Part II. In search of “grammar” and GRAMMAR
II.A Three sides
II.1 Though such a beginning is hardly conventional for a “grammar”, I shall straightaway affirm the “three-sided” premise that language as a potential system of choices available, and discourse as an actual system of choices made should both be described from three sides.[Note 1] Most basically, both systems are linguistic in the broadest sense because their prime modality is of course language; cognitive because both supply our major resources for formulating, expressing, and sharing knowledge; and social because both define and sustain the organisation of society. The premise would hardly seem controversial, had not the respective disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and sociology long been pernickety about their borders, which I at least have been working to surmount or reconcile throughout my own career.[Note 2]
II.2 Among the most gratifying e-mails I receive are acknowledgements that my efforts have indeed guided and encouraged people in their works and aspirations, e.g.:
I am a retired lecturer in English for Specific Purposes, Applied Linguistics, English for Communication and Teacher Training for 35 years. […] Your “triple vision” of discourse as linguistic, cognitive and social was the foundation of my thesis, [although] my then counsellor [said the three were] irreconcilable. [...] But I went ahead all the same. [...] Today, my thesis, written in Portuguese, is quoted by other post-graduation students far beyond my expectations. That has also been the basis of all my teaching.
-- Susan Nicholls in
I could desire no more welcome reward for my solitary and far-roving odyssey upon the swirling oceans of language and discourse -- and now, grammar.
II.3 A second “three-sided” premise would be a direct corollary: GRAMMAR -- written in BLOCK CAPITALS to designate the actual human capacities and activities (§ II.19) -- must in turn be a system with three sides in the service of language, cognition, and society. On the linguistic side, GRAMMAR offers a repertory of forms, classes, and patterns that underwrite the detailed linear organisation of speech or writing. On the cognitive side, GRAMMAR packages and finalises the expression of what people “have in mind” and, for the moment at least, helps to bring their minds closer together. On the social side, GRAMMAR is replete with subtle or unsubtle signals of origins, roles and status, plus signals of power or solidarity.
II.4 This second premise must sound more controversial, after a long-standing trend of fencing off “grammar” inside some narrowly “linguistic” purview. The trend has been intensified those approaches in “modern linguistics”, the academic “science of language”, preoccupied with formal approaches highlighting the static arrangement of sentences over functional approaches highlighting the dynamic roles, intentions, and attitudes of participants in communication. My own theme has insistently been the reverse: as functional as possible, and as formal only as necessary.
II.5 As a third “three-sided” premise and further corollary, MEANING (also written in BLOCK CAPITALS to designate the significances of human of action and communication) can also be grasped from three sides. On the linguistic side, language is the most basic yet most precise modality for being “meaningful”, and to fluctuating degrees prefigures how we put thoughts or ideas into words. On the cognitive side, MEANING is part and parcel of what we know or understand, including ourselves. As such, it cannot be exclusively restricted to language, witness the diverse items occurring after the phrase “the meaning of’”: “God”, “faith”, “life”, “death”, “existence”, “time”, “history”, “fidelity”, and “intelligence”, plus emotional expressions like “flushed face” and “sparkling eyes” (BNC data). On the social side, MEANING both regulates and is regulated by the organisation of society, especially in deciding how far its members may “mean the same thing” or “mean different things”, or again what they may “mean but not actually say” -- and what consequences may ensue, such as confusion, fistfights, marriages, divorces, pre-emptive wars, etc etc).
II.6 These “three-sided” premises might seem to counsel a careful triple apportionment of distinct terms like “linguistic grammar” or “social meaning”. But these seem too unwieldy for frequent use and may foster distinctions that are not adequately clear or secured in the data. To assert the significance of the “three sides” by no means implies they can be reliably filtered out separately for description. Rather, we can, as it were, “revolve” our data to bring one side into focus when it merits it.
II.7 Perhaps too, schooling is reluctant to venture too deeply into those matters of language which are prone to raise uncomfortable questions about the tilted cognitive and social agenda of education at large.[Note 3] The official agenda centres on “acquiring knowledge”, “learning the material”, or “mastering the subject-matter”, made equally and fairly available to all; the unofficial (or “hidden”) agenda is to spread learners across a hierarchy of relative success or failure depending to a large extent on the learners’ individual language varieties and social ambiences. For many, both the subject-matter and the language used to present it is remote from their lived experience. But schooling either ignores this incongruence or even exploits it -- remoteness as a levelling factor. And, until recently, the area of “grammar” in the curriculum was tamed and channelled into safe “exercises”, such as “naming the parts of speech” (cf. IV.D).
II.8 The natural outcome has been a disembodied, desiccated vision of the cognitive and social purposes and relevance of the real GRAMMAR as opposed to any “school grammar”. Allow me here just one rather droll demo of a key mode of information that gets excluded, namely ATTITUDES, which in my “grammar” will receive its proper attention. The opposing poles can be called AMELIORATIVE for what’s judged good and PEJORATIVE for what’s judged bad (POSITIVE and NEGATIVE are needed elsewhere for DEGREE and POLARITY, respectively -- see IV.184 and IV.194). The PASSIVE sub-pattern of PERSONAL PRONOUN + AUXILIARY “be” + invariant “to be” + PAST PARTICIPLE carries, with unnerving persistence, a PEJORATIVE ATTITUDE about how people “are to be” treated, e.g.:
[1] The girl was to be guarded until she delivered, at which time she was to be stoned to death. (Amnesty)
In
BNC data, among the sinister inconveniences using this pattern I find “demoted”,
“cut out”, “despised”, “hounded”, “punished unfairly”, “investigated”,
“arrested”, “prosecuted”, “convicted”, “incarcerated”,
“imprisoned for life”, “chained hand and foot”, and “hanged”. In EPC
data, I find “humbled”, “abandoned”, “persecuted”, “trampled upon”,
“devoured”, “condemned”, and “hanged” all over again -- and, for bad
measure, “boiled alive”, “burned at the stake”, and “buried at sea”.
