Grammar for education

was: Why education needs grammar

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Richard Hudson 2020

In a nutshell (2.2K)

This book[footnoteRef:1] is a defence of grammar teaching, arguing that grammar should be one of the pillars of education, alongside maths, science, literature, history and the rest. But I’m a grammarian by trade, so I would say that, wouldn’t I? I love grammar, so I’d like everyone to have the same amount of fun that I’ve had. Fair enough, you may think, but not a strong argument in itself; after all, every academic would like more followers. So I need to persuade you. [1: I would like to thank Neil Sheldon for statistics, Shahan Choudhery for pedagogy, John Walmsley for history, …]

First, though, what do I mean by grammar? What I think should be taught in schools is grammatical analysis – the ability to think about the structure of any word or sentence, to see the patterns and the intricate network of connections, to see them in any sentence you write or read, to be able to look at a draft sentence and spot the ambiguities, the potential challenges for a reader, and the alternatives which could make it better.

For example, take this sentence from a few lines back:

(1) What I think should be taught in schools is grammatical analysis.

I’d like you to be able to recognise that this is a cleft sentence with the same meaning as (2).

(2) I think grammatical analysis should be taught in schools.

And I’d like you to understand why I chose to use (1) rather than (2): because it focuses attention on the words grammatical analysis. In other words, I would like you to understand the anatomy of this sentence – its structure – and how this relates to its physiology – its function as an act of communication. I’d also like you to know useful things about the words in this sentence: for instance, that is and be are forms of the same verb (which grammarians call BE), and that their different forms reflect the way they are being used. In short, I would like you to be able to apply the same kind of analytical thinking to your language that a medical expert applies to your body.

Now I’ll try to persuade you that grammar in this sense – understood as grammatical analysis – provides an essential foundation for education. Here goes: Education is part process, part content and the process is part socialisation, part communication; so education is part socialisation, and part communication of content. Now comes the critical bit: the content of education is complicated, so the communication also needs to convey complicated messages. Teachers and pupils need to be able to talk about complicated ideas such as dinosaurs and spelling, novels and photosynthesis. However hard a teacher may try, the complexities just won’t go away, so pupils need to be able to understand the teacher’s complex messages and to produce similarly complex messages of their own.

The problem is that this level of complexity goes beyond what children meet outside school, so they have to learn an extended language – ‘academic English’. Many children pick up academic English on their own – but many don’t, and need help. For example, imagine a lesson where the teacher uses the word creativity. Some children may know the word already, but what about those who don’t? Some will be able to analyse it grammatically into creative + ity, thereby linking it to words such as curiosity and maybe even electricity, so they’ll work out that it’s a noun with something to do with being creative. But others won’t be able to make this leap. For them, its shape gives no clues to either its meaning or its word class. These are the children who stand most to benefit from learning grammatical analysis – not the academic superstars, but the strugglers.

But that’s not all. Learning grammatical analysis opens up a whole new world of possibilities, in much the same way as learning arithmetic does. Not only does academic English suddenly become transparent, but so does the everyday English that we all take so much for granted. We notice that we form questions by moving the first verb back before its subject, as in (3) and (4).

(3) Jo is her friend.

(4) Is Jo her friend?

But although this works fine with is, it fails completely with most verbs, as witness (5) and (6).

(5) Jo invited her friend.

(6) *Invited Jo her friend?

(The * means that the sentence is ungrammatical.) Here, every native speaker would agree that (6) is utterly impossible – bad English. Instead, we have to add did (and remove the d from invited).

(7) Did Jo invite her friend?

This example takes us into the heart of English grammar, where we find a particularly neat combination of rules and patterns, with a handful of interesting loose ends – something that any non-native learner of English has to understand, but which few native speakers are aware of. Surely this is at least as worthy of exploration as anything else in the curriculum? What better place for a child to recognise the rule-governed nature of their language than in their very own ordinary speech?

The idea of teaching grammar in relation to the child’s own language may sound obvious and even uncontentious, but it is actually revolutionary. The fact is that the child’s own language is likely to be a non-standard variety; so in England, it will be some kind of Non-standard English involving forms such as we was and them books. But we all believe (I guess) that one of the school’s aims is, and should be, to teach Standard English; so how does the study of Non-standard English mesh with that aim? Very well, I would argue, because it separates two challenges that face a child. The first challenge is to learn grammatical analysis – how to look analytically at language. For that analysis, Non-standard English is just as good as Standard English, even though the forms concerned may be different. The second challenge is to add Standard English as a second dialect alongside Non-standard English. The issue here is the child’s emotional attachment to the local version of Non-standard English. If you’ve grown up in a working-class area of (say) Birmingham, that’s the identity that matters to you and that you want to reflect in your speech; so studying the grammar of Birmingham English helps you to value this identity, and when you eventually learn about the grammar of Standard English, the comparison will be a comparison of equals. In contrast, if grammatical analsis is applied from the start only to Standard English, the message for the child is obvious: Standard English has grammar, but Birmingham English doesn’t. This puts Standard English and Birmingham English into conflict, when they can easily coexist in easy harmony.

My argument so far has brought us to the point where a child knows something about their own internal grammar as well as about the grammar of academic English. Not only do they have the important skill of metalinguistic awareness (the ability to think about language), but they also have a metalanguage (a language for talking about language), plus awareness of rules constraining their own speech. What a good start for learning a foreign language! When presented with the French for ‘hello’ and ‘good evening’, bonjour and bonsoir, they can immediately isolate bon and guess what it means; and as their knowledge grows and becomes more complicated, they can tame the complexities by talking about them.

And best of all, they can think about how different the foreign language is from their own English, and marvel at it. Isn’t it interesting that whereas English restricts the verbs that can be moved in front of the subjects, French restricts the subjects that allow this movement? So French forms questions by moving any verb, such as mangeait ‘was eating’, but only if the subject is a pronoun (elle, ‘she’) as in (9) but not in (11).

(8) Elle mangeait une glace. ‘She was eating an icecream.’

(9) Mangeait-elle une glace? ‘Was she eating an icecream?’

(10) Marie mangeait une glace. ‘Mary was eating an ice-cream.’

(11) *Mangeait Marie une glace? ‘Was Mary eating an ice-cream?’

Knowing something about grammar, and being able to think and talk about it, turns the learning of a foreign language from mere rote learning into an exciting journey of exploration.

So far, then, I’ve offered three reasons for teaching grammatical analysis: as a support for learning academic English, as a microscope for studying the child’s ordinary vernacular, and as a tool for learning a foreign language. I have two more arguments, to do with Standard English and with thinking.

The argument based on Standard English used to be the only justification for teaching grammar, because it was assumed that other kinds of English had no grammar. On this assumption, it was easy to see that if children were to learn Standard English – e.g. to say we were instead of we was, or those books instead of them books – they needed a stiff dose of grammar. By the end of this book, I hope you will at least be convinced that every kind of English has its grammatical rules, and that most of the rules of Standard English are shared with every other kind of English – as indeed we have already seen to be the case for one such rule, the one for forming questions as in (4) and (7). Nevertheless, there’s still a place for grammatical analysis in the teaching of Standard English to native speakers of non-Standard varieties. After all, the differences are quite few in number, so they can easily be dissected and displayed. For instance, Standard English uses those as the plural of that, whereas the local dialect uses them (giving that book, with two different plurals: those books or them books). If children are used to exploring their own speech, such details should be easy to learn and digest emotionally.

And finally we have the argument from thinking. We started with the argument from communication: grammar allows us to communicate complex ideas, so we should understand how it works. But before we communicate complex ideas, we have to entertain these ideas and make sure that they’re not just complex, but sensible – and maybe even true. This of course is one of the main goals of education. Children enter primary school thinking like infants, unable (or unwilling) to see through the myth of Father Christmas, and leave secondary school thinking like adults about adult issues, from politics to climate change and careers. One of the key thinking skills to be learned is analysis – recognising the full complexity of an issue, including all its uncertainties and inner conflicts, but being able to work through it to some kind of conclusion (such as which way to vote in a referendum or election).

This is precisely the kind of thinking that’s encouraged and developed in grammatical analysis. Grammar offers complexity in spades, with a diversity of units (words, phrases, morphemes, meanings) in a diversity of relations (with names such as ‘means’, ‘signals’, ‘is the subject’, ‘is a member’, ‘is a part’ and ‘follows’). It also offers uncertainties (e.g. is out of a single preposition or a sequence of two words? And how about into?) and inner conflicts (e.g. if is working is a form of the verb to work, how come it looks as though it contains two separate verbs?). Better still, school grammar is underpinned by a lively research scene where these uncertainties and conflicts are debated, and where resolutions are available.

It’s true that other subjects offer training in analytical thinking, but grammar is very special because all the data needed for an exercise in thinking is freely available in the children’s own heads. They’re already experts in using grammar, and already know a vast amount of fine detail (though they probably aren’t aware of any of this knowledge); and this treasure-house of information is vastly richer than any comparable body of information that most of them already know, and probably richer than anything else they will ever learn during their lifetime. This puts grammatical analysis into a very special category on its own as a training ground for sophisticated thinking – ahead of sciences and mathematics as well as the humanities subjects.

Better still, all these patterns of grammar aren’t neutral and ‘out there’, like objects from the natural world, but (as already mentioned) they’re the patterns that we use for communicating with. It’s a short (but tricky) jump from communication to thinking, so the patterns of grammar are closely related to patterns of thinking. For example, English grammar forces us to decide on the epistemological status of a thought: is it a fact, a mere conjecture, a rumour, an impression, or what? The distinction emerges clearly in examples like (12) to (16).

(12) They missed the bus.

(13) They must have missed the bus.

(14) They may have missed the bus.

(15) They seem to have missed the bus.

(16) It sounds as though they’ve missed the bus.

As an exercise in thinking, it would be hard to beat the analysis of these grammatical contrasts.

We can now summarise the arguments for teaching grammatical analysis:

· It helps children to learn academic language.

· It teaches them about the rules behind their own ordinary spoken language.

· It makes foreign languages easier to learn and more interesting.

· It helps them to learn the standard language.

· It develops important thinking skills – the ability to analyse complex patterns and to think in sophisticated ways.

These arguments will be developed somewhat in the following chapters, but most of the book will be concerned with practicalities. What is the state of play in grammar teaching? (I try to combine details about the UK with broad generalisations about other countries.) How did we get to where we are now? What kind of grammatical analysis should be taught? How should it be taught? Who should teach it, and who should be taught? When should the teaching happen? And finally, how should we get from where we are now to where we (or at least I) would like us to be?

And just in case it’s not already obvious, I want to be absolutely clear about what I am NOT proposing.

· I am not arguing for a return to a golden age of grammar teaching; at least in the UK, grammatical analysis has never been taught in the way I am proposing, though there are many positive lessons to be learned from practice in the past and in other countries.

· Even more emphatically, I am not suggesting that grammar should be taught as a list of ‘common errors’ to be avoided. If that’s what you want, you’ll find plenty of free websites offering lists of the most important errors – but don’t be surprised when you compare the lists and find that every one is different!

· Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, am I arguing that grammar should be taught in order to improve writing. There is good evidence that analytic grammar, well taught, can improve writing, but that’s only one reason for teaching it. The benefits I offer go well beyond writing.

Grammar

What do we know about grammar? This is a question for the experts – people like me who spend their working lives studying grammar. (There are more of us than you might think – certainly thousands if you count all the grammarians in different countries.) As I explain in chapter 0, it’s a very old research field, with roots in ancient Babylon, and although we’re a long way from an agreed final analysis, there’s a lot of agreement on the basics which I lay out below, so you can take this as a fairly reliable summary of what we all tell our undergraduate students.

Why ‘anatomy’ and ‘physiology’? I mentioned this analogy earlier, but in case it wasn’t clear I should expand it a little. In medicine, anatomy is the study of body parts and structures, so if you were a novice learning about the human body, you would learn about all the bones – their physical properties such as size, shape and density, and how they fit together to make up a skeleton. In contrast, physiology is the study of what these body parts do and how they work together, so in relation to bones you would learn how they move and what they do – which are used in walking, which in lifting, and so on. This is a good analogy for grammar, because grammar could be described as the anatomy and physiology of words, studying their internal structures (anatomy) as well as how we use them (physiology) to complete grammatical patterns and to convey meanings. In grammatical terms, grammar is the study of both structure (anatomy) and function (physiology); and as in medicine, there is no clear boundary between the two approaches; in fact, another useful analogy is a coin, whose two sides are different but inseparable. Some people enjoy distinguishing ‘formal’ grammar from ‘functional’ grammar, but in fact we all pay attention to both sides of the grammatical coin. The same is almost inevitable in teaching about grammar, as will become very clear in the rest of the book.

0. Texts and system

Grammarians distinguish sharply between texts – bits of language in use, whether written or spoken – and the language system that lies behind them. Texts can be of any length, from words (or even word-parts) to a whole book, so every word in the previous sentence is a text, as well as the entire sentence (and any other parts of it that we may choose to identify). Spoken texts are purposeful actions that have a speaker, an addressee (the person spoken to), a place, a time and a purpose; they happen, and then they’re gone. The same spoken text never happens twice, and until recently it was gone for ever unless someone remembered it and repeated it. Written texts are a bit more complex, because they too are the result of an action by a writer, taking place at a particular time, but when we think of written texts we think of the permanent marks on the paper; so a written text is the permanent product of an impermanent process. Thanks to tape recorders, the same is now true of spoken texts, so an audio or video recording is also a permanent product (the recording) of an impermanent process (the talk). Texts, then, are essentially actions taking place in time, even if they have a permanent product.

The language system that lies behind a text is quite different. This is a body of knowledge that each speaker carries permanently in their head, and which speakers learn from each other. When you wake up each morning, your language system is still there, more or less unchanged, even though the texts you produced the day before have vanished into the mists of time. During the day your language system may undergo tiny changes such as learning a new word or spotting a new connection. The system is a vast collection of patterns of many different kinds (which we explore below), from tiny facts about the pronunciation of one word to broad generalisations about how words can combine with one another. But the system is very busy whenever you speak or listen, write or read, because it is the system that allows you to make sense of other people’s texts, and to produce comprehensible texts of your own.

Like form and function, texts and the system are two sides of the same coin, so although they’re very different, you can’t separate them. If you want to analyse a text, you have to apply what you know about the system; and if you want to analyse the system, you do so by studying texts. This may sound dangerously circular, but it’s what grammarians have been doing for thousands of years, and it works.

Texts

Texts are much more concrete than the underlying system, so they’re always the natural starting point for any teaching. Sometimes you look at individual words; for instance, what do we know about the grammar of the one-word text round? We might consider this word out of context, noting its grammatical versatility; or we might consider it as part of a larger text such as the sentence He looked round the corner. In both cases, the word round is a text – something you say, and maybe write on the board. At other times, though, the text will be longer, and may be very much longer. For instance, you could look at the use of round, or of passive verbs, in a poem or a newspaper article. All these are also texts, and they’re all material for grammatical analysis.

We can apply the analogy of anatomy and physiology to texts of any length, so let’s start with a really short text: a single word, the word texts at the start of the previous paragraph. Notice how I use italics to distinguish a text that I’m quoting from the rest of the text that I’m writing. This is standard practice among grammarians, and a very useful convention for avoiding confusion between form and meaning. For instance, the word texts consists of five letters, but this isn’t generally true of texts themselves.

Even a one-word text illustrates the complexities of the form-function contrast mentioned earlier. A simple account recognises just two things: a meaning and a pronunciation. In this analysis, the word has a physiology, its function of conveying the meaning, and an anatomy, in the form of its pronunciation. But it’s actually more complicated than that because there’s no direct connection between meaning and pronunciation; instead, this relation is split into a number of shorter steps.

A fairly standard analysis recognises a number of levels of analysis on an imaginary scale from most concrete at the bottom of the scale to most abstract at the top. Starting at the top, here are the levels that most grammarians recognise, all applied to the word Texts:

· meaning: Texts means something like ‘a set of items each of which is a text’, where the idea of a text awaits further analysis in terms of language, action, authors, readers and so on. The units of analysis at this level are concepts such as ‘set’ and ‘text’.

· syntax: the word Texts is the syntactic subject of are. Here the units are words such as texts (or more helpfully, ‘TEXT: plural’, i.e. the plural of TEXT).

· morphology: the word Texts consists of two parts, which by convention we enclose in curly braces: {text} and {s}. The units of morphology are morphemes, such as the stem {text} and the suffix {s}.

