Silly Little Country

Marginalized Discourse that deserves Marginalization

Geoff Pullum describes an Australian tale of great hilarity. I guess it should be no surprise that Australia's English teachers are as ill-served by postmodernism as those in the rest of the West.

Grammar is taken to be conservative, you see; and Rodney Huddleston (a flaming liberal in the American sense, long-time hater of sexism and opponent of the thoroughly conservative government of the recently ousted John Howard) is supposed to be on the side of conservativism. On the other side are left-wing teachers, Marxist literary critics, deconstructionists, and post-modernists wittering on about diversity of Englishes and marginalized discourses of the oppressed, and the Coalface author is taken to be on that side — as if there was something leftist or subversive about being unable to tell an adjective from a modal auxiliary.
...
Thus quite rapidly the incident has turned (as one might have anticipated) into a full-scale assault on the credentials and mental acumen of all Queensland's hard-working teachers. It might have been better for ETAQ to openly and honestly admit that it had unfortunately published a grammar article that was a complete crock. When you make a mistake, just admit it.

Labels: linguistics, marginalize discourse, postmodern

posted by Alan Adamson @ 4:52 PM