II.9 Why a seemingly innocuous linguistic pattern should be so cognitively and socially loaded is a puzzle. True, the PASSIVE in general has traditionally languished under a cloud, and I have met with plenty of English textbooks and teachers who still counsel against it, even whilst using it in their counsel (cf. IV.218). But authentic data do not reveal it in so dire a fate as this sub-pattern, which may have stemmed from memorable uses in the 18th and 19th centuries, either by hugely respected speakers [2-3], or in hugely popular books [4-5].
[2] Am I to be hunted in this manner? (Dr Johnson)
[3] Am I to be cut off before I do anything to effect permanent improvement in Africa ? (Dr Livingstone)
[4] Do you expect enemies? Am I to be shut up here, to be killed in a siege? [...] Am I to be blocked up here to die? (Mysteries of Udolpho)
[5] This is not to be borne! Am I to be bearded in my own palace by an insolent Monk? ( Castle of Otranto )
My conjecture would be that such an ancestry might attract a PEJORATIVE custom for a pattern which had not figured this way before, since I do not find it so in, say, Shakespeare’s plays and the King James Bible -- trusty lodestars for historical issues of usage.
II.10 I have yet to encounter an English teacher or grammarian who had noticed this regularity. But then, they had not build their conceptions of “grammar” on the large data banks needed to render such things noticeable. Their invented data was routinely bland and neutral, not to say bland and inane, such as “I hear with my ears” and “My brother is a boy” (published examples). For compiling a realistic “grammar”, real data in unending supplies are veritably a brave new world.
II.B The double-bind of “English teachers”
II.11 While I was composing my “multidisciplinary” tomes back in the 1980s (now also freely downloadable from this website), I always had the English teacher in mind. After all, I was one, in title at least, and have remained so throughout my wandering life. All the more was I troubled by what I saw as I worked, lectured, and counselled my way around the globe. In West and East Europe, in North and South America, in Africa, Arabia, Asia, and Australia, English teachers were being caustically short-changed: in status, esteem, salaries, resources, office space, and technical support, and, most importantly in my own view, deprived of a consolidated, coherent programme or mission, whether within the educational system or within society at large -- and, insult to injury, getting scapegoated for “low standards” or even a “decline in standards”, and by implication, denying future social opportunities to our learners (cf. II.46, 103).
II.12 Recently, the powers that be (or imagine they be), hoping to save face for themselves, bombard us with “official syllabuses” or “curricula”, which (to jumble up metaphors) conjure the wish-list of a cloud-cuckoo-land bureaucracy for English taught by a generation of fairy godmothers, wands at the ready.
The Tories excelled in 1988 with their Revised National Curriculum for English in England and Wales (hereafter NCE) for ages 5 through 16, which stipulates instilling a command over seventeen distinct “forms”:
[6] The range of forms in which pupils write should be extensive, eg notes, diaries, personal letters, formal letters, chronological accounts, reports, pamphlets, reviews, essays, advertisements, newspaper articles, biography, autobiography, poems, stories, playscripts, screenplays. (their italics)
The Chair of the Committee that cobbled together this list was Brian Cox,[Note 4] the waspish co-writer of “Black Papers on Education” and a of a provocative book Cox on Cox. Cox says he was dissuaded by Sir John Kingman, chair and namesake of the predecessor committee (and a professor of mathematics, if you please), from “saying far more about in what ways would it be implemented in the classroom”; Sir John “thought that this was not our brief, and that the complexities of this problem would prevent us from submitting our Report on time.”
Posilutely wrong on the first “thought”, Sir John -- if you tell somebody to go do something new and difficult, then “your brief’” must be to tell them how -- but absotively right on the second -- it could indeed not have been submitted on time.[Note 5] So for English teachers in Britain, the motto for this “revision” might read: “you just muck in or muck out, and watch out too, because you’ll be watched”. Crikey, I myself couldn’t “write” all 17 of those “forms’! What’s more, I’d wager Cox or Kingman couldn’t either, not to mention their bosses, the then “Secretaries of State for Education”, Kenneth Baker followed by Kenneth Clarke, both of whom understood hardly more about education than their distant predecessor in the same post: the frozen soft ice cream specialist and later “Baroness”, or better, “Ironess”, Margaret Thatcher, whose first swat at her job was to abolish universal free milk for school children.
[“Baker days” were holidays when hapless
staff had to donate unpaid labour anyway. In retirement, “Lord” Baker wrote
a biography of King George IV subtitled Caricature
of a Life, which, to judge from Amazon.com, nobody bought.]
[Clarke is reputed to have taunted his own
party chairman, Brian Mawhinney: "Tell your
kids to get their scooters off of my lawn”, meaning, I suppose, keep
party members from opposing Clarke, who coveted the
chairman’s post himself and contested vainly it three times. In student days,
he twice invited “reformed” British Fascist “Sir” Oswald Mosely to
“lecture” at
[Thatcher’s degree was in chemistry, where she helped
develop the first soft ice cream. Unfortunately for Britain, she changed jobs.
To kick off her interminable siege of
Downing Street, she filched from St. Francis of
II.13 To complete the cycle of scapegoating, those same “powers” visit upon us a galloping charade of “teacher evaluations” to implicate us as the weak link in the chain. The forms are designed for computer marking, with a woozy faith in quantifying everything, say, between 1 and 10. They imply that learners somehow know, better than their teachers, just what makes “teaching” good or bad, and just how the subject-matter should be “taught”. And -- insult to injury again -- they are carried out in a cloud of concealment and mistrust that bluntly question the teacher’s fairness and integrity, as if we lusted to reward or punish the good or bad evaluators, or to substitute mysteriously prefabricated and concealed packets of ten-out-of-ten evaluations along the way to department heads or “evaluation committees”. I have known plenty of students who saw only an occasion to vent their frustration and anger upon the whole university system, irrespective of the identity of the teacher-victim -- which wipes out any remaining vestige of rationality from the show trial.
II.14 In such a world of curricular ostentations, I have played the role of an itinerant, iconoclast explaining in frankest terms why this short-changed shop-keeping forces us teachers to short-change our students too. Many students I spoke with were just as frankly aware of the abuses, though many bought into the scapegoat myth, and, at the term’s end, wrote snarly “teacher evaluations” that might better have been called “eviscerations”.
II.15 This disheartening situation can hardly improve until teachers and students can interact upon a unified and consensual foundation, and with genuinely sufficient resources. What is the rightful subject matter of “English”, and whose “English” is the aim of the enterprise? How should the pieces of the enterprise be fitted together, such as writing, reading, pronunciation, orthography, literature, linguistics, and so forth? What processes make writing and reading fluent for some and not for others? Implicated somewhere among these questions is the rightful but so far unsettled purview of “grammar”.
II.16 In my best assessment, “English” within the native-language educational system is mainly an enterprise of standardisation. For most learners, the real task is to acquire an alternate variety of English beside the “home variety” which they bring from family and friends and which they are likely to retain outside the classroom. Now, this task is predictably misdirected by practices that in effect struggle to intervene and tamper with home varieties whilst spurning them as “incorrect” or “bad English”, and -- insult to injury on this side too -- indicators of “poor manners” and “low intelligence” (cf. II.54). Learners are understandably bewildered and disaffected, misled to see “Standard English” as a patent expurgation or indeed denigration of their own English rather than a coherent system designed for alternative contexts.
II.17 Meanwhile, the double-bind pinches the “grammar teacher” most savagely. We above all others are conjured to be the petty pelting officers of “correctness”, and the eradicators of “errors” that seem most glaring and unforgivable in people’s “grammar”. Unable and unwilling to fulfil these captious roles, we are most vulnerable to such recriminations as you shall presently see (§ II.46, 103). But first I should seek to clarify potential designations of the term “grammar” itself, and then the one I propose to pursue.
II.C Some precepts for “grammar”
II.18 Aside from sporadic sallies, I hadn’t focused my attention directly upon “grammar” until 1997, when I was assigned to a compulsory team-taught third-year “grammar course” which lacked tangible teaching resources, much less a reliable textbook. I was then at the University of Botswana at Gaborone in south central Africa. A substantial clientele among our 350 or so restive students, fluent enough in English, would later be English teachers if they weren’t already, and deserved workable, accurate materials for future use. And so began in earnest the explorations whose eventual outcome you see before you.
II.19 My logical first step, I reasoned, was to formulate some basic precepts:
q We should distinguish fundamentally between GRAMMAR (written here throughout in BLOCK CAPITALS) as the system of guidelines and strategies actually applied to forms, patterns, and positions by speakers and writers of English; versus grammar (written here throughout in ordinary type) as a notion or description of the GRAMMAR sustained or constructed by some individual or group for such purposes as teaching children or edifying the general public.
q A “grammar” should place more emphasis on showing how the attested patterns of English (PHRASE, CLAUSE, etc.) are put together than on simply inventing dismantling them for drills like “diagramming” or “naming the parts” (cf. IV.D).
q A “grammar” can have no firmer legitimacy than it derives from authentic data as evidence of the GRAMMAR being put to use in discourse. The grammarian’s intuition should be harnessed to predict, test, and interpret data, not to invent them.
q The GRAMMAR is always more encompassing and diverse than even the most ambitious “grammar” could describe. In that sense, “writing a grammar” is a utopian enterprise that we could always expand or improve. Having it on a computer for easy data access and easy revision is a godsend, but also a challenge not to be prematurely complacent or content.
q The GRAMMAR must be so designed that items which are functionally related (e.g., expressions sharing a topic) can also be formally related (e.g. phrases sharing a clause). In most discourses, the functional relations are substantially more flexible and extensive than the formal ones, so that relevant linguistic expressions, cognitive ideas, and social traits can sustain an overarching topic far beyond the boundaries of the single sentence or utterance -- precisely the two officially largest units of many “grammars”.
q The GRAMMAR must also be so designed for active integration with lexical resources in the LEXICOGRAMMAR (cf. II.136ff), which drives the actual use of the GRAMMAR upon richer cognitive and social bases (Part V). For example, the familiar TENSES of PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE must accommodate the temporal organisation of the PROCESSES expressed by individual VERBS or indeed diverging uses of the same VERB. “Running for your house” [7] must be much quicker than for the “White House” [8]; an event can “run for years” yet only for a small part of each year [9].
[7] In agony and terror I ran for the house. (Creative Writing)
[8] movie stars had supported John F. Kennedy when he ran for the White House. (Dustin Hoffman)
[9] First performed in 1946, this series of concerts ran for 37 years, earning an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. (Brighton Festival)
And in each usage, the action is radically different. No one would suppose that Kennedy literally “ran for the White House” in order to punch the current president in the nose.
