Implications for ESOL of Some Recent Linguistic Research

Abstract

The amount of research emanating from the field of modern linguistics has begun to reach staggering proportions. Moreover, a substantial part of this output is extremely significant for general linguistics as well as potentially quite useful for applied linguistics. Exciting things are happening. Just as a few years ago linguists realized that it made little sense to conduct phonological research independently of syntax, so we have now reached a point where it appears that syntax cannot be divorced from semantics. This fact is reflected in the coinage of a new word referring to precisely this area of current interest: semantax. In recent years, at least in the work of linguists such as Ross, Lakoff, Postal, and McCawley, underlying syntactic representation has been bearing less and less resemblance to surface realizations, but at the same time more and more resemblance to semantic representation. To the extent that syntactic configurations appear ever more abstract then, they point to identity with semantic structure. Furthermore, the more that individual languages are investigated in depth, the more their deepest abstract representations begin to look alike, suggesting really for the first time that lingustic universal is something other than just an idealized notion. One need not dwell very long on the interesting implications for language pedagogy that a formalized theory of linguistic universals will have. In any discussion of the current convergence of syntax and semantics, and its possible relevance for ESOL, one would cite such contributions of the last couple of years as Fillmore's case grammar, Sandra Annear's analysis of relative clauses, Kiparsky's observations on belief and presupposition, plus other efforts, published and unpublished, by such as Postal, Chomsky, Lakoff, Bach, McCawley and the UCLA English Syntax Project. Since, however, it is impossible in a single article to even begin to do justice to this tremendous output of linguistic research, discussion will be limited to the implications for ESOL of just one area of recent inquiry, something known as the performative hypothesis, which is best presented in an article by J. R. Ross entitled On Declarative Sentences, to appear in the forthcoming Readings in English Transformational Grammar, edited by Jacobs and Rosenbaum. Before looking briefly at Ross's proposal, however, consider the following pairs of sentences: