there are transformational grammar rules that determine with changes in the wording of a sentence are possible without changing the meaning of the sentence. Transformational rules help linguists understand how meaning is communicated in sentences".
To retain the meaning of a difficult sentence, one would have to understand the underlying meaning and re-word it in plain simple English, without changing the meaning.. no?

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Dude, ye're barking up the wrong tree. You need to understand grammar as it really is, not from some book, be it traditional or "linguistic"..[/nq]
[nq:1]I agree with what you responded with, but even if I know something about the topic, it doesn't generally help... ... one would have to understand the underlying meaning and re-word it in plain simple English, without changing the meaning.. no?[/nq]
Yeah, but you really do seem to be confusing "deep structure" with "plain, straightforward English". The two have nothing to do with each other. The deep structure of "It was golblanged, as it is bandied about, before the fremdool could cartipulate" is something like: "The fremdool could not yet carpitulate. They golblanged it. They bandy this about".
That is, an analysis of the deep structure does not in the least help in understanding what is actually meant. It may help in understanding "how meaning is communicated in sentences", but it doesn't help in understanding what the meaning of a specific sentence may be.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]... I find it difficult to read some newspaper articles, journal articles, etc because I need a dictionary to understand ... out there who have acquired this skill and I would like to work on being able to do this also![/nq]
I'm going to treat the text you provided. You have gotten some good advice already about the general problems you have with English. Some people have suggested that this text suffers from being either "academic" or "Marxist," suggesting that somehow journalism or non-Marxist writing is better. This is silliness. What is true is that people who take ideas seriously often write for others that take ideas seriously, and they often share a familiarity with concepts that most people have only a faint glimmer of. This is to be expected: when people have spent tens of years studying a subject they have a different relationship with it than other people.
It is not necessary that writing from such a background is impenetrable. Obscurantism is often used to hide a lack of content, but "large ideas" can often be written clearly.
Let's contrast two popular writers from the right. Gertrude Himmelfarb is the godmother of the neo-conservatives. It is not only her philosophical writing that leads to that characterization; she is the wife of Irving Kristol and mother of William Kristol. Her writing, which holds that Victorian values represent all that is best in the world and that falling away from them is the root of all evil, is clear and easy to understand. It may be that I am right that you need to approach her writing very critically, but that doesn't detract from the clarity of her writing.
On the other hand, it is easy for popular acceptance and wide-spread feelings that people "understand" something to mask vacuity. An example of this is another writer popular in some sections of the right, Ayn Rand. Her fiction is populated with cardboard characters; her "philosophy" when shorn of appropriated and misapplied philosophical terms has almost no content left. People think that they "understand" her writing, but that is because there is nothing there to understand.

The best attack on "academic leftism" comes from the academic left. Two lively, easy-to-read, deep thinkers from the academic left, although non-Marxists, are Hilary Putnam and Richard Rorty. Putnam spent some time with members of the Progressive Labor Party in the late 60s and early 70s, but rejected that Maoist-inspired Marxism; Rorty grew up in a Trotskyist family, but also moved on. Both found their home in the all-American philosophy of pragmatism.
Putnam has taken a number of philosophers of both the left and the right to task (including his own earlier work). He attacks the meat of their arguments, and often shows that that work is incoherent to the extent that if their arguments are correct then those arguments prove themselves to be wrong. His essays are easy to read, lively, and easy to find. Many of his ideas including ones that he has since renounced have found their way into popular culture.