Or
that the
q More precisely, the “GRAMMAR of English” is in reality a “family of GRAMMARS of Englishes” whose members are partly alike and partly distinct, due to such conditions as history, geography, migration, or social class. Most disputes among grammarians or English teachers are more or less “family quarrels” arising from this diversity. We do better service reporting such disputes as social attitudes than fomenting or exacerbating them ourselves.
q The personal “GRAMMARS of English” used by individuals, families, or groups such as a literary society or a rugby club, constitute a vastly more numerous and diversified “family”; perhaps no two are completely alike. The peril of disputes is still more imminent.
q
As if in compensation, the term “Standard English” --
apparently a brain-child of the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED)
(cf. § II.45) -- has been brandished for over a century as the ultimate model
of what “English” should be or become, eventually to be imposed on everyone
through “standardisation” (cf. § II.16). Yet inevitably, even “Standard
English” is a family of “Englishes”, e.g., British, Canadian, Australian,
South African, or US “American”. What they have in common may be the
tendencies to model speech upon writing, and to steer away from distinctly
regional usages, like “gitty” for alleyway (Midlands), “fizog” for face
(Yorkshire), “whigmaleeries” for silly whims (Scotland), “culchie”
for a country person (Ireland), “scrut” for stupid fool (Wales), “dekey” for fashionable (Canada),
“bludge” for shirk (Australia), “gromit” for child (New Zealand),
or “boopie” for prodigious belly (South Africa).
q Contrary to what self-serving “grammarians” preach, the GRAMMAR of English does not require explicit “grammars” to maintain or protect it. Rather, it is staunchly maintained in the linguistic, cognitive, and social capacities of the members of the “language community”. The grammarian’s job is not to legislate how the GRAMMAR should be used, but to report how it is used.
II.20 In my own view, the
precepts just stated hardly seem disputatious or radical. But I must confess
they do not represent the practices that have dominated the history of
“English grammars” I shall review below (II.E). In particular, traditional
grammarians have been complacent in implying that “my “grammar” is the
GRAMMAR”; and in thereby sustaining the expedient myth that English has only
one GRAMMAR, full stop, all usages outside it being
“errors”.
II.21 I would propose more precise and apt definitions: an error is saying what you couldn’t mean [10-12], and perhaps amending it [12]; a solecism is saying what you do mean and can be readily understood, but with expressions that are not commonly so used [13-15]; and a variation is using expressions which are commonly so used and understood, but in a regional or social variety not accepted as “standard” in some other quarters [16-17].
[10] The spacecraft is moved forward by throwing onions out the back. [ejecting ions] (Emirati student data)
[11] The government should help the ministry of education with funds to promote the abuse of alcohol and drugs in schools. [publicise] ( Botswana student data)
[Ngwao ya Setswana: “Setswana cuture”. Batho! “People!” (expressing surprise); Shakeshake: sorgum beer; boerwors: a beloved local sausage. The image is the then colourless president, Festus Mogae, who showed scant interest in culture.]
[12] I have heard that two or three dozen native lobsters give an appetite; [...] I meant oysters (Nickelby)
[13] We should all fall for [choose] the traditional wedding ( Botswana student data)
[14] They tried to learn English, but their native language was the hamper [hindrance] (Emirati student data)
[15] Miss Raymond looks smelly [smiley] face but speaks in pride ways. Her teeth look when she talks, and she owns angry tone. She is a liar person who lied to disappear her ignorant. (same)
[16] I thought they was going to catch a train, and that’s why they was hugging and kissing and that, but I dunno -- maybe they was just planning to go away or summat [something]. (Billy Bayswater)
[17] I were
just pretending to him, because I ain’t really full of beans
[feeling spirited]. Truth is, I’m still ever so peaky. And them
other doctors said I weren’t to go back up
Now, a particular error or solecism may be remedied, yet variations are the most likely to be singled out for disapproval in “grammar” books. They belong to the relevant variety as a system, and the English teacher can’t just reach in and yank out an isolated piece, like a dentist extracting one bad tooth. At best, learners acquire the alternative variety as a system which the educational process accredits, as I have remarked (II.16).
II.22 A “friendly grammar” registers attested variations as far as is feasible, at least from varieties that are accessible. If the long-standing project to “standardise” everybody’s English has proven unrealistic, the goal of providing more accurate information about the GRAMMAR of “Englishes” has not. That goal is if anything more vital than ever when “English” in its family of varieties is ceaselessly expanding its reach, and when its status as a language either of power or of solidarity hangs in the balance.[Note 6]
II.D The term “grammar”
II.23 Since the term “grammar” seems to me vague and unstable, I shall seek to sort out some uses before pursuing one of my own devising. I begin with uses of the term for compilations.
II.24 The term reference grammar can apply to compilations purporting to supply a reasonably comprehensive account of the real GRAMMAR. They are less intended to be read whole, like a history or a novel, than to be consulted on specific points or problems, such as “agreement of the verb with a group noun”. My personal view, aired back in I.11, is that if some topic or explanation does not appear in the more substantive reference grammars (which I have carefully read), it is unlikely to do so in countless “school grammars” and “grammar handbooks”, accumulated over the years (which I have not read).
II.25 With this factor in mind, I would commend three fairly recent data-based grammars that I have found invaluable.
