>>an accumulation of formulaic phrases<<
Yes. If you believe that language acquisition is hard-wired then the semantics of
grammar are a common pool owned by all. Noone has copyright on that but God.Which
raises the tricky idea that one day God is going to call in the lawyers...
Martin Cooke
----- Original Message -----
From: "Erik Borg" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 12:39 PM
Subject: common knowledge
> As someone working in linguistics and teaching international students, I
> tend to see more problems in citation practices than other contributors to
> this mail list.
>
> Starting simply with "common knowledge" or common practice, do we--does
> anyone--really problematicise and therefore source all common knowledge?
> How is a Chinese student to understand the name of the 1914-1919 conflict in
> Europe? What is the name of the 1939-1945 conflict? What is "the
> Renaissance?" If one says, for example, "Survey methodology developed
> rapidly after the Second World War," does that need two citations, one
> supporting the claim about survey methodology, the other, that there was
> such a thing as "the Second World War"?
>
> But even more fundamentally, if you are writing in a language other than
> your mother tongue, what do you need to cite? If the limit is the use of
> "any words, phrases or even a general idea that you know has not fallen from
> your own lips or been created in your own mind," our Chinese student would
> have to cite each word, or if that seems absurd, each phrase. "For
> example?" "Of course?" "It has been said that...?" Linguistics suggests
> that much of our language is not words joined according to rules, with open
> slots (Any noun + any verb + any object = sentence) but an accumulation of
> formulaic phrases, so that the occasionally-seen guidance of citing
> occasions of "more than three or five or seven words that are not your own"
> is regularly violated by native speakers because that is how language
> operates. If the language is not your own, when does "saying it in your own
> words" become meaningful?
>
> This isn't to suggest that I believe there is no such thing as plagiarism,
> or that prohibitions against it are an "eccentric practice confined to
> outdated British universities" in the words of Furedi's recent screed
> (Furedi, F. [2004, 6 Aug.]. Plagiarism stems from a loss of scholarly
> ideals. The Times Higher Education Supplement, pp. 16-17.). I agree with
> Reddy, Donnan, Botes and other recent contributors that this is a teaching
> issue. (This, I think, was the saddest part of Furedi's piece: the
> dismissal of the argument that plagiarism is in large part a learning
> problem, and therefore that explaining plagiarism is beneath the role of
> lecturers.)
>
> I see plagiarism as a specific case of a general phenomenon,
> intertextuality. Intertextuality is both inevitable and desirable:
> inevitable because of the nature of language, and desirable because we, as
> teachers, want students to understand and draw on the knowledge of our
> fields. It's up to us to convey our own understanding of the space of
> appropriate explicit acknowledgement.
>
> Erik Borg
> English Language Centre
> Northumbria University
>
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