· phonology: This is a written text, so strictly speaking Texts has no phonology; but thanks to our language system we know that it would be pronounced /tɛksts/. Note the slants enclosing pronunciations, and the use of symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet. The units of phonology are phonemes, classified as vowels and consonants, as well as syllables and possibly larger units for intonation.

· graphology: Texts is written as five characters: . The diamond brackets are standard notation for written units. Notice that this analysis distinguishes between upper-case and lower-case , a distinction that has absolutely no counterpart in phonology. Writing and pronunciation are different and need different analyses. The units of graphology are graphemes (characters or groups of characters), written words (separated by word spaces) and punctuation marks.

This gives a four-level analysis in which the bottom level is split into two: one for speech and the other for writing. The analysis is starting to get complex, so you may find a diagram such as Figure 1 helpful.

[graphic]

Figure 1: A four-level analysis of a text

If you like conceptual tidiness you may be wondering how grammar fits into this analysis. I hope you’ll agree that it’s just a matter of semantics, of what we want the word grammar to mean. If we want to keep in step with our scholarly tradition, then we certainly have to include both syntax and morphology; but these two levels link upwards to semantics and downwards to phonology and graphology, so it really is just a matter of taste as to whether we call these neighbouring levels ‘grammar’ as well. Personally, I don’t think it matters much, so long as we remember that the neighbouring levels matter. If syntax and morphology are two sides of the same coin, then so are syntax and semantics, and morphology and phonology or graphology. At which point, of course, the analogy of the coin collapses.

You may also wonder about the familiar distinction between grammars and dictionaries, or between grammar and vocabulary. This is an important issue which will receive a whole section (2.4) to itself, but without spoiling the story too much I can reveal that by the end of the discussion this distinction will be dead.

The language system

If a text can be analysed on four levels, what about the language system that makes the text possible? Not surprisingly, this has the same four levels, but it’s a bit more complicated because these levels are interrelated and it’s the grammar that decides how they can be related. For example, the syntactic analysis treats Texts as a plural noun, while the semantic analysis shows that its meaning is a set (a group with a number of members); but these two facts are obviously interconnected, and it’s the grammar that defines this relation by requiring a plural noun to refer to a set.

The language system therefore defines two different kinds of pattern:

· intralevel patterns, showing how units on the same level can combine.

· interlevel patterns, showing how units on different levels can combine.

The grammar tells us that a noun such as Texts can occur as the subject of a verb such as are; this is an intralevel pattern because the noun and the verb exist on the same level (syntax). But the grammar also tells us that a plural noun such as Texts has a set as its meaning – an interlevel pattern because the noun and the set belong to different worlds: the world of syntax, and the world of meanings.

Putting these two kind of information together, and multiplying each of them by several thousand for each of four levels, the result is one of the most complex structures in the human mind, and possibly even in the universe. I’m not trying to impress or frighten, but this is the background for this book about teaching grammar at school. The good news is that school teachers have been teaching grammar pretty successfully for thousands of years, so it must be possible to boil the intellectual complexity down into a teacher- and pupil-friendly form.

We can show the architecture of a language system by adding interlevel links to the diagram for texts, giving Figure 2. Most of these interlevels have well-established names – morphophonology for the link between morphology and phonology, morphosyntax for that between morphology and syntax, and semantics for that between syntax and meaning. But there’s no established name for the link between morphology and graphology, so I’ve suggested ‘morphographology’, with scare-quotes. The lack of a name for this interlevel is hardly surprising, because hardly any linguists work in this area – a great shame because English spelling is heavily dependent on morphology.

For example, you may have noticed that both semantics (the study of meaning) and syntax end in /ks/, but are spelt differently. Why? Because they have different morphology. Semantics is based on the adjective semantic (just as phonetics is based on phonetic), so the and belong to different morphemes; but syntax isn’t matched by syntac, and the shows, correctly, that there’s no morpheme boundary between the /k/ and the /s/. Exactly the same is true of pairs like tax (one morpheme) and tacks (two morphemes). Teachers and learners deserve a thorough, systematic and accessible guide to the morphographology of English; but as things stand currently, they’re still waiting.

[graphic]

Figure 2: The organisation of a language

Language analysis therefore needs four levels and four interlevels. Most of this is merely stating the obvious – that an analysis of meaning is quite different from an analysis of pronunciation, even though both are part of language. If you ask what a fox is, you don’t want to hear that it’s a monosyllable, any more than you would want information about animal classification in asking how to pronounce the word fox. This is obvious. What is less obvious is what a word is, because words, the units of both syntax and morphology, combine meaning with a form which is just one step from pure phonology. It’s all too easy to confuse texts and texts – the word and its meaning. I once read an undergraduate essay which reported that the fox, like many other common animals, is a monosyllable. Foxes have tails and four legs, but the word fox has three letters and a pronunciation; so it’s easy to imagine how this example helps my argument that a stiff dose of grammatical analysis is good for thinking.

Grammar and vocabulary

You won’t see vocabulary in either of my pictures of language, so I need to explain how it fits in. We’ve all grown up in a world in which publishers offer grammars and dictionaries: grammars for the general stuff that applies to a lot of words, dictionaries for the vocabulary, the individual words to which the grammar applies. The grammar tells us about nouns and verbs in general, while the dictionary lists individual nouns and verbs, thousands of them each with its own ‘lemma’ (a little paragraph). Surely this is an important distinction that a linguist ought to respect?

Well, no. It is true that, in any language, there are some facts that are very general. For example, in English it is true that if an adjective modifies a noun (as big modifies books in big books), then the adjective almost always comes first. And conversely, there are plenty of words which link meanings and pronunciations in a completely arbitrary way, not predictable from any kind of general rule – think of fox and text, for example. Faced with quick fox, it makes total sense to ask why quick comes before fox, and the answer consists in a very general rule; but it makes no sense to ask for a general rule which explains why fox means ‘fox’.

But, and this is the crucial point, there is no natural boundary between the general and the particular. Rules and facts can range in generality from the very general to the very particular. Think of English past-tense verbs. There is a very general rule: to form the past tense of a verb, you take the verb and add {ed}, as in {walk}{ed}, {work}{ed} and so on. (Remember: {…} for morphemes.) But we also have several hundred irregular verbs like sink, think and go. Where should we put them – in the grammar or in the dictionary? As a matter of fact, they’re handled in both places: both in the grammar (in lists of exceptions to the general rule) and also in the lemma for the individual verb. Moreover, there are useful sub-regularities; for instance, consider the following verbs:

begin, swim, ring, sing, drink, shrink, sink, stink

What do these verbs have in common? Nothing in terms of meaning, but they all have followed by or (both nasal consonants), and in their past tense the changes to . Where does this factlet belong? Grammar or dictionary? Since there is no good answer to this question, many of us have come to the conclusion that it’s not worth asking. This conclusion is somewhat controversial among grammarians, but it makes such good sense that I’m now offering it to you.

In short, there is no distinction between grammar and dictionary, so the grammar – the syntax and morphology – includes all the minutiae of the dictionary as well as the very general rules of traditional grammar. There is no need to change the map of language in Figure 1 and Figure 2, because they already cover all of vocabulary. But of course publishers will continue to market grammars and dictionaries as separate products, so we just need to remember that the grammar (in the new and much broader sense) is defined jointly by the publisher’s grammars and dictionaries.

This conclusion is important for teachers. For one thing, it means that you can take a bottom-up approach in teaching grammar, starting with individual words and their syntactic and morphological properties. For instance you could cover a great deal of the grammar of English by looking at the verb take. Its morphology (take, takes, took, taken, taking) reflects the main morphological distinctions of English, many of which are fundamental to syntax; for instance, takes never occurs without a subject noun (as in She takes …), whereas taken and taken can easily be used without a subject (as in Once taken, this medicine acts fast). Then there are the syntactic and semantic properties of all forms of take; for instance, it can occur either with or without an object noun:

(1) She took her tablets.

(2) She took to her bed.

And when it has an object, it may also have an object complement, as in the rather academic (3):

(3) I take that to be a matter of opinion.

As for meaning, each of these syntactic options has a distinct meaning, which is worth exploring even in the absence of a proper technical language for doing so. All of these factlets about take are shared with other verbs, so they invite classroom projects on building lists of similar verbs. What other verbs have a past tense where turns into , or have different meanings when they have an object or no object, or allow an object plus an object complement?

