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Date:         Mon, 14 Dec 1992 10:25:03 -0600
From:         LHAMPLYONS@CUDNVR.DENVER.COLORADO.EDU
Subject:      Re: standard english

Hirsch's description of a written code is by and large accurate, but he presents
it in linguistic rather than sociolinguistic terms.  Thus he misses much that is
important and true.  Of course written codes are normative, conservative and
seriously inert.  But they DO change both as a whole and from discourse
community to discourse community.  Perhaps what we are seeing diffferently is
the DEGREE of difference across communities/genres or across time.  The
definition of "dialect" is itself not resolved; in spoken language what some
call dialects others cal languages-and the reasons are usually sociopolitical.
People declare they language they speak to be mutually incomprehensible with a
nieghboring language while NNS learners of one find they can comprehend the
other--again,m the reasons are sociopolitical. Differences are described as
dialects that in other contexts would be considered within a single dialect,
wider variation being expected across dialects.
Dialects turn out to be most importantly about identifying membership and
exclusion, and applying that yardstick to written codes I belive we see that
groups construct grapholects for thamselves for the same reasons that dialect
separation occurs in speech communities.  My grad students this term were
astonished to read between the ESL literature and the composition literature
and find the (to them) huge differences in, for example, citation practices.
Identifying and describing these differences and accounting for them is a
relatively new and fascinating research field reaslised esp in the journal
*Social Studies of Science*   The differences are certainly less dramatic than
many in spoken language, but we can and do find measurable differences at the
rhetorical, syntactic and lexical levels.  For Hirsch to suggest that this was
pretty much all set and can no longer be impacted is invidiously untrue.  It
can be and is being.  Change is smaller and slower but still there.  To argue
about the size **needed** for a dialect/grpaholect difference is futile, I
think, since language users decide that without us.  Huckin wote about the
shift from MLA to APA documnetation, which is a significant external expression
of subtler changes that had been going for a long time.  Another example that
has been much before us recently in issues of CE and CCC is the acceptance of
personal narrative as research.  This acceptance has not (yet) happened in other
   t
disciplines such as linguistics.  College composition is its own discourse
community and I can describe linguistically and rhetorically (and socioculturall
   y)
specific characteristics of it.  Slow change? yes.  Frozen? no.
I don't want the basic truths in Hirsch's explanation to overshadow the other
truths of the possibilities of fruitful changes in written language-using
conventions.  But I think (as always is the case) that we agree on a lot.
Liz
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU