25 June 1999, 888 words
People use language to communicate. Politicians use language to lie. It seems, therefore, that politicians understand the rules of language differently from other folk. So when Cabinet decides what English Language textbooks schoolchildren should use, it may be that they're trying to ensure that people stop understanding language.
For example, as a writer, I usually frown upon the passive. (As a man, I always frown upon it, since the sex soon gets boring.) A passive is defined as "A construction in which the usual object appears as the subject, and the usual subject is the object of the preposition by or absent altogether." My concern is that the passive may be promoted as a good thing, since the UNC regime clearly wants all media to roll over and play dead.
I also worry about what children may learn about the relative clause from a UNC-textbook. A relative clause modifies a noun, and usually contains a trace corresponding to that noun. However, even if the noun isn't a relative, the UNC tends to omit clauses which might make the relatives subject to market forces (like INNCogen getting a guarantee that T&TEC will buy all its electricity even if they don't need it) and ensures that any trace of corruption is covered up completely (like INNCogen being given immunity to investigation of the contract).
Similarly, the dative is "a family of constructions typically used for giving or benefiting." But, as Ish Galbaransingh proves, you don't even have to be family in order to benefit from Government construction contracts. All you have to do is give significant contributions to the party's coffers, and even the women you date will benefit.
All of which is inextricably bound up with the accusative, which is the case of the object of a verb. I say this because under the UNC the noun "nepotism" has become a verb which means "governing". Yet, although the UNC leaders continually trumpet how they are upholding law and order, no one is ever accused of fleecing the country of millions of dollars. In fact, even when someone is accused, they are allowed to leave the country, or they quit their jobs and get another government consultancy, or their contracts are withdrawn and then returned to them at a profit. So I'm pretty sure that the accusative will never even be included in any UNC-approved textbook.
On the other hand, I am quite certain that "agreement" will be dealt with in fine detail. Agreement is the process in which a word or sentence is altered depending on a property of some other word in the sentence. This concept has been used continually by the UNC to excuse its policies: once "PNM" or "race" is the other word, terms like "nepotism" and "corruption" become phrases like "redressing an imbalance" and "appointing the best person for the job".
That is why I am quite sure that the auxiliary, which is a special kind of verb used to express concepts related to the truth of a sentence, will be completely eradicated from Cabinet-approved language texts. Politicians certainly won't want children knowing that there are parts of speech which could indicate whether a sentence is truthful or not, since those in government speak the truth rarely or never. It is true that the present crop rarely speak in complete sentences, either, but that is not always an effective defence, since the best-spoken Ministers are often those who lie most blatantly.
Kamla Persad-Bissessar, whose pronunciation probably makes Undine Giuseppi's heart warm, stood up on a platform during the UNC's Local Government launch and declared that the Equal Opportunities Bill will provide protection from discrimination for all. Since the EOB specifically excludes homosexuals, her auxiliary ("will"), her adjective ("Equal") and her collective noun ("all") were all lies.
Children may thus come to think that a proposition, which is a statement consisting of a predicate and a set of arguments, must always have a false predicate. And I don't even want to think about what will happen to their pragmatics, which is how language is used in a social context, including how sentences are made to fit with the flow of a conversation and how degrees of formality and politeness are signaled. After all, with Dhanraj Singh as an exemplar, pragmatics will obviously not be signaled at all.
Semantics, which is the parts of rules and lexical entries that specify the meaning of a word or phrase or sentence, will surely fall by the wayside. After all, the less certain people are of a word or phrase or sentence, the more difficult it is to point out the contradictions in politicians' statements, like Prime Minister Basdeo Panday saying in 1977, "The arguments most often used in support of capital punishment is that it deters capital crimes more effectively than do penalties of imprisonment...but none of them withstand careful examination."
So this may be why the UNC has been so insistent on having students use only one textbook chosen by them. In the final analysis, though, I am not too worried: contrary to what people like Undine Giuseppi preach, the rules of grammar are contained in the brain, not in books. So, narrowly educated or not, people's belief in politicians' statements will continue to be defined by race and inherent stupidity.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh