Dick Leith, a social history of English
Chapter four: Grammar
There are probably more misconceptions about the term 'grammar' than any other term in the popular vocabulary of linguistics. Disseminated in classrooms, and therefore widely believed throughout society, these misconceptions tend to identify grammar with a certain kind of book which has been written about a language; more specifically, about the standard variety of a language, in its written manifestation. In this chapter, we shall examine the nature and the source of some of these notions, and show how inadequate they are to describe either the variation in a language at any given time, or the process of grammatical change. We shall need to look at some basic categories of grammatical description, and subject to scrutiny some common misunderstandings about the nature of rules in grammar. Aspects of the grammar of the Anglo‑Saxons will be discussed, in particular its reliance on a system of endings known as inflexions; and we shall see how these inflexions can be said to have been simplified in the course of centuries. This process of grammatical simplification will be examined in the light of sociolinguistic variables, such as pidginisation. The agency of social factors will be clearly seen as we describe changes in the system of pronouns, and we shall see the importance of linguistic variation for describing the trend towards syntactic elaboration. Finally, we shall ask how the grammar of written English has acquired not only great prestige, but also a reputation for cognitive superiority.
Grammatical change is often less consciously felt than the adoption of new words or the creation of new meanings. Thus, it is difficult to isolate and describe changes that have been recently introduced into English. Yet when we stand back and view the changes that have occurred during the last 1500 years, we see developments of a particularly striking kind. The grammar that the Anglo‑Saxons used seems to have been a radically different kind of grammar from the one we use today (subject to the qualifications we shall note below). It has been suggested that this difference entitles us to classify Anglo‑Saxon English and the English of today as languages of quite distinct types. In making [p. 88] sweeping comparisons of this kind, however, it is as well to remember that Anglo‑Saxon English was no more monolithic than the language we use today. Though the dimensions of variability may have been fewer, Anglo‑Saxon grammar had its own variations, associated with region, the difference between speech and writing, emphatic and unemphatic language, and formal and informal usage. We shall see the importance of these variations in the course of this chapter, and in particular, the process by which new variants come to be associated with certain social groups, and hence acquire either prestige or stigma.
In recent years the emphasis of linguistics has been less on the social aspects of grammar and more on its psychological implications. Grammar has been seen as the crucial level of linguistic structure. Many linguists have been absorbed by the process of language acquisition, the apparently effortless and highly efficient way in which people learn their first language from a very early age. While we cannot do justice here to this recent and important tradition of inquiry, we can abstract one of its most important precepts. By about the age of five, we have mentally internalised an immensely complex system of grammatical rules. The essential feature of these rules is that they are creative: they enable us to make up new sentences. From a social point of view, our attitude to these rules is revealing. We do not regard them as rules, since we have been educated to think that grammatical rules are something formulated by people who know better than we do, who incorporate them in grammar books, rather than part of our birthright. Thus, our treatment of our grammatical knowledge is much like our attitude to words discussed in the last chapter. We apply our internalised system of grammatical rules unreflectingly and unconsciously; and just as words change shape and meaning in new environments and contexts, so we constantly adapt and extend our grammatical patterns as similarities with other patterns and forms are perceived. In many traditional histories of English, grammatical change is very often explained by reference to such a process of analogy: a vague term, but one which reminds us that human language is creative, in that we are constantly re‑structuring and expanding our grammatical knowledge by the ceaseless process of making connections.
Some misconceptions about grammar
We can find at least five ways in which the word grammar is used to give a misleading idea of the nature of this part of language structure. [p. 89] One of these is the notion mentioned above, that some people are supposed to 'know' the grammar of the language, while others do not. A second is that grammar is something which belongs to the written language, but not to the spoken. Third, there is the somewhat archaic use of the term to refer to a book, a written account of a language's grammar; so that someone might say 'lend me your grammar'. Fourth, grammar is something that can be either 'good' or 'bad'. And finally, grammar is something which some languages have more of than others; people say that language x has more grammar than language y.
These misconceptions stem from the view of language held by the people who began to codify English grammar during the eighteenth century. To a large extent, our whole perception of grammar has been distorted by their work. Many people have been left with the impression that the grammar of the language they speak is the preserve, even the invention, of a small group of scholars. From this, the whole idea of what constitutes a grammatical rule has been perverted: for many people, such rules consist of do's and don't's, such as the prescription that 'whom did you see' is more correct than 'who did you see'. In other words, the notion of a grammatical rule has been taken in its prescriptive sense ‑ it tells you what you should or should not say. But as we have already seen in chapter two, such prescriptive rules were formulated, unsystematically and often arbitrarily, with respect to the structure of Latin, to the written mode, in its formal tenor. The rules, then, apply to only a small part of our linguistic repertoire, and not even the most important part. And many of us do not obey the rules even in formal written style: they are too redolent of pedantry, and irrelevant fussiness.