And for another thing, merging grammar and vocabulary helps with the PR. Everyone understands, and accepts, that children’s vocabulary increases, and that schools play an important part in this growth; but grammar is different. Many people think of grammar as a static, non-growing, body of rules; and indeed some linguists have even suggested that the child’s grammar is to all intents and purposes complete by the age of five. One of the themes of this book is that schools can and should help children’s grammar to grow as well, so if grammar and vocabulary are actually one and the same thing, this argument is much easier to make.

Grammar and meaning

The reason why grammar is so important to humanity is that it allows us to express complex meanings, so semantics (the link between grammar and meaning) is at the very centre of the study of language and of grammar in particular.

… grammar should never be taught divorced from the meaning that the sentence pattens convey. To teach grammar without reference to meaning is that strategy that has given grammar a bad name. Anyone who has ever felt that grammar is boring, dull, pointless and irrelevant has almost certainly been taught it in this way. (Crystal 2017a: 118–9)

The complexity comes from the general rules for modifying ordinary word meanings.

For instance, suppose you had a vocabulary of (say) 20,000 words (which, incidentally, is a reasonable guestimate for many people). If each word expresses one meaning, that gives you 20,000 meanings you could express. But add on morphology, and the vocabulary suddenly grows. Every verb has four or five forms even in English (which is relatively poor in this respect compared to many other familiar languages), and every noun has a singular and a plural; moreover, new words can be created, as driver is created from drive – a new noun created out of a verb. Each of these differences gives a different word, differing either in meaning or in syntax from all the existing words.

Then there’s syntax, which enriches the range of possible meanings even more. If you know just two words, you have two meanings; but if you allow them to combine with each other, one modifying the meaning of the other, you get a third meaning. And if you have ten adjectives (pretty, big, ugly, …) and ten nouns (girl, book, idea, …), they combine to give 100 new meanings. Some of the meanings may not be very useful, such as pretty book, but at least they are available if the need should arise. Syntax is the powerhouse of meaning creation, because there’s literally no limit to its creativity. There’s no such thing as the longest possible sentence, so you can always add an extra word or two to create a slightly different meaning.

All this is fundamental to teaching, where meanings are central. Teaching can be imagined as a system for transferring information from the teacher’s head into the pupils’ heads; but how does this magical operation work? One way is to do it directly, by transmissive teaching: the teacher first converts an idea into a meaning, expressed in words; and (all being well) the pupils recognise these words, identify the meaning intended and convert it into the same idea in their own heads. Of course the operation rarely goes as smoothly as that, but at least that’s the aim of transmissive teaching; and transmissive teaching is surely part of every teacher’s repertoire, even if it sits alongside a host of less direct methods. And it all depends on the infinitely subtle meanings that grammar allows us to create. Take away grammar, and the whole of education collapses.

You may wonder how we can represent meanings without complete circularity. Using italics for words and quotation marks for concepts, we could say that book means ‘book’, but what is ‘book’, apart from being the meaning of book? This problem faces anyone who writes monolingual dictionaries, and the practical answer is to provide an expanded description of the concept to be defined. Here is the definition of book given in one fairly small dictionary (the Collins Cobuild Student’s Dictionary):

A book consists of a number of pieces of paper, usually with words printed on them, which are fastened together and fixed inside a cover of stronger paper or cardboard.

A definition like this shows the way forward in defining meanings: the essential trick is to show how the concept being defined is related to other concepts – in this case, concepts like ‘paper’, ‘words’, ‘printed’, ‘inside’ and ‘cover’. This kind of analysis invites a ‘mind map’ or ‘semantic network’ as its visual manifestation, and could play an important part in school teaching about how knowledge is interconnected. The mindmap in Figure 3 shows how the concepts linked to ‘book’ can in turn be linked to other concepts in a rapidly expanding network that would ultimately contain the whole of human knowledge – if only we had enough time and paper. Notice how the map includes the words that carry some of these concepts as meanings: the synonyms attach and fix, and the word book.

[graphic]

Figure 3: A mindmap for the concept 'book'

Exploring meanings in this way is a really good classroom activity because of its analytical focus on the students’ own existing knowledge and understanding. This particular example is all about words, which (according to my expanded definition of ‘grammar’) are part of grammar; but the same kind of treatment is possible for more traditional grammatical items such as tense and number. For instance, what is the time structure of a sentence such as (4), containing a ‘past perfect’ verb (here had chatted)?

(4) I met him at 5.00 although we had exchanged messages at 4.00.

The analysis in Figure 4 shows the time structure of this sentence, with the message exchange before the meeting, which was before now (the time of speaking). Notice how this diagram makes the mindmap slightly more sophisticated by using an arrow to point from earlier to later (so 4.00 is before 5.00).

[graphic]

Figure 4: The time structure of a past perfect

To summarise, grammarians are well aware of meaning, and have developed various ways of analysing it so as to be able to bring meaning and grammar together; mindmaps are very crude approximations to the kind of analysis that some grammarians use, but they are a step in the right direction and have the advantage of being easy to implement in a classroom. Mindmaps aren’t the only tools on offer, but they are undoubtedly the most accessible.

Grammar and communication

It’s tempting to think that meaning and communication are the same thing. After all, what is communication but the transmission of meaning from one mind to another? However, a moment’s thought shows that they are very different. As any teacher knows all too well, being able to put a thought into words does not guarantee that it will reach the mind of someone listening or reading. Our ancestors were also aware of this challenge, and responded by moulding our language into a reasonably serviceable tool for communication. One of the goals of school education is to make sure that school leavers are aware of this functionality in the language and can use it well.

You may remember that in my nutshell summary I included this example, which I called a cleft sentence:

(5) What I think should be taught in schools is grammatical analysis.

This example illustrates one of our communication options because it conveys exactly the same meaning as its simpler version (6):

(6) I think grammatical analysis should be taught in schools.

As, indeed, do all the following sentences:

(7) Where I think grammatical analysis should be taught is in schools.

(8) What I think should happen to grammatical analysis is to be taught in schools.

(9) The one who thinks grammatical analysis should be taught in schools is me.

(10) In schools, I think grammatical analysis should be taught.

(11) ?Schools I think grammatical analysis should be taught in.

(12) ?? Taught in schools I think grammatical analysis should be.

(13) Grammatical analysis I think should be taught in schools.

(14) Grammatical analysis should be taught in schools, I think.

(15) I think they should teach grammatical analysis in schools.

Examples (7) to (9) illustrate ‘clefting’, which splits the sentence into two parts linked by is, thereby focusing attention on the bit after is by presenting it as new information. Examples (10) to (13) do the reverse, by ‘fronting’ one part of the sentence, i.e. putting it at the front of the sentence, thereby marking it as relatively familiar information, or the ‘starting point’ of the sentence; but you may wonder whether (11) and (12) really are allowed by English. (As a grammarian I can assure you that such sentences are quite common.) The point of example (14) is to show that the main clause I think can be turned into a mere tag, an afterthought. And (15), of course, shows that the original sentence (6) was already a departure from the most basic grammatical form, thanks to the passive be taught. In converting it back to an active version I have had to supply a new subject, the vague they. Apart from this addition, all these sentences have the same meaning, but very different communicative value.

When you consider the various devices made available in our grammar, they all seem to be geared to making life easier for the receiver (the reader or listener); so you could take the structure of English grammar as evidence for our ultimate altruism, as speakers accepting responsibility for increased effort on our part in order to benefit others. Alternatively, you could also take it as evidence for hard-headed rationality, showing how our ancestors recognised that there’s no point in talking if the other person can’t understand. Either way, we find that the grammar is concerned with two related questions:

· What does the receiver know already?

· What mental resources does the receiver have for processing incoming words?

The current knowledge of the receiver is relevant to the first three sentences, the clefted ones where one word is removed from its normal position and located at the end of the sentence while the rest of the basic sentence is turned into a relative clause. The diagram in Figure 5 shows how this operation applies to produce example (5): What I think should be taught in schools is grammatical analysis. It shows that the cleft version includes two extra words: what and is, which change a relatively simple sentence into a much more complicated structure – a complete reorganisation of the syntax.

