Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Diagramming Sentences: Deep Knowledge?

Kitty Burns Flory has an Op-Ed in today’s NYTimes about, of all things, diagramming sentences, which I learned to do in the sixth grade. I thought of it as a species of puzzle-solving and rather enjoyed it. I’d like to believe that the act of creating a visual representation of sentence structure was intellectually useful in some deep way, as though learning to go back and forth between visual and a propositional modes of thought created a useful matrix in which later thinking could take shape.

Mark Liberman’s noted the column in Language Log, saying:
The 1863 edition is available here from Google Books. I haven't previously read it, but a quick skim confirms my previous impression that grammar-school children of the 19th century learned more about linguistic analysis than most graduate students in English departments do today.
[Edit] While Mark is right about English graduate students, I'm not quite sure of the significance of that phenomenon. I know Mark is deeply skeptical about the effects of Theory on literary study I don't think that's the result of insufficient knowledge of linguistic analysis nor do I belief that more sophisticated linguistic analysis would remedy the situation. And least not directly. There might, however, be a residual effect from having to think about language as a fairly precise and orderly affair.

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