It seems hardly worth saying that the rules of prescriptive grammar are repeatedly broken in casual, informal speech. What we need to do is redefine the notion of grammatical rules, to cover the patterns that in a variety of contexts we actually produce. Such rules must be descriptive ones, capable of explaining, for instance, why 'book the your liked father' is not an acceptable sequence in any variety of modern English. The explanation here would involve principles of word‑order; but because as speakers of English we apply rules of this kind so efficiently and unconsciously, we are not aware of them as rules. The irrelevance of prescriptive rules in accounting for basic structural patterns in English can be readily seen when we examine the kinds of mistakes that are made by foreign learners of the language. How do we explain, for instance, that are you hearing? is in general a less acceptable structure in [p. 90] contemporary English than do you hear? or can you hear? And what about the order of the words in his nice new leather jacket? Is any other word‑order possible? If not, how do we formulate the rule?
From the above discussion, then, it should be clear that we are using the term rule in the sense of a 'pattern', of a structuring principle that we conventionally use without being aware of it. The rules will vary (at least with respect to surface patterning) according to the tenor of the situation, the dialect of the speaker, and the field of discourse; the rules for newspaper‑reporting will differ from those of recipe‑writing. And in general, the rules for spoken English will often be different from those of writing. Unfortunately, the association of grammar with the written mode has meant that we often judge speech against writing, and not surprisingly we find the former wanting. Our impressions of the matter are confirmed when we confront transcripts of tape‑recorded speech. The following is an extract from an informal conversation between university graduates:
We ‑ I wanted to ‑ er ‑ you know ‑ go on a bit further but well
the ‑ there were six ‑ seven of us I ‑ wait a minute ‑ no ‑ I – well
anyway when ‑ my chain broke a bit later ‑ we were going down
this hill this really steep hill....
On paper this looks garbled and formless, but it would not necessarily appear so if we were to hear it. This is because we organise our spoken utterances in association with a battery of devices that have no matching counterparts in writing. We use, most importantly, a system of intonation; this is the set of 'tunes' into which we embed our every utterance, to distinguish some kinds of questions from statements, and to signal uncertainty, sarcasm, anger, disbelief, and many other kinds of meaning. Intonation, stress, pitch, and tempo are all integrated into the spoken mode, as are the many paralinguistic and extralinguistic features that accompany our speech; we use our eyes and heads, we gesture with our hands, change our voice‑quality. In short, conversation involves the whole of our bodies, and is a form of physical behaviour, and thus totally distinct from writing.
In describing the grammar of speech, then, we must take account of the features outlined above, just as in the description of writing we must consider punctuation and the special grammatical devices for achieving emphasis, like inversions of normal word‑order. We have said above that we are more used to thinking of grammar in connection with [p. 91] written texts: but the more we examine the wide range of texts that we are quite capable of reading and understanding in the course of everyday life, the less useful the prescriptive rules seem to be. For instance, a recent advertisement has the following structure:
The crisp new look of glistening aluminium frames around big bright windows!
This is not school‑English: it contains no verb, and for many it would therefore be incorrect. Such verbless sentences are very common in advertising English, however, so that school‑grammar is perhaps not the best tool with which to analyse it. If we continue to view specimens of contemporary English through prescriptive spectacles we often miss the most interesting and innovatory features of particular varieties. While advertising English tries to capture the spirit of informal conversation in its use of verbless sentences, it also innovates by casting words in new roles: as in the NOW cigarette, where 'now' is used as an adjective. At the other extreme, the respected, even revered, language of prayer has a different kind of grammar. In this opening, written to be spoken aloud:
Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ ...
we find not only the preservation of a pattern common in the early seventeenth century in didst give, but the only use in English of a who clause directly after a noun in direct address, God.
So far, we have tried to expose the first two fallacies about grammar on our list, by referring to their origins. We can deal with the next two in a similar way, by remembering that it was the standard variety to which the Latinising, logic‑orientated rules of the codifiers were applied. Thus, for many people today the notion of grammatical rules only exists in relation to the standard. Rules of grammar are to be found in books about standard English; therefore it is this variety that possesses grammar. From this point it is only a short step to the notion of grammar as a book, to be kept in your desk at school. Whatever is not in the book, moreover, must be ungrammatical: and this will include all varieties of non‑standard English. Since grammar came to be evaluated, what was ungrammatical must be incorrect, or bad; so that if you spoke a dialect, you spoke ungrammatically, therefore badly, and deserved to [p. 92] be corrected. Once again, we see that the full range of variation in English is not taken into account in popular notions about grammatical rules, in that regional speech is felt to be synonymous with bad grammar.
What was said earlier in this chapter about different varieties of English having their own grammars must apply, of course, to the regional dialects. Unfortunately, the notion that dialects have their own grammars, which their speakers unconsciously apply when they talk to each other, has been the preserve of only a small group of language scholars, the philologists and dialectologists, and only for little more than a century. Rather than formulate rules such as 'I am is standard: I be is south‑western dialect', the eighteenth‑century codifiers either ignored regionalisms, or listed them as traps to avoid. But while their prescriptions are widely acknowledged, many people persist in using the stigmatised forms and patterns. Some of these, like the cumulative negative construction I don't know nothing, are probably used at times by a majority of people in England. Also very common are the use of them as a demonstrative (as in them books), differences in present and past tense forms of verbs (he do, he done it), the pattern in reflexive pronouns (he's washing hisself), the form of certain adverbs (he ran slow), and the plurals of nouns after numerals (three mile). All these examples, many of which will be discussed in the course of this chapter, either preserve patterns which were once more common than they are now, as in the case of the prayer discussed above, or are representative of tendencies towards grammatical change that are very common in the history of English.