Rorty blames many of the problems of the left on "academic leftism." His homepage, has examples of writing that is both academic and leftist, both good and bad. His "Analytic Philosophy and Transformative Philosophy"
is well-written and accessible. When he veers off into aesthetics, as in his "Remarks at MOMA" , he can be as impenetrable as Derrida (who he seems to praise here, while attacking elsewhere).
On to your text. You will note that this text is not straight-forward. It seems to be written to inflate the piece that it is describing.
[nq:1]Let me give you an example - a friend of mine referred me to an article where the author, in his introduction, wrote the following: "On an empirical level this article charts the introductin of a number of key reforms to the corporate policy.[/nq]
It is hard to say how this sentence should have been written. Most writing about society (or science) has a component that is empirical and a component that is analytical. Sometimes the analytic component is lacking. That leads to what academics call "journalistic" writing and is mostly a disease of undergraduates. Sometimes the empirical component is lacking. That leads to ungrounded theorizing and is mostly a disease of graduate students and professors. It becomes important, then, for writers to establish that both legs are present. This partially explains why the sentence above is not simply "This article traces the introduction of key reforms in corporate policy."
We will later find that this is not what the article is about. We later discover that it is legal policy rather than corporate policy that is claimed to have been reformed.
[nq:1]The author avers these reforms were shaped by the institutional power of big business.[/nq]
"Avers" is a perfectly good English word, yet seem to cry that the writer is substituting vocabulary for thought. I suggest that the first two sentences should be
"This article traces the introduction of key reforms in corporate policy, claiming that they were shaped by the power of big business." The "institutional power" phrase is argumentative and involves a series of claims about the relationship of particular organizations (businesses) to business as a thing in itself. This either requires a different set of evidence or belongs in the analytical component.

These two sentences (or my replacement) bother me, since I would think that the shaping of reforms by big business would be something to demonstrate, not to simply "aver." Note that none of this has any "Marxist" flavor so far; there is no reason that a captain of industry should not have written this.
[nq:1]On a theoretical level the article contends that the essence of the recent legal reform process was underpinned by complex interdependence bewteen economic forces and the nature of corporations.[/nq]Now we get the other shoe. "Not only is there empirical evidence, but I have a hypothesis to explain it." It is not clear that the sentence means anything, however. It seems clear that "the essence of" is empty language. Talk of "essences" is always suspect, and talk of "processes" is often obscurantist. Further, we should suspect that the nature of corporations is part of the "economic forces" rather than something that has a complex interdependence with them.

"Economic forces" is itself suspect; it screams of reification. I think this sentence says "This article claims that recent legal reforms are rooted in the nature of corporations and the role corporations play in the economy." This is vacuous. For a political economist to claim that political control of economic entities is rooted in the nature of those economic entities is trivial. This sentence, then, says that this article offers no interesting theoretical claims.
[nq:1]The article criticises the distortions and mystifications of legal positivism that treats law in isolation from the economic infrastructure.[/nq]
Legal positivism does not "treat law in isolation from the economic infrastructure." In fact, legal positivism is a tradition from Bentham and Austin which emphasizes the opposite: that law grows out the world as it is. Bentham, especially, attacked Blackstone for his 'spirit of obsequious quietism' in the assumption that law comes from some given structure of duties and rights. The criticism here is of a particular kind of legal positivism: one that claims that law-making has no foundation in the relations of the economy. We are perilously close to an attack on a straw man here.
? .. The governing principle
[nq:1]in any backlash against theoretical concepts dominant in the legal academy is the recognition that any changes in the doctrinal ... of the fundamental dynamics of the social relations of capitalism and the lobby groups that express the will of capital".[/nq]
That the social relations of capitalism must be considered in discussion of law affecting the social relations of capitalism is vacuous. This sentence is most interesting for its mixture of categories (see "category mistake" in your dictionary of philosophy) and of levels of analysis. The "social relations of capitalism" are mixed with "lobby groups," a bizarre error if I ever saw one, and then combined with a semi-mystical "will of capital." This odd mixture then is used to prescribe the grand-sounding "governing principle."
[nq:1]The start isn't so bad but there are paragraphs and sections throughout the article that are so difficult to understand ... some words have different meanings, so it becomes ambiguous and the meaning of the passage is lost in the process.[/nq]
The start is so bad. This synopsis of the article suggests an associate professor under pressure to publish who has nothing to say. I don't know what you mean by "some words have different meanings." If you mean that words used with technical meanings in a field need interpretation within that cognitive field, then this is no surprise. Get used to it. If you mean that words seem to change meaning, then those changes are worth marking for a critical assessment of the article (see "equivocation" in your dictionary of philosophy).
[nq:1]Does anyone know whether learning linguistics would help me, eventually, comprehend the English language so that I will be able to read a difficult passage and understand the underlying meaning?[/nq]
Linguistics is not the key to understanding such passages. Learning to read critically is the key.

Linguistics v's Traditional Grammar; a desire to read and understand

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