The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985, by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik, was in fact a thoughtful revision of the earlier Grammar of Contemporary English (1972), both based upon the large Survey of English Usage centred on University College London.[Note 7]
The quartet of grammarians decided that each would contribute different sections than before, and a curious permutation ensued:
When we started work on it, however, we found ourselves rewriting the whole grammar, changing its organization, and introducing much additional material based on the Survey of English Usage. (Geoff Leech)
They had struck upon a phenomenon that was destined to become obtrusive when ever-larger “corpora” were made accessible: new attestations appear; subtler significances come into focus; finer distinctions take shape; and so the appearance of the GRAMMAR evolves as whole.
II.26 Much the same experience arose from the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (1990), with John McHardy Sinclair as editor-in-chief.
It was derived from the “COllins Birmingham University International Language Database”, which would become the world’s largest corpus: as of 2006, 650 million words of authentic discourse. While still using a small corpus -- the book vaguely says “many millions of words” -- the Grammar simply advised:
[18] When you want to talk about groups of people who share the same characteristic or quality, you often choose an adjective rather than a noun as a headword. […] It is possible to use almost any adjective this way. (p. 21).
In 1996, when the corpus was many times larger, Sinclair pointed out what had been overlooked: that this pattern is routinely PEJORATIVE, applied to groups who deserve pity and aid: even the 1990 examples should have revealed this trend: “the sick”, “the blind”, “the injured”, “the unemployed”. I would further surmise that the omission of any noun can have a distancing or even dismissive effect of suggesting these groups are conclusively defined by this sole “characteristic”. Too bad, of course, but, well, you know, facts of life…
II.27 More recently still, Longman re-entered the field with a computerised corpus for the ambitious Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English (1999), by Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech (again), Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan.
Though its scope was limited somewhat by adopting the “grammatical framework and concepts” of the Comprehensive Grammar of 1985 (p. viii), all examples are authentic data (often with frequency statistics) directly cited from a computerised corpus with much American (i.e. US) data, three of the compilers after all being Yanks (in my sense), and lends renewed importance to “spoken data”. The books says the size was “over 40 million words of text” (p. viii) (but not how far “over”) and claims “the research-based work required for this project has been on a scale probably unmatched in the writing of any previous grammar of the English language” (p. vii) -- which I consider unfair to the venerable Otto Jespersen, whose Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles,[Note 8] laudably backed up with authentic data, filled thousands of pages in seven hefty volumes published over the biblical span of 40 years.
Moreover, I absolutely cannot agree that “for many purposes of grammatical research, the absence of prosodic information may make little difference” (p. 1042). One might as well say that you can critique a song without the melody.
II.28 Sensing in its turn that hefty grammar books may be good business, the Cambridge University Press entered the arena in 2006 with a Comprehensive Guide to Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage, by Ron Carter and Mike McCarthy.
They had devoted to years producing a grammar based entirely on a large corpus of spoken English. But the CUP boffins surmised -- correctly, I reluctantly concede -- that most people who concern themselves with “grammar” have written English in mind; and that the population at large is uneasy about whether and how far speech is really “grammatical” in the sense dinned in by the schools. The result was a transmogrified project: a “Guide” to Spoken and Written English. Even so, the product betrays its origins in its extensive and respectful coverage of speech, though “the corpus has not been systematically coded for phonetic and prosodic features”, such as “intonation contours”, “loudness, and tempo”.[Note 9] The sound bites on the accompanying CD have been read out, in plummy voices (one male, one female), by the project team.
The term “guide” might paper over the traditional ambivalence between GRAMMAR (how it is used) versus “grammar” (how it should be used) (cf. II.19). In fact, affixed to the cover is a quaintly challenging “real English guarantee” seal which whimsically seems to have been inspired by a fried egg on a platter, whence my own seal on my title page.
According to John Sinclair, the term “real English” was adopted by the COBUILD project in the 1980s without high hopes, yet soon proved a serendipitous selling point. Since “reality” is after all a bottomless concept, I would interpret the meaning as “actually attested English not invented simply to illustrate grammar and usage”, even though, framed in a project like mine, it can illustrate them. Yet I do my best to show that it also does much more whilst interfacing linguistic, cognitive, and social concerns.
II.29 A reference grammar is chiefly aimed at professionals and specialists. The terminology is elaborated and technical, as attested by a complex and hierarchical index. In return, ordinary speakers and writers may have to go wading to locate a particular point, if they dive in at all. So the quartet at the Survey of English Usage shown in II.25 split up to produce friendlier versions: A University Grammar of English, (1973), A Student’s Grammar of the English Language (1990), and A Communicative Grammar of English (1972, my fave). Similarly, a smaller Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English has appeared (2002). No doubt there will be a compressed Cambridge Grammar in due time.
II.30 The term textbook grammar can apply to compilations, on paper or on websites, intended for active use in “teaching” and “learning”. The safest ones consistently rely on reference grammars. But the disconcerting tradition has rather been to raid older textbooks, some going back for centuries; or else to dispense advice and “rules” based on personal intuition or home-baked philosophising, which may seem meaningful for some seasoned teachers, but hardly for untrained learners, viz.:
[19] The sentence is important. Why? Because it gives us a complete thought which offers clarity. (My Writing Coach)www [Oho, a sentence fragment!]
[20] The noun is a word used for naming an object of thought; […] the verb is a word that makes a statement about something else. (Business English)
I could adduce a multitude of sentences lacking in “clarity” or “completeness of thought” [19]; and the distinction frankly eludes me between “naming an object of thought” and “making a statement” [20].
