Before we start looking at grammar in detail it will be helpful to be
clear about what exactly grammar is, and what it is for.
We
will do this by asking you a series of questions for you to reflect on.
Submit your answer and then, in each case, you can compare your views
with ours.
1. What is grammar for? - why do
we need it?
2. Is there one grammar
of English or are there many?
3. Is English grammar God-given
or constructed by humans?
If we only had words and no grammar, it would not be possible to express
the relations among the things we were using the words to refer to.
Consider the following simple sentence:
Emily is watching Jane.
If we just know the meaning of each of the words, we cannot know that
Emily is the person doing the watching and Jane is the person being
watched. The fact that in English subjects typically come before verbs,
and objects typically come after them, enables us to know that Emily
is doing the watching and Jane is being watched. So grammar is used
in languages to specify the relations among the words and phrases we
use.
There are two main ways in which languages typically 'do' grammar.
They can specify grammatical relations among words and phrases
by adding grammatical morphemes to words: languages that mainly
do this are normally called synthetic languages.
Or they can use place ordering by associating particular grammatical
functions with particular places in sentences, clause and phrases:
languages that mainly do their grammar this way are normally called
analytic languages.
Most languages are a mixture of these two grammatical modes. English
is a predominantly analytic language, doing most of its grammar by place-ordering.
But even though it is an analytic language, English still uses grammatical
morphemes to do some of its grammar. Consider the '-ed' past tense endings
on verbs, plural markers on nouns and and comparative (-er') and superlative
(-est) endings on short adjectives (though notice that longer adjectives
have 'more' or 'most' placed in from of them to affect the same meaning
relations).
Although modern English speakers to a large degree share the same grammar
(otherwise communication would be extremely difficult), the grammar
of the language is always changing (the grammar of modern English is
different in many ways from Shakespeare's English, and the difference
between modern English and Chaucer's English are even greater). Moreover,
there is some variation from one speaker to another and one dialect
to another. It is this variation that drives historical linguistic change.
So there is not one monolithic English grammar - no complete system
we could call THE grammar of English.
For example, some parts of Yorkshire, people still use 'thee' and 'thou'
instead of singular 'you', and some American dialects use 'you-all'
for plural 'you'. And although in Southern and standard varieties, 'while'
is a clausal conjunction meaning roughly 'during the time when', in
various Northern dialects it can also be a preposition, and means 'until',
whether it is a preposition or a conjunction (cf. expressions like 'Wait
while tea.'). It is said (we have never discovered whether this story
is true or apocryphal!) that someone driving on a road in Derbyshire
once came to an ungated railway crossing with a sign (presumably written
by a southern speaker) saying 'Wait while lights flash' and was killed
because he waited until the lights began to flash before trying to drive
across the railway line, only to be hit by the oncoming train.
Not only is there not one monolithic and 'perfect' English grammar,
it is also easily arguable that grammars are not God-given (despite
the attitudes of those who try to change what others say to accord with
what they call 'correct grammar'), but are merely the constructs
of grammarians. There are many grammars of English, and they all
differ from another in some ways not just because English has variation
and is changing, but also because the grammarians are always struggling
to get good descriptions of the grammar of English and continually argue
among themselves about what is the best description of this area and
that area of English grammar.
Moreover, different grammars are designed for different purposes. So,
for example, the various generative grammars associated with Chomsky
and his followers have the form they do because they are constructed
to investigate universals of language and related phenomena. On the
other hand, pedagogical grammars, written to help foreign learners of
English, are very different from so-called theoretical generative grammars
precisely because they have a different function.
We have chosen a grammar which is well-suited to describing texts.
So, as you learn about it, you should remember that it is bound to differ
from other grammars you might have come across, and there is NO ONE
TRUE ANSWER.
In any case, grammars describe clear cases, but in the real world,
and in real texts, we often come across difficult cases which might
be very complex or be borderline between one grammatical phenomenon
and another. So don't be surprised if not everything you come across
fits neatly into the 'boxes' you learn about. The world is full of phenomena
like flying fish, which do not fit neatly into pre-determined categories,
and the same is true of language in general and English grammar (and
Englishtexts) in particular.
The grammar we are going to explore is based on:
Leech, Geoffrey, Margaret Deuchar and Robert Hoogenraad (1982) English
Grammar for Today, London: Macmillan
Next:
Style, meaning and the structure of sentences
