Response to Sanford B. Steever's Review of A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil

Sanford Steever has written an extremely negative review (Language 78(2).314–16) of my1999 grammar. In fact it appears to me to be the most negative thing I have ever seen anywhere in any journal, in my entire academic career.

The review’s criticisms can be divided into two categories. One is on the issue of copyediting, typographical errors, and other kinds of lapses, both on the parts of copyeditors and on my part. These errors, catalogued in excruciating detail by Steever (S) can be repaired and will be dealt with in any future edition of the grammar.

The other issue is a philosophical one. S appears to believe that a grammar ought to be an exhaustive review, catalogue, critique, and/or explication of all the linguistic literature written in recent decades on the language in question. My failure to produce this kind of grammar allows him to conclude that the work is ‘unusable’.

My clearly stated goal, however, was not to produce this kind of a grammar but to provide one for learners of Tamil, in particular of what I call the ‘standard’ spoken variety, in a form that they will find useful and usable. My experience, over almost three decades of teaching Tamil to (mostly) American learners, is that they are not able to digest the complex linguistic formulations linguists delight in and that this inability has become more acute in recent years. Where once one could assume that students in a language class had some understanding of basic grammatical terminology such as ‘noun, verb, adjective’, this seems to be less and less the case, and the expectation that they might understand terminology such as ‘infinitive, imperative’, or ‘transitive verb’ will not be rewarded. Neither does it seem to be possible to teach the requisite terminology to students so that they will understand how a transitive verb differs from an intransitive form. I have had the experience again and again of students asking for an explication, say, of dative-marking with stative verbs. I make the explanation in as simple a manner as I can, only to have the same student ask for the same explanation again a short time later.

This work evolved over a period of years, from originally dittoed handouts on various subjects provided to students to accompany the kinds of teaching materials that existed in the 1960s, which were largely devoid of any grammatical explanation (the philosophy was that learners would absorb the structure of the language the way first-language learners, i.e. children, do). In 1971 I compiled these notes into a grammatical appendix that accompanied a radio play reader; in 1979 I published this grammar with the Christian Literature Society and then updated it in 1994 in a ‘samizdat’ form that circulated among interested parties until the final publication of the 1999 version. Throughout, I strove to explain the Tamil language in the simplest, most user-friendly form that I could manage, knowing that even these simple formulations would not be easily absorbed by many learners.

I must also note that there are occasional exceptions to this, such as when linguistics students show up in a Tamil language class mainly because they are interested in its structure and not because they intend to use the language for some real-world purpose. These students take avidly to complicated constructions and complex explanations and, if allowed free rein, can fill up an entire class hour with discussions of such issues as whether the intransitive-transitive distinction in Tamil verbs that S raises is actually the best way to characterize the formal distinction or whether another distinction such as the affective-effective polarity proposed by Paramasivam is the most apt.

Non linguists, however, not only do not benefit from these discussions, they actively dislike them and do not wish to be present when they take place in the classroom. Teaching Tamil and its grammar, then, requires balancing the needs and expectations of various user groups, most of whom are not linguistically sophisticated. I personally would prefer that all students be willing and able to...