II.31 Even less helpful are explanations clouded in impenetrable bafflegab, as when the “participle” and the “infinitive” were described in these terms: [Note 10]
[21] Although a following participle may be demanded from a preceding verb, yet it is understood to be written in place of a suppositum, or else it is governed by the verb through the suffrage of a suspended point, which after a verb performs the function of a copulative conjunction.
[22] As for the bare infinitive, it can be shown that in all of its uses it implies that the extra-verbal support’s place in time cannot be conceived as a before-position with respect to the infinitive’s event. In cases where the bare infinitive evokes the actualization of its event, the use of the bare infinitive incident directly to the finite verb implies that the agent who realizes the latter is directly and simultaneously involved in the action of the infinitive.
I think I could safely offer cash prizes for any English teacher who could explain what is meant here.
II.32 Worse than any of this is an explanation going plain wrong, viz.:
[23] A proper noun is the name of a religion, person, etc.: Christian, Jewish, Muslim. (Noun and Verb Center )www
[24] The subject is whatever verb agrees with in person and number. The predicate [is] whatever follows the subject. (Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace)
[25] So when the copular-verb basic sentence “Sir Edmund gave the diatribe” is embedded with an adverb phrase in “Twenty years ago Sir Edmund gave the diatribe”, it becomes a complex sentence. (The Well-Bred Sentence)www
[26] The definite article and the indefinite article are of course [!!] adjectives. (Business English)
Evidently, statements about “grammar” are exempted from critical examination, even passing the scrutiny of otherwise meticulous editors and publishers. Any English teacher ought to know that “Jewish” is not a “proper noun” [23]; that parts of the PREDICATE can go before the SUBJECT [24]; that a SIMPLE SENTENCE only becomes a “complex sentence” by adding a DEPENDENT CLAUSE [25] (IV.369); and that the distinction between ARTICLES and ADJECTIVES [26] is among the best secured in the whole GRAMMAR.
II.33 To exploit the confusion, miracle textbook grammars promise all things to all people, quick easy, foolproof. A luminescent instance worthy of P.T. Barnum is entitled Grammar Crammer (2004), which certainly does “cram”. Printed on just 136 pages, and subtitled How to Write Perfect Sentences, it is touted on websites not merely as a “concise, sensible grammar handbook that explains lucidly how to remember correct word forms and sentence structures”, but also as a guide for “improving spelling and vocabulary”, developing “skills for research and note-taking”, and “revealing secrets for putting these skills together in great essays”.
I notice the same authors have published a tome called How to Improve Damn Near Everything around Your Home, plus handbooks for the do-it yourself repair of lawnmowers and snowmobiles. Authors for all seasons indeed.
II.34 Meanwhile, the examples of “English” in many textbooks are patronisingly simple, not to say silly, viz.:
[27] I hear with my ears.
[28] A cat is not a vegetable.
Authentic data are less predictable before the fact but more memorable after the fact, viz.:
[29] I heard with wounded Ears your cruel Father give the strict Orders for your hasty Voyage. (Mary Leapor, The Unhappy Father)
[30] The European Community has decreed that the carrot is not a vegetable -- that it is a fruit. (New Scientist)
We do our learners a disservice by feeding them fictitious examples and postponing the development of skills to navigate the GRAMMAR of real-life English.
II.35 The term linguists’ grammar can apply to a compilation expounding some theory, model, or description within the academic field known as “modern linguistics”.[Note 11] In the early stages, the field inadvertently created its own prescriptive stance by marking off “language in and for itself” from the “heterogeneous mass” of “actual speech facts” (Ferdinand de Saussure, 1916).[Note 12]
Though touted as a brilliant insight, this demarcation hamstrung in midair the linguists who maintained it, like tightrope artists tapped in their own safety net.
II.36 But most did not, even if they purported to. The majority of “grammars” rested on actual usage -- not some prescriptive remake -- not intended so much to be used in teaching and learning, as to bring the subject-matter into the purview of “science”. Two opposed approaches seem to have dominated the “mainstream”, or so I’m told. Within descriptive linguistics, the intention was stated like this:
[31] Although a descriptive grammar gives detailed coverage of the facts about a language, it is not written in a form which can be used directly to acquire speaking control of the language. (Language Learning)WWW
Within the more recent generative linguistics, the intention was to further relocate grammar on a more formal plane of abstraction and technicality:
[32] The construction of a generative grammar represents an attempt to formulate a system of rules for the formation of the sentences of a language. (Large Vocabulary)WWW
The latter approach bodged up a new demarcation between “competence” for the abstract language system versus “performance” for “actual speech”, which latter was said to abound in “deviant expressions” (Noam Avishtai Chomsky).[Note 13]
This approach abjured all ambitions to assist the teaching or learning of “grammar” -- a “language acquisition device” was conjured up for the job anyway. Indeed, the Maximum Headman has declared:
[33] Your professional training as a linguist […] just doesn’t help you to be useful to other people. (Chomsky again) [Note 14]
Well, his training sure didn’t “help” us all that much.
II.37 At all events, an English teacher might well be perplexed by the linguists’ portentous ambition to outdo each other in making their “grammars” look austerely formal (cf. § II.4). Sometimes they chucked out “meaning” from their “science”; replaced real speakers with an “ideal speaker-hearer who knows the language perfectly”; and levelled society into a “homogenous community”.[Note 15] “Grammar” became a travelling circus of “structures” and “rules” to “transform” one “sentence” into another, like a magic hat for making white rats into white rabbits and vice-versa -- and the whole shebang was advertised as an “explanatory” triumph of “science”. (Science with a capital sigh, as I said. Nobody laughed.)
