Okay, I only had five minutes to look at someone else's copy, so now I'm going through the sample you can get on-line to see what I can pull out and explain easily. Also, I'm a little afraid of this turning into a quibble-fest. Any one point can be argued as being not
that great a transgression, but it's the cummulative effect that's problematic. With that in mind, here goes:
- Let's start with the introduction:
As for shaping words into ideas, what if ideas had only two sides? . . . An idea could be about a main word, and the other main word would be about the first. That would be the simplest structure: one main word about another.
This is not so much incorrect as it is incoherent. In the memorable words of Wolfgang Pauli, it is "not even wrong."
- He goes on:
Minor logic and support words could finish the job. This is a stunningly ignorant statement about the structure of language. It is wrong both because grammar is not determined by logic (and the belief that is should be has led to many of the pernicious "zombie rules" that plague the popular imagination, like the idea that you can't say "Me and Tom went to the store" because you wouldn't say "Me went to the store"); and because it implies that explaining everything beyond subject-predicate is a matter of a few minor details, rather than a challenge of staggering complexity that still keeps brilliant minds occupied for their entire careers. I'm not saying that little kids should be slapped upside the head with that complexity, but the fact that this author would make such a statement strongly suggests that he has never had any real exposure to his subject matter.
- He talks about "four levels" of grammar in a way that is entirely at odds with how linguists talk about the levels of grammar. (Properly speaking, the three levels of grammar are phonology, morphology, and syntax. Thompson is restricting his remarks to syntax.) The four "things" he is talking about are not exactly wrong. There are such things as parts of speech, subjects and predicates, phrases, and clauses.
- "There are only eight kinds of words." False false false. This would be like saying "There are only three states of matter. Learn these and you know all there is to know about states of matter." It is also very likely that if he is trying to shoe-horn everything into eight parts of speech, he miscategorizes some types of words.
- "parts of sentence: the subject, simple predicate, direct object, and other parts." He just got done saying there are only two "parts of the sentence." Even if we accept that he's using his own way of describing things, this is just plain bad pedagogy.
- When he introduces nouns, he uses the canard that a noun is a person, place or thing, which is just not true (unless you stretch the definition of "thing" to the breaking point). Nouns can be action-like ("His humming is driving me crazy"). What really distinguishes nouns and verbs is the syntactic role they play in the sentence, as subject, head of a verb-phrase, and so on. If he's already introducing the distinction between subject and predicate, why not use this to drive the distinction between nouns and verbs?
He also, incidentally, feels the need to mention "collective nouns" (e.g. "flock") but neglects the more interesting and discussion-worth distinction between mass nouns and count nouns (e.g. "lumber," which has no plural, vs. "log," which does).
- He praises The Elements of Style. If you want to see a linguist go apoplectic over Strunk & White's Horrid Little Book,
go here.
Well, that's all I have time for right now. That was harvested from just a few pages of the preview, so I don't have high hopes for the rest of it.