[graphic]

Figure 5: The construction of a cleft sentence

Why did I bother to make life more complicated for both of us – for me as writer and for you as reader? Because I thought it would improve communication by focusing your attention on the phrase grammatical analysis. By the time I was composing this sentence I had already told you that I think schools should teach grammar, and that I was just about to explain what I meant by grammar, so I calculated that the focus on grammatical analysis was what you needed. Figure 5 hints at the complex mental operations that may have been involved in producing my sentence. The structure is complicated, but the point of the example is that you don’t have to be a professional grammarian to cope with it. You probably read it without any difficulty, and every English speaker produces such sentences on a regular basis, and as needed by the communicative demands of the immediate situation. Indeed, they are even more common in casual conversation than in formal writing (such as this book) – one research project reports approximately one such example in every thousand words (Biber et al. 1999: 961).

Cleft sentences, like all the other grammatical structures illustrated in (7) to (15), are a way of managing and shaping the information contained in a sentence. When used successfully (as they usually are) they mould the message to fit the hearer’s existing knowledge. But this isn’t the only way in which grammar contributes to communication, as you’ll see if you compare the next two examples:

(16) That we’re going to miss our train if we don’t walk a bit faster is very clear.

(17) It’s very clear that we’re going to miss our train if we don’t walk a bit faster.

I’m sure you’ll agree that, although both sentences carry the same message, (16) is a lot harder to read than (17). The general principle explaining why is the principle of ‘end weight’: the heavier parts of the sentence (such as the long subordinate clause that … faster) should stand at the end of the sentence. Such sentences have received attention from cognitive psychologists, who explain the difference in terms of working memory: (16) demands far more mental resources because of the very long subject That we’re going to miss our train if we don’t walk a bit faster. While you (the reader) are processing this subordinate clause, you have to remember that it needs to be linked somehow to a main verb; so this need for a main verb has to be held in memory while you’re processing all the 15 words of the clause. In contrast, (17) is easy because the two tasks are separated: the extra word it stands in for the subordinate clause and shows that it’s the subject of is clear, so by the time you reach the word that, which introduces the subordinate clause, you already know how it’s going to fit into the meaning of the whole sentence. Once again, the sentences carry the same meanings but communicate it in very different ways; and, thanks to the extra word it, easy communication comes at the price of more complex grammatical structures.

How many English teachers are aware of the principle of end weight? (Crystal 2017a: 106) Another principle of clear writing is ‘order-of-mention’, a preference for mentioning events in the same order as they occurred, which deserves a great deal of attention in teaching (Crystal 2017a: 109–116).

Grammar and emotion

It may come as something of a surprise to see grammar linked to emotion. Meanings, yes, even communication, yes, but surely not feelings? But why not? After all, if we think of ordinary grammar as a tool for interacting socially, it would be surprising if it was incapable of expressing our feelings. And indeed, once you start looking there’s plenty of feeling in language.

Take exclamations, which enjoy special grammatical patterns in English:

(18) Oh what a wonderful morning!

(19) How very kind of you!

(20) Isn’t that awful!

All these examples are nothing if not emotional, and the emotion comes from the grammar, not from the individual words. They also express a meaning, of course, but they present the speaker’s total emotional commitment to that meaning, rather than as a neutral matter of fact.

Or take interrogatives such as who, what, when, where, why, how. Emotions in this case attach to the question itself, as in (21) and (22).

(21) Who on earth did you ask?

(22) Why in heaven’s name did you do it?

Every interrogative allows a following expression such as on earth or in heaven’s name, which are not found anywhere else. They add nothing to the meaning, but they tell us a great deal about the speaker’s state of mind. The expressions all indicate the same emotion of exasperation or surprise at the possible answer to the question.

Admittedly naked emotion only exists in odd little pockets of grammar, but these pockets are real and are thoroughly integrated into the heart of grammar. They are important evidence against two views of grammar: that it is all about cold logic, and that it is dry and remote from real flesh-and-blood people.

Grammar, pronunciation and spelling

Grammar is a bridge between communicated meaning and the sounds or marks that communicate it. As the Duchess said to Alice (with careful allusion to the saying Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves), "Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves." Grammar (including vocabulary, of course) is the mechanism that guarantees this connection. If we think of words as the basic building blocks of language, then each word faces in two directions at the same time: upwards towards inaudible and invisible meanings, and downwards towards the audible or visible signals of pronunciation and spelling.

The area of grammar that links downwards is morphology – the study of word-shapes. Morphology reveals a complex mixture of the arbitrary and the regular. Take the word reveals, for example. This is arbitrary in that there is no generalisation to explain why the morpheme {reveal} should mean the opposite of conceal or hide. That’s just how English is – and likewise through the tens of thousands of words that make up our vocabularies. It’s true that we can trace the history of the word reveal back to Latin revelare, meaning ‘un-veil’ and linking to velum meaning ‘veil’, but sooner or later you hit an impenetrable wall of arbitrariness – in this case the connection between the meaning ‘veil’ to velum; and in any case the history of reveal is irrelevant until we check an etymological dictionary. So the connection between reveals and its meaning is basically an arbitrary social convention that we inherit, more or less unthinkingly, from many generations back.

On the other hand, the {s} on the end of reveals is anything but arbitrary: it is completely predictable from the rule for making present-tense verbs agree with their subjects (whereby morphology reveals, but morphologists reveal). Morphology spans the whole gamut from total arbitrariness to fully motivated and rule-governed, with a considerable middle ground where there is some motivation, but not much; for example, the re- of reveals is also found, with much the same ‘reversive’ meaning, in other verbs such as reverse, remove, replace, and reinstate, but how many of us are aware of this similarity?

Morphology, then, studies the relations between words and their shapes; but of course what we mean by a word’s shape depends heavily on whether we are thinking of spoken or written language. In English, morphemes are where sounds and spellings meet, which is part of the reason why English spelling is so ‘un-phonetic’ – why a word’s spelling often can’t be predicted from its pronunciation, or its pronunciation from its spelling. Consider the following examples:

(23) The tax is unfair.

(24) The tacks are sharp.

The point of the examples is, of course, that the words tax and tacks have exactly the same pronunciation: /taks/. If English spelling had been phonetically regular, they would have shared the same spelling, which would probably have been . The actual spelling has the advantage of highlighting the morphological difference between the monomorphe {tax} and the bimorpheme {tack}{s}. In a nutshell, the final /s/ has two completely different reasons for being there: as part of the root morpheme {tax} and as the morpheme that distinguishes plural nouns from singulars. By writing in tacks we allow it to be a separate morpheme. Moreover, this spelling also allows this morpheme to be the same as the one at the end of (say) toes or horses, in spite of the fact these have a different pronunciation for this morpheme: /z/ in toes and /ɪz/ in horses.

It’s quite uncontroversial among grammarians to claim that English spelling is oriented strongly towards morphology, and the claim is also accepted by educationalists (Nunes & Bryant 2009). But if it’s true, it has serious implications for the ways in which we teach spelling in schools, where UK government policy is to promote phonics – the teaching of ‘grapheme-phoneme correspondences’ (e.g. that between the letter and the phoneme /s/), and little more. Instead, schools need to teach morphological analysis in a systematic way so that children can understand the pressures from morphology. As we shall see in later chapters, this argument based on spelling provides a strong argument for teaching grammatical analysis.

The aim of this section has been to expand the bottom part of the diagram in Figure 2, giving the structure in Figure 6. This diagram focuses on the ‘interfaces’ – the links between different kinds of structure:

· morphosyntax relates the words of syntax to the morphemes of morphology (e.g. ‘the plural of tack’ is {tack} {s})

· morphophonology relates morphemes to their phonology (e.g. {tack} is pronounced /tak/)

· morphographology relates morphemes to their spelling (e.g. {tack} is spelt )

· grapheme-phoneme correspondences show how graphemes are paired with phonemes (e.g. is pronounced /s/).

[graphic]

Figure 6: From words downwards

You may be wondering whether morphemes deserve their important place in this picture. You probably accept that words are different from phonemes and graphemes, and that phonemes and graphemes are different from each other; so you’re happy to distinguish the word tack from the phoneme /t/ and the grapheme . But is the word tack really different (as I’m claiming) from the morpheme {tack}? After all, they’re the same size, so why not simplify the diagram by relating the word tack directly to its phonemes and graphemes? And it would be very easy to write rules for changing words without invoking morphemes at all – for example, to make a noun plural, just add /s/ at the end. If you are thinking along these lines, then you’re in he very respectable company of some distinguished linguists, so your objection deserves serious attention.