II.38 The veriest shibboleths of “generativism” were two “sentences” flaunted for donkey’s years like sleeve-patches or bumper-stickers:
[34] John is easy to please.
[35] John is eager to please.
The fact that these superficially identical “structures” differ by whether “someone pleases John” [34] or “John pleases someone” [35] was trumpeted as an epochal insight. I need not dwell upon the limpid facts that I found neither sentence attested in the largest corpora of English (the COBUILD and the BNC), except when brandishing this same insight; and that neither sentence implies any actual “pleasing” (maybe everybody avoided John like a sewer flusher with the avian flu). Instead, my point would be that I consistently found “easy to please” in my EPC with an explicit or implicit NEGATIVE in, e.g. [36]; whereas I found “eager to please” in the BNC occurring mostly with an AFFIRMATIVE, e.g. [37].
[36] “Why don’t you get married yourself, Peg?” queried Uncle Roger teasingly. “Because I’m not so easy to please as your wife will be”, retorted Peg. She departed in high good humour over her repartee. ( Golden Road )
[37] The local curate [was] a merry young man and yet, quite firm in his discipline, so that the child was eager to please him and her education made rapid strides. (Fields in the Sun)
On the cognitive side, being “eager” is more praiseworthy than just being “easy”. On the social side, power inheres having people “eager to please” you [38], but also in your acting “not easy to please” [39].
[38] Mauer had barely swung the police car out when the radio crackled into life. “Can I answer it, Sergeant?” Mauer smiled to himself. Rookies were all the same in the beginning, eager to please and desperate to be judged favourably by their superiors. (Death Train)
[39] The maid-servant [was] represented from time to time by girls of various extraction, for Mrs. Hurstwood was not always easy to please “George, I let Mary go yesterday”, was not an infrequent salutation at the dinner table. (Sister Carrie)
Mrs. Hurstwood -- in Dreiser’s words, a “type of woman who has ever endeavoured to shine and has been more or less chagrined at the evidences of superior capability in this direction elsewhere” -- doubtless aspired to power by firing maid after maid in her own “perfectly appointed house” with its “soft rugs, rich, upholstered chairs and divans, a grand piano, a marble carving of some unknown Venus”, etc; maybe she would have also “let go” the Venus for out-“shining” her if she weren’t afraid it might fall on her social climbing foot, leaving her well and truly “chagrined”.
II.39 The term corpus-driven grammar can apply to a compilation achieved by direct, extensive and systematic contact with large “corpora” of authentic, attested English. Before this resource became readily available, such data had entered into “grammars” by other modes of contact, such as the grammarian’s prior reading and occasional, individual citations from respected authors. Now, we can refer each point to plentiful sets of data and try to finalise our interpretation whilst selecting the data that seem best to secure it. We can also move well beyond the formal issues of word or word class (“noun”, “verb”, etc) to the functional issues of usages and combinations. For example, we can single out VERBS used mainly in the ACTIVE, like “elude” [40], and VERBS used mainly in the PASSIVES like “be rumoured” [41]; they may be hardly acceptable in the opposite uses [40a-41a].
[40] Dorothy Wordsworth found fulfilment in ways that elude precise analysis. (Missing Persons)
[40a] ??Precise analysis is eluded by the ways of Dorothy Wordsworth’s fulfilment.
[41] [Ukranian pole-vaulter Sergei] Bubka was rumoured to have been emasculated by the absence of his usual appearance money. (Today)
[41a] ??The absence of his usual appearance money rumoured Bubka to have been emasculated.
“Where’s the money?”
The signal pioneer work was the already mentioned Collins COBUILD English Grammar, which probed deeper and more delicate levels than most predecessors (cf. § I.14; II.26).
II.40 Whether a “grammar” can actually be derived from a corpus is a disputed question. Some version of the real GRAMMAR is undeniably acquired by young children from lots of data. But an adult grammarian naturally approaches corpus data with already elaborated notions about the language and its GRAMMAR. Our work focuses on pondering, reconsidering, adjusting, specifying, or reformulating those notions, or discarding some and introducing others. So our grammar is not data-derived so much as data-driven. It reminds me of an exhilarating treasure hunt with many small gems I couldn’t seek before because we had different, sketchy, or misleading maps – or none at all.
II.41 Next, I shall try to sort out the uses of the term “grammar” for viewpoints. The term traditional grammar can fittingly apply to the viewpoint cultivated during long European “traditions” since “classical” antiquity, often after the models of the “grammars” of Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. A given usage was most readily certified “grammatical in English” if its most direct translation into Latin yielded a grammatical result -- not workable, say, for a “split infinitive” or a “preposition at the end of a sentence”, still held by some in stern disdain for English today.
II.42 Traditional grammar has been moodily busied with setting down rules that prescribe (like a medicine) what users of English should say (e.g. “It is I”) and proscribe (like a banishment) what users should not say (e.g. “It’s me”). Such became the groundwork for the bastion of language guardians who have for centuries, in the gross and scope of their opinion, been boding some strange eruption to the state of the “English language” (cf. § II.62, 78, 92, 120; III.3). They have shirked or spurned the labours of collecting and reporting what users of English speakers do say, which has been viciously slandered as “going out into the field and finding the most benighted group of speakers or non-speakers [huh?] and recording every one of their miserable grunts” (John Simon in Esquire). Their latest and trendiest incarnation on the Internet are “grammar Nazis”. No comment necessary.
II.43 The moralising overtones may defy belief. A panel of authors and editors,[Note 16] when asked to judge the use of the ADVERB “hopefully” to mean “it would hoped that…”, responded:
[42] It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable.
