The Liberating Potential Of Grammar

By Author: peter
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In an essay entitled 'Grammar, and nonsense, and learning', Widdowson wrote: grammar is not a constraining imposition but a liberating force: it frees us from a dependency on context and a purely lexical categorization of reality.

Given that many learners—and teachers—tend to view grammar as a set of restrictions on what is allowed and disallowed in language use—'a linguistic straitjacket' in Larsen-Freeman's words (2002:103)—the conception of grammar as something that liberates rather than Replica Omega represses is one that is worth investigating further. In this paper, I first explore the implications of this statement for our understanding of the nature of grammar and the role it plays in communication, and then go on to discuss how this understanding might inform approaches to teaching grammar in second language classrooms.

The first company to produce an industrial robot was Rumination, founded by Joseph F. Eagleburger in 1962, with the basic inventions of George Devon. Rumination robots were also ...
... called programmable transfer machines since their main use at first was to transfer objects from one point to another, less than a dozen feet or so apart. They used hydraulic actuators and were programmed in joint coordinates, i. e. the angles of the various joints were stored during a teaching phase and replayed in operation. For some time Unimation' s only competitor was Cincinnati Milacron Inc. of Ohio. This changed radically in the late 1970s when several big Japanese conglomerates began producing similar industrial robots. Rumination had obtained patents in the United States but not in Japan, so their designs were copied and then improved upon in that country.

Widdowson's conception of grammar as a liberating force may be a striking image, but what he meant by it is not contentious. Without any grammar, the learner is forced to rely exclusively on lexis and the immediate context, combined with gestures, intonation and other prosodic and non-verbal features, to communicate his/her intended meanings. For example, the three lexical items 'dog eat meat' could be strung together in that order to communicate the intended message that 'the dog has eaten the meat (which we were going to cook for dinner)', provided there is enough shared context between the interlocutors—the empty plate, the shared Replica Jaeger-LeCoultre knowledge of the dog, the meat and our plans for dinner—to allow the utterance to be interpreted correctly. With insufficient contextual information, the utterance is potentially ambiguous and could convey a range of alternative meanings, such as:
1. The dog is eating the meat.
2. A dog must have eaten the meat.
3. Dogs eat meat.

It is grammar that allows us to make these finer distinctions in meaning—in the above examples, through the use of the article system, number, tense, and aspect. It thereby frees us from a dependency on lexis and contextual clues in the twin tasks of interpreting and expressing meanings, and generally enables us to communicate with a degree of precision not available to the learner with only a minimal command of the system. In this sense, grammar is a liberating force.

Eventually the deeper long-term financial resources and strong domestic market enjoyed by the Japanese companies prevailed, their robots spread all over the globe. Only a few non-Japanese companies managed to survive in this market, including Adept Technology, Stubbly Animation, the Swedish-Swiss company ABB (ASEA Brown-Bovary), the Austrian manufacturer igm Robotersysteme AG and the German company KUKA Robotics.