Let’s start with the objection based on size: tack is the same size as {tack}, so they must be the same thing. Would you raise the same objection for very short words such as the pronoun I? Would you argue that since the word I is the same length as the single (but internally complex) phoneme /ai/ and the single letter they must be the same thing? Surely not. The point here is that words and phonemes or letters have very different kinds of properties. The word I is a pronoun, and more precisely (in grammar-speak) it’s the first-person singular personal pronoun in subjective form. None of this information has anything to do with pronunciation or spelling. In contrast, the phoneme /ai/ is a long vowel which is made up of two parts that form a diphthong, and the letter is an uppercase vowel letter in the Roman alphabet; and this time the information has nothing to do with the word’s grammar. So in grammar size really doesn’t matter: two things can be different even if they have the same length. Returning to tack and {tack}, the same argument applies: even though they have the same length, they have very different properties. The word tack is a common noun with the meaning ‘tack’, whereas the morpheme {tack} is a root morpheme which isn’t tied to this one word. It is found not only in the plural tacks but also in the verb to tack (as in You need to tack it down at the edge) and all its forms: tacks (this time singular!), tacked and tacking, not to mention any words derived from the noun or the verb such as tacker and tacky. We can also identify it in homophones such as the noun tack (meaning harness for horses) and may even recognise it (wrongly) in the word tackle. In short, the word tack has a very different status and set of relations from the morpheme {tack}.

That leaves the second objection, that rules can easily be given without mentioning morphemes. Yes, it’s true that we could say that plural nouns add , but the question is whether this is just a common-or-gardent . The morpheme analysis claims that it’s a special , different from those in or . What’s special about it is its pronunciation, its grapheme-phoneme correspondences: as pointed out earlier, it has different pronunciations according to how the previous sound is pronounced. In cats, dogs and horses it is pronounced /s/, /z/ and /ɪz/. Of course it would be possible to formulate the rules so as to give the right answer: plural nouns add , which is pronounced /s/ after a sound like /t/, and so on. But this would miss a crucial fact: exactly the same differences are found in the which makes a verb singular (as in eats, begs and forces). If we connect words directly to their spelling and pronunciation we have to ignore this similarity, but we can recognise it by by introducing the morpheme {s} between the words and their pronunciations or spellings. The two analyses are shown in Figure 7 and Figure 8. Personally I think it’s obvious which analysis is better – but it is only possible if we distinguish words and morphemes.

[graphic]

Figure 7: Plural nouns and singular verbs without {s}

[graphic]

Figure 8: Plural nouns and singular verbs with {s}

Grammar, intonation and punctuation

I said in the previous section that morphemes are the meeting-point for pronunciation and spelling, but there’s another place where pronunciation meets writing, namely wherever intonation – an important part of pronunciation – meets punctuation. This place is somewhere in the realm of syntax, meaning and communication, which is a clumsy way of saying that it’s complicated! But the important point that I’d like to make here is that intonation and punctuation are functionally similar: whatever syntactic, semantic or communicative pressures apply to intonation also apply to punctuation.

Most people are much more aware of punctuation than of intonation, but we all use intonation all the time – and use it with great expertise; though comparison is very difficult, most of us almost certainly use intonation more accurately and more effectively than punctuation. What I would like to do is to make you more aware of this skill that you have (if you speak English as well as reading it); but of course this is difficult in a book because there’s no standard way of representing intonation. Let me start with a little activity for you, based on one of the glories of English grammar: the question tag. This is the little question tagged onto the main clause in examples like these:

(25) He can swim, can’t he?

(26) He can swim, can he?

Question tags are glorious for three reasons: First, they’re complicated because the tag varies with the main clause: can’t he after he can, isn’t she after she is, and so on, including didn’t it after examples like it broke. (The younger generation have recently made things even more complicated by introducing an invariant innit as in I missed the bus, innit? Since I don’t pretend to understand this innovation I shall ignore it.) Second, they carry very subtle contrasts concerned with communication; and third, the intonation is rather rigidly limited. There are basically two options for the intonation: rising or falling, which are easily distinguished visually and provide an easy way into the study of intonation. (For simplicity I’ll drop the question mark from the examples to leave room for the intonation mark.)

(27) He can swim, can’t he ↗

This starts from an assumption (that he can swim), and asks for confirmation; the speaker isn’t sure, but thinks the hearer knows for certain. As a communication, this is very different from (28):

(28) He can swim, can’t he ↘

Here, the speaker is making a judgement or an exclamation, so it could be introduced (at least in this example) by Wow! As a personal comment it expresses the speaker’s state of mind, or even feeling, so the only uncertainty is about whether the hearer feels the same. That’s what the tag is about.

These two examples both have the same words, in which a positive main clause takes a negative tag (can swim … can’t …) – positive plus negative. Another possibility is positive plus positive, with rising intonation:

(29) He can swim, can he ↗

In this case the idea that he can swim comes from someone else – probably the hearer – and the speaker is self-distancing. The larger context might Oh, so he can swim, can he ↗ In that case, why is he so reluctant to get in? Once again, the dynamics of the communication are quite different. And finally, to the fourth logical possibility (positive + positive with falling tone):

(30) He can swim, can he ↘

Try saying this to yourself, and I predict that you’ll find it very hard. If I’m right, it’s because this combination isn’t permitted by the grammar. The grammar allows two patterns of words: positive + negative, or positive + positive (it actually also allows combination where the first element is negative, but I’m ignoring those for simplicity); and it allows two intonation patterns: falling or rising. But falling intonation is only allowed after the negative tag. Why? Because falling intonation on a tag means not only certainty but also emotional commitment, while the positive tag means self-distancing and doubt; and commitment and doubt are contradictory emotions.

The point of the example is that intonation is closely connected with grammar, while also preserving a functional life of its own because it carries a distinct range of meanings or communicative functions which combine with those carried by the words. Much the same is true of punctuation, which is in many respects a much cruder and less efficient substitute for intonation.

Just like intonation, punctuation is also related to grammar, so skill in punctuation indicates some skill in syntactic analysis; but as I’ll explain below, punctuation (like intonation) also has direct links to communication. Since communication and syntax can pull in opposite directions, this produces tensions within the punctuation system which skillful writers can exploit well but which baffle novices. But let’s start with syntax, and specifically the syntax of sentences. What is a sentence? Since some punctuation marks (full stop, question mark and exclamation mark) are called ‘sentence punctuation’, we may expect them to mark the boundaries of the sentences that are defined by syntax; and by and large they do. But they’re the result of a mental analysis by the writer, and don’t in themselves explain the analysis. How do I decide where to put a sentence mark? This takes us back to my first question: What is a sentence? How do I recognise sentence boundaries when I’m writing?

For a grammarian, the answer is easy: a sentence boundary is where syntax runs out. Words inside a sentence are connected by syntactic links, but words in different sentences are not. Take the sentence that I’ve just written: Words inside … are not. Every word in this sentence has a syntactic link to at least one other word in the sentence; for instance, the first word, Words, is linked directly to are (Words … are …) and also to inside, which in turn is linked to a, which is linked to sentence. This analysis is shown in Figure 9; the details are controversial but the main point about syntactic relations holding a sentence together is not.

[graphic]

Figure 9: A sentence held together by syntax.

Every arc (curved arrow) in this diagram represents a relation defined by at least one syntactic rule which allows one word to be subordinate to another, while but indicates an equal relation between the two parts of the sentence which, in grammar-speak, are therefore coordinate. Syntax is all about subordination and coordination, so wherever you can find one of these relations between two words, they are glued together by syntax and are therefore part of the same sentence, and if you’re writing rather than speaking, you need a capital letter at the beginning and a sentence mark at the end. Incidentally, using arrows to show syntactic relations may be useful in teaching grammar at school; it’s the only diagramming system that I’ve seen in a modern grammar textbook for schools (Stone 2010).

Syntax is also relevant to punctuation within the sentence. Subordination is a complex affair, as it involves a range of different relations which school grammars managed to distinguish reasonably efficiently by the end of the nineteenth century (though very few even try these days). Since each such relation involves two words, we have to start by distinguishing the subordinate from the word to which it is subordinate, called respectively the dependent and the head; so in the pair words … are, the head is are and words is the dependent; but in the pair words in, words is head and in is dependent. Ultimately subordination is a matter of meaning: the head provides a general meaning which the dependent makes more precise; so words inside a sentence are a particular kind of word, not a kind of sentence. But identifying heads and dependents is complicated and the answer isn’t always obvious (though in most cases grammarians agree on the answer). This distinction isn’t in itself relevant to punctuation, but once we start distinguishing different kinds of dependent the distinctions are highly relevant to punctuation. For instance, consider these sentences:

(31) They do _ whatever I say.