[43] I have sworn eternal war on the bastard adverb.
[44] This is one that makes me physically ill.
[45] It’s an abomination, and its adherents should be lynched.
Grammatically, this “hopefully” is consistent with “fortunately” or “happily” as ADVERBIALS for expressing the speaker’s attitude about the future, and so cannot be an “error”. I find it attested both in casual speech [46] and in formal writing [47]:
[46] “That’s really all you could ever ask for, isn’t it, a long and he althy life? -- And hopefully, a happy one too.” (Denise Bulger in the Liverpool Daily Post)
[47] Hopefully, if the management information system in an organization is one that reflects control and accountability, […] then the accounting information thereby generated should demonstrate the attainment of value for money from public services. (Public Sector Financial Control)
Those peevish judges with the instincts of army ants, who “swore eternal war” and clamoured for “lynchings” had better stockpile weapons and rope for a long campaign. Grammar Nazis indeed.
II.44 And yet I see less morality than effrontery in the custom whereby “rules” are fabricated in defiance of real usage and yet accorded solemn honour and endless life. The proscription of “never begin a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’” has survived from one traditional schoolbook to another and even down to the “grammar checker” of Microsoft Word XP. However, my EPC containing nearly every major prose writer of the last three centuries shows 29,973 SENTENCES (or utterances written down as SENTENCES) beginning with “And”, e.g. [48]; and 49,917 with “But”, e.g. [49]. The higher frequency for “But” reflects its clearer function of introducing contrary content, which also encourages a division between sentences.
[48] Little of
beauty has
[49] Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may be a deceitful guide. (Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species)
Some advisors on “grammar” abide the usage but claim it impairs “formality”:
[50] Contrary to what your high school English teacher told you, there is no reason not to begin a sentence with “but” or “and”; in fact, these words often make a sentence more forceful and graceful. [Yet] beginning with “but” or “and” does make your writing less formal (Grammar and Style Notes)www
This
too is disproved by ample data. Among the consummately formal texts where the
two usages abound, I find
II.45 The term standard grammar
would presumably conform to the view of “Standard English” so reverently
invoked this many a year (cf. II.19), and would be the variety patronised by
such august authorities as National Curriculum for English and Microscoffed
WORD. It seems to have been a creation of Victorian or “Imperial”
II.46 Since then, the “grammar” of “Standard English” has been enshrined as the hallowed target of nearly all English teaching, which by implication charges us teachers with a mandate as “standard-bearers”. The carrot on the linguistic stick for standardisation is ever “economic advancement”. The Revised National Curriculum for English (NCE), cited back in II.12, prods us sharply that we “encourage pupils to be confident” in “using the grammatical, lexical and orthographic features of Standard English” -- assuming as a matter of course that we know exactly what those are -- and menaces us with a dire guilt trip should we fail:
[51] If pupils do not have access to Standard English, then many important opportunities are closed to them, in cultural activities, in further and higher education, and in industry, commerce and the professions. […] In our democracy, Standard English confers power on its users, power to explain [sic] political issues and to persuade on a national and international stage. […] Those educationalists who deny children these opportunities are confining them to the ghetto, to a restricted discourse which will close to them access not only to the professions but also to leadership in national politics.
In August 2006, BBC Online ominously reported a survey by Hertfordshire University indicating that “three-quarters of employers would be put off a job candidate by poor grammar”; they “found bad English alienated 77% of the 515 companies it spoke to -- more than twice the 34% annoyed by CV exaggerations”. Everyone involved, including the Beeb, evidently believed to know just what counts as “poor grammar” and “bad English”; no examples were quoted. The only link I can see between these issues and the reported “biggest draw for potential employers”, namely “relevant work experience”, would be the discrimination against speakers of regional Englishes who aspire to enter the urban workforce but cannot point to equivalent “experience”.
II.47 As to what for those “grammatical features” might be, the NCE itself mentions only “subject-verb agreement and the use of the verb ‘to be’ in past and present tenses” -- pet peeves of English teachers from time immemorial. At a safe remove, the “compulsory schools of England and Wales” are airily enjoined to “teach the standard written forms of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and verb tenses” -- and presumably to frown indignantly upon all non-standard spoken forms that affright the fug-filled air in “ghettos”. Still, the NCE elsewhere sanctions “non-standard forms” “for effect or technical reasons”, an ungainly phrasing that would make more sense to me as “technically non-standard forms for special effect”, like Oliver Mellors teasing the posh Lady Chatterley with his “Darby” English:
[52] “‘Appen [i.e. maybe] yer’d better ‘ave this key, an’ Ah min [might] fend for t’ bods [birds] some other road. [...] If yer want ter be ‘ere, yo’ll non want me messin’ abaht a’ th’ time.” She looked at him, getting his meaning through the fog of the dialect. “Why don’t you speak ordinary English?” she said coldly. “Me! Ah thowt it wor ordinary.”
II.48 If the conception of “standard” has threatened to become an obsession, so too has the counterpart “non-standard”, fomenting a timid over-avoidance of wholly innocuous usages. Quite unaccountably, Richard Grant White’s Words and Their Uses (1870) spent an entire chapter excoriating the PROGRESSIVE PASSIVE such as “is being built”. Not long after, William Cullen Bryant, self-righteous editor of New York ’s Evening Post, issued a list of usages forbidden to his writers, and sure enough, among them was: “ ‘is being done’ and all similar passive forms”. I shall merely cite the frequencies on the Internet (vi