For the last few decades, the teaching of English grammar has been out of favor among educators at all levels. When grammar is touched upon in the college curriculum, it is usually organized around free reading and creative writing, or it is reduced to lists of motto-style recommendations.
There is a cost to this neglect. Faculty members commonly complain that today’s high-school graduates are not acquainted with even the most basic concepts of grammar, such as tense, case, or even parts of speech. We encounter students working toward the Ph.D. who are not familiar with grammatical concepts like clause or participle.
What accounts for the flight of educators from teaching grammar? The sheer complexity of the English language is surely one factor, but traditional grammatical descriptions, with their focus on recommending and correcting, have also contributed to the problem.
Yet the complexity of the English language is not a reason for declining to teach grammar altogether. Schools and colleges continue to provide students with at least some introduction to the methods and subject matter of mathematics, a much larger body of knowledge than English grammar. They do so because any grasp of mathematical methods and principles has some intellectual value and some positive effect on the ability to understand science. Even a modest amount of exposure to the enterprise of discovering, justifying, and describing principles of grammar might help students’ writing and analysis of arguments.
Half a century ago, the logician Paul Rosenbloom dismissed the idea of doing formalized reasoning in English because “the rules of word and sentence formation in English are so complicated and full of irregularities and exceptions that it is almost impossible to get a general view of the structure of the language.” We don’t agree with Rosenbloom, but we do understand why some might. A complete description of English will certainly be vast. The comprehensive survey of English grammatical structure that we recently completed with the help of a dozen other linguists, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, runs to more than 1,800 pages.
And as we worked on The Cambridge Grammar, we came to realize just how much traditional grammars missed. It was not just that they lacked the insights of the last 50 years of research in theoretical linguistics. On the topics they did cover they were often confusing and counterintuitive, even incoherent.
For example, if you recall trying and failing to understand the traditional classification of subordinate clauses into noun clauses, adjective clauses, and adverb clauses, you have our sympathy. The classification just doesn’t work. Noun clauses aren’t like nouns, adjective clauses have almost nothing in common with adjectives, and most adverb clauses turn out not to be clauses at all. The Cambridge Grammar replaces the traditional scheme with one that makes sense.
Likewise, all current dictionaries still maintain the alleged distinction between prepositions and supposed synonymous adverbs that look exactly like them. For instance, “No ship came in that bay” is said to contain “in” as a preposition, but “No ship came in that day” is alleged, bafflingly, to exhibit a distinct but identically spelled adverb “in.” If you never saw much sense in this, we agree with you. The Cambridge Grammar treats words like “in” and “after” as prepositions in all their occurrences.
One might have thought that as university linguistics departments expanded during the 20th century, they would naturally assume the role of being the standard source of expertise in descriptive grammar. But that is not what happened. In the early part of the 20th century, linguists of the structuralist school were so zealous about taking the behavior of native speakers to be sacrosanct that linguists came to be regarded as irresponsible radicals with no standards, approving of anything that emerged from the mouths of hoi polloi.
The explosion of interest in linguistics that was triggered after generative grammar swept away the structuralists’ worldview at the end of the ‘50s could perhaps have changed this, but it did not. The program led linguists away from grammatical description and into cognitive science. Many profound and important discoveries were made about English syntax as work proceeded, but large-scale, consistent description of grammatical detail has never been on the agenda of generative grammarians.
Taking all these factors together, one can hardly be surprised that the teaching of grammar to nonlinguists has fallen off. At the high-school level, grammar is taught sporadically at the discretion of individual English teachers. Courses in writing and in foreign languages at the college level have tended to evolve toward excluding grammar instruction from the curriculum, the hope being that merely exposing students to “the whole language” and encouraging self-expression will inculcate an understanding of language use without requiring technical analysis of it. English-literature departments have long since turned from syntactic construction to semiotic deconstruction. And theoretical linguists focus on limited domains as they search for insight into syntactic universals that give clues to the workings of the mind.
Students thus miss the pedagogical benefits that accrue from analyzing English grammatical structure in detail. The notion that learning Latin provides a training for the mind seemed old-fashioned and silly by the ‘60s, but it always contained a grain of truth: Learning Latin in the traditional way involved a lot of work on word and sentence structure, and it is indeed good intellectual training, of the same sort as is provided by symbolic logic and computer programming.
Moreover, having a grasp of grammatical concepts has practical value. There is hardly a well-paid professional job today that does not involve writing material that others will read. Without a minimal grasp of grammar, it is hard even to understand editorial suggestions or house-style directives about one’s writing. Organizations like the Modern Language Association and the American Psychological Association publish book-length guides to grammar and style. Many journals, book publishers, and copy editors take these as almost sacred texts. Yet sections of these books are scarcely intelligible to a person who lacks a basic understanding of grammar.
We happen to think that telling authors to use only “that” to introduce so-called restrictive relative clauses is bad advice (a phrase like “an argument which deserves to be taken seriously” is not ungrammatical), but suppose some editor wanted to follow the APA manual and enforce this fallacious principle. Any hope of complying with it depends on being able to identify relative clauses.
Likewise, we don’t think it is at all sensible to stipulate (as the APA manual does) that the active must always be preferred over the passive (absurdly simplistic advice), but to know whether one has obeyed it, one must be acquainted with the distinction between active and passive voice.
Instead of systematic teaching of syntactic analysis, what tends to be found in colleges and universities today, mostly within writing programs, is a modest amount of trivialized and routinized grammar in the form of short lists of oversimplified mottos and maxims. The list of “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused” in Strunk and White’s legendary little book The Elements of Style is typical. “Avoid starting a sentence with however,” say Strunk and White. Why? Don’t ask; just obey. (The advice here has no basis at all, of course.)
Strunk and White’s precepts were formulated before the First World War. They are woefully out of step with the contemporary language, preferring “got” over “gotten” (hence insisting on stereotypically British rather than American English), and at times disagreeing with all varieties of English since the time of Chaucer, for example when they ban “they” with singular antecedents. (“Nobody enjoys paying their taxes” is flatly rejected by Strunk and White: They want us to write “Nobody enjoys paying his taxes.” A study of “they” in fine English literature simply does not support them.)
But the dogmatic pronouncements of The Elements of Style live on, quite probably because exposure to them is the only grammar teaching most Americans ever get.
Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania has computed that there are enough linguistics Ph.D.'s on the faculties of America’s colleges and universities that it should be possible for undergraduates to average at least one course each on linguistics. But in practice the average taught is much lower than one enrollment per undergraduate career: Linguistics classes are underenrolled compared with what could be achieved. It would be no bad thing if linguists were to make plans to alter that situation by renewing their interest in broad-based grammatical description, filling the space that language instructors and literature departments have largely vacated.
Even a modest amount of direct attention to the structure of English might benefit students’ language skills and writing style. The question of how much grammar should be taught, and at which stages, might be due for a little more thought among educators.
For us, English grammar has been a rich and continually challenging domain of inquiry. It took an arduous decade to complete The Cambridge Grammar, but exploring English grammatical structure was an endlessly intriguing and surprising enterprise. Not a single day of the work lacked the excitement of original discovery.
It could have a salutary effect to revise the