(32) They misbehave _ whatever I say.

Which of the marked blanks would accept a comma? I hope you agree that a comma would be possible after misbehave, but quite wrong after do. Why the difference? Because although whatever is a dependent of the verb in both sentences, it is a complement of do but an adjunct of misbehave. The distinction between complements and adjuncts is a central part of syntactic theory, and is a modern version of the old-fashioned idea of ‘a complete idea’: a complement ‘completes’ the verb do whereas misbehave is already complete without the adjunct, which is simply added on. This isn’t the place to explore the classification of dependents, but my point is simply that your use of punctuation is already sensitive to this particular distinction. Syntactic theory can explain your punctuation practices.

You won’t be surprised to learn that your punctuation is actually even more complicated than this, because as I mentioned earlier it tries to do two different, and conflicting, jobs at the same time. On the one hand it reflects syntactic patterns such as sentences and the complement/adjunct distinction; but at the same time it tries to help communication by ‘chunking’ the written text into manageable units, and by indicating communicative functions. Chunking allows us in effect to use full stops anywhere we want the reader to pause. Everyone. But everyone. Knows. It. Works. But only so long as you don’t overdo it.

Communication and syntax place different and potentially conflicting demands on the punctuation system. Take the question mark. As a sentence-marker this signals the end of a sentence, but as a tool of communication it signals a question. But what if the question is only part of a sentence, as in the very everyday example (33)?

(33) Is this your kettle _ because it’s boiling_

I’ve omitted punctuation, so how would you punctuate it if you wrote it down? Since it’s partly a question, you’ll want a question mark, but where would you put it?

(34) Is this your kettle, because it’s boiling?

(35) Is this your kettle? because it’s boiling.

You can see the problem: (34) respects the question mark’s syntactic function, but wrongly implies that ‘cos it’s boiling is a question; but (35) respects its communicative function at the expense of the syntactic function – and what about the next word, because? Should it have a capital letter?

I hope to have shown that both intonation and punctuation have strong links to syntax, just as strong as those from pronunciation and spelling to morphology. Fortunately we don’t on the whole need instruction in pronouncing words or in doing intonation when speaking, but both spelling and punctuation need a great deal of explicit teaching; in fact, they take up most of the time devoted in our primary schools to ‘literacy’ teaching, and between them they constitute the ‘transcription’ skills which writing experts contrast with the higher-level skills of ‘composing’. But since both spelling and punctuation build on grammatical foundations, it makes intellectual sense to see spelling, punctuation and grammar as specially linked, as in the ‘Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar’ tests which every child takes on leaving one of England’s primary schools.

Grammar and identity

One slogan which has emerged in the recent UK debate about grammar teaching is “Tools not rules”: grammar is more like a tool-kit than a rule-book. If a tool is an artefact dedicated to serving some function, a hammer is a tool for hitting, then grammar is an archetypical tool except that it serves a number of different functions. One function is to allow us to express complex meanings, and another is to help us with complex communications; as I explained in section 2.6, these functions are distinct. A third function, however, is to announce our social identity. Grammar provides alternative ways of expressing the same meaning which are geared either to communication or to social identity. What we say reveals not only what we’re thinking but also who we are.

For example, take the two ways of saying the same thing in (36) and (37).

(36) I didn’t say nothing to nobody.

(37) I didn’t say anything to anybody.

As I explain in chapter 4.1, these two sentences have precisely the same meaning, but they project very different identities. Those who want to sound educated tend to use the second, but most people, most of the time, use the first – just as Shakespeare and others did before them. It all depends on what kind of social identity you want to project. And of course since our social identity can shift from situation to situation, so can our grammar: someone who used (36) with friends or family might switch to (37) in a committee meeting or a lecture. This is one example among many which distinguish the grammar of Standard English from other dialects; others include they were/was, those/them books, the book that/what I bought and come quickly/quick. If you find these choices familiar, then it must be because you know both forms, so in principle you could also use both. But you also know that each alternative form comes with social baggage attached, which you may or may not value.

Any grammar allows some choices based on social rather than semantic criteria – in other words, different ways of saying the same thing which are appropriate to different social situations or to different types of people. One particular manifestation of this principle is in language change, where the relevant social variable is age: old people speaking differently from youngsters. This contrast is very familiar in slang, where this year’s exciting innovation is next year’s old-fashioned quaintness, but it also applies to other areas of language, including grammar. At any given moment some details of your language are gradually changing, and if you know where to look, you can see (or hear) them changing. Take the verb to have, as in (38) and (39)Error! Reference source not found..

(38) They had finished.

(39) They had a good time.

Although they look the same, these verbs are very different syntactically. The contrast is clearest between (38) and (39), as you’ll see if we try to make them negative or to turn them into questions:

(40) They hadn’t finished.

(41) Had they finished?

This had is an auxiliary verb, which take {n’t} in the negative (had > hadn’t) and form questions by moving up before their subject (they had > had they). In contrast, the one in (39) is a ‘lexical verb’ – i.e. not an auxiliary. Here the rules are very different.

(42) They didn’t have a good time.

(43) Did they have a good time?

In both cases, we have to add did: had > didn’t have, they had > did they have. It’s simply wrong to treat this had like the auxiliary, giving *They hadn’t a good time and *Had they a good time? (Remember: * marks an example as ungrammatical.)

This major distinction between auxiliary and lexical verbs is actually an innovation in English grammar which as come in since the time of Shakespeare. It’s happened very gradually over the centuries, as each generation pushed it a step further; and we’re still pushing, sorting out the consequences. One locus of ongoing change at the moment is the possessive have, as in (44).

(44) She has brown eyes.

I predict that my readers will now divide according to age (and geography) into three groups: ultra-conservatives, conservatives and innovators. The ultra-conservatives may be happy with (44) but mere conservatives will prefer (45) (where, please note, got does not have the usual meaning of to get, meaning ‘come to have’).

(45) She’s got brown eyes.

When we try the negation and question tests, the differences become more interesting. Ultra conservatives (who tend either to be elderly or to live in the north of Britain) will accept (46) and (47). They’re still treating the possessive have like an ordinary auxiliary verb – in spite of the fact that there’s no other verb in sight, and in fact this verb behaves in other respects just like a transitive lexical verb such as possess.

(46) She hasn’t brown eyes.

(47) Has she brown eyes?

Mere conservatives, on the other hand, prefer the has got alternative, so for them negatives and questions are straightforward, as in (48) and (49). This is straightforward because have is a straightforward auxiliary verb, supporting the (rather meaningless) got.

(48) She hasn’t got brown eyes.

(49) Has she got brown eyes?

Finally, the innovators (presumably led by young Americans) have turned possessive have into a lexical verb like the one in have a good time. For them, the negative and question based on (44) are (50) and (51).

(50) She doesn’t have brown eyes.

(51) Does she have brown eyes?

The direction of change is clear: from the ultra-conservative pattern either to the mere conservative one or to the innovative one. The whole process is driven partly by a desire to tidy up this little corner of English grammar, but partly too by a desire to identify with ones region and age-group.

Another consequence of the link between grammar and identity which is particularly relevant to education is the way in which ‘academic language’ varies from subject to subject. Every school subject has its own special grammar, which experts use automatically and probably without even being aware of it but which novices are expected to master. Teachers have a responsibility for helping novices to build this special grammar on top of their existing everyday grammar. Chapter 4.1 gives an extended example of this process in mathematics but let’s briefly consider another example: tense in the English lesson. Imagine a student writing about Romeo and Juliet, knowing that Shakespeare lived centuries ago and that Romeo and Juliet were supposed to have lived even earlier. In ordinary English we would expect the past tense, whether we’re talking about Shakespeare or about Romeo:

(52) Shakespeare presented Romeo as madly in love.

(53) Romeo was madly in love.

But by convention English expects the present tense: presents, is. This convention presumably stems from the idea that both Shakespeare and Romeo are both eternally present through the written medium, which makes good sense to the experts, but may need to be explained to novices who want to write like experts.

Identity and grammar, then, are closely intertwined. Any particular bit of grammar may be linked to some kind of social identity, just as it may be linked to a semantic or communicational function. Grammar is not monolithic – always the same under all circumstances. Nor is it modular, a box of grammar disconnected from the rest of life and knowledge. Why should it be? Given the way we learn all our grammar through some kind of interaction with other people, intimately interconnected with the whole network of social relations and goings on, it would be astonishing if grammar remained untouched by these other influences.

Grammar and research

You may wonder where all these ideas and facts about grammar come from, so it’s time I said a bit more about grammatical research. As I explain more fully in chapter 0, grammar teaching is very ancient, and the same is true of research, even if research may seem too grand a name for people sitting around and thinking hard about their language. Grammar teaching and research have had ups and downs during their four-thousand year history, but at the moment – as of 2020 – research is on an up. In fact, it’s thriving, though the same can’t yet be said of grammar teaching. Most universities have a department of linguistics, and every such department contains at least one grammarian, and maybe several; so the academic calendar is well supplied with international conferences on grammar. For example, the Linguist List, an international collecting point for information about linguistics world wide, lists conferences about linguistics. For June 2020 it lists 17 such conferences, including three that are specifically about grammar, and most of the others are likely to include numerous presentations with a focus on grammar.

What does a grammarian do when researching? At one time grammatical research meant pouring over old books studying a dead language such as Latin or Greek. This stereotype was so familiar that it even provided the hero for a famous poem published in 1855 by Robert Browning, The grammarian’s funeral which includes the following lines.

This [man], throws himself on God, and unperplexed

          Seeking shall find him.

So, with the throttling hands of death at strife,

          Ground he at grammar;

Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife:

          While he could stammer

He settled Hoti's business let it be!

(Hoti is a Greek conjunction meaning ‘that’ or ‘because’.) Maybe some modern grammarians still work like this, but most of us do things differently. Not that we’re short of passionate commitment to grammar, and in particular to understanding grammar, but we have different languages, different data, different methods and maybe different goals. The classical languages are no longer centre stage, and have been replaced by English, which attracts more attention than any other language; for example, we now have no fewer than five recent ‘blockbuster’ grammars of English each containing between 1,000 and 2,000 pages (Quirk et al. 1972; Quirk et al. 1985; Biber et al. 1999; Huddleston & Pullum 2002; Carter & McCarthy 2006), not to mention thousands of scholarly jornal articles about English. But grammarians have also studied thousands of other languages from across the world; for example, my PhD was a study of the grammar of Beja, a language spoken by about a million people in the north-eastern part of The Sudan. This research was what we call ‘field work’, where I sought out native speakers of the language; but since then most of my work has been on English, where I am my own native speaker. Fieldwork on an exotic language is a wonderful preparation for looking at one’s native language (which turns out to be just as exotic in its own way).

Throughout its long history, grammatical research has combined descriptive work – exploring and describing the factual details of particular languages – with theoretical work. Description and theory are actually two sides of the same coin, which we might call ‘grammatical analysis’. Any description presupposes some kind of theoretical framework (even if it’s only the idea that language consists of basic units such as words), and every theory presupposes evidence in the form of descriptions. One of the reasons why the study of grammar is in such good health nowadays is that we have really good theory to support really good description. In fact, we have a lot of competing theories – which, of course, is not something to boast about because we can be sure that they’re not all right, and there’s a disturbing possiblity that they are all wrong. The most famous theory, and probably the one with the most followers, is called ‘Minimalism’ and was invented by Noam Chomsky, who is certainly the most famous linguist (and grammarian); but there are many more, including one that I invented called ‘Word Grammar’ (Hudson 1984; Hudson 1990; Hudson 2007; Hudson 2010; Gisborne 2010; Duran Eppler 2011; Traugott & Trousdale 2013).

Let me put flesh on these rather abstract bones about description and theory. Consider the very elementary English data in Table 1.

subject

present

present + not

reduced + not

present + n’t

they

they are

they are not

they’re not

they aren’t

you

you are

you are not

you’re not

you aren’t

we

we are

we are not

we’re not

we aren’t

he/she/it

she is

she is not

she’s not

she isn’t

I

I am

I am not

I’m not

????

Table 1: The amn't gap

Assuming that you know English pretty well, my question for you is what you would put into the bottom right-hand cell. Would you say I amn’t or I aren’t? Or something else? As an extra data-point I might point out that you probably do have a ready-made form for the question in (54).

(54) Aren’t I your friend?

If you come from Scotland or Ireland I predict that your answer for the statement is I amn’t, but otherwise I predict that you don’t have any answer at all: you don’t like either I amn’t or I aren’t. Why? This question moves us straight into grammatical theory. What kind of answer does your theory allow? Here are some possibilities that you might consider:

· We don’t like amn’t because it’s too hard to pronounce. This can’t be right because the Scots and Irish use it very happily; and in any case, we can easily argue on theoretical grounds against this kind of explanation for the simple reason that phonology – the bit of language that handles pronunciation matters – exists precisely to make sure that every word is pronounceable. So if we didn’t like saying amn’t we could easily change it into a more pronounceable form such as /amənt/ (where ə is schwa, the vowel at the start of about).

· We don’t like amn’t because we’ve never heard it. This can’t be right either because we’re good at generalising, and the relevant generalisation in the table is very simple and obvious. If is not gives isn’t, and are not gives aren’t, what does am not give? This is a very simple analogy indeed, and yet we all resist it. In any case, this explanation begs the question: why have we never heard amn’t? The answer, of course, is that we’ve never heard it because nobody else uses it, but this takes us back to the first question: why don’t any of us use amn’t?

· We don’t like amn’t because it’s somehow incoherent or contradictory. This is the explanation that I’ve proposed (Hudson 2000), but it takes us right into the heart of grammatical theory because we need to know precisely what the mechanisms of grammar are. My suggestion is that generalisations in grammar (as in the rest of our thinking) apply by default, so they apply unless they’re blocked by an exceptional subcase. For example, by default a noun becomes plural by adding {s}, but exceptionally the plural of mouse is mice, so the default rule doesn’t apply. This is unproblematic because it’s clear that mouse is a subcase of ‘noun’. But if two incompatible generalisations apply, and neither is a subcase of the other, we reach a stalemate where we simply don’t know what to do. In the real world this is a familiar situation; for example, if one door is for females and the other is for students, which one should a female student use? This situation is parallelled in the case of *amn’t, which is simultaneously ‘first person’ (notice that be is the only verb in English that has a special form for the first person, i.e. for use with I) and ‘negative’, neither of which is a subcase of the other. And the problem is that these two features demand incompatible forms: am for ‘first person’, and aren’t for ‘negative’.

This explanation strikes me as much more plausible than the other two, but of course there may be a fundamental fault in it, and someone else may be able to come up with an even better explanation. But whatever the merits of my explanation, the point is that the problem demands an explanation formulated in terms of a clear and coherent theory of grammar.

I hope to have given some sense of why so many people (like me) find grammar an exciting and challenging area of research. As chapter 0 will show, the grammar taught in schools has always been validated ultimately by research, but the links to research are all too easy to forget or ignore, leaving the teacher with nothing but half-understood dogma, to be taught (in the worst cases) by corporal punishment and rote learning, rather than as a body of research-based learning which throws light on this important area of our intellectual life.

Grammar and correctness

Finally we come to the idea that many discussions of grammar treat as their starting point: that grammar is about correctness. This view presents grammar as primarily a means for avoiding error. I’ve deliberately left this view to the end because I wanted to persuade you that grammar is actually much, much more than that.

Correctness, in this view, is to be achieved by learning a list of common errors, and then learning to avoid these errors. Just to be clear, this particular interpretation of error-avoidance is absolute anathema to me, and I reject it totally. As a grammarian I think it is total nonsense, and in education I believe that its effects are all, and always, negative. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a list of errors from one website that I found by googling for “common grammar mistakes”:

· They're vs. Their vs. There

· Your vs. You're

· Its vs. It's

· Incomplete Comparisons

· Passive Voice

The lists starts well with some homophones where spelling needs morphology (section 2.8), but then we hit incomplete comparisons. What on earth are they? Apparently they’re sentences like this one:

(55) Our car model is faster, bigger, stronger.

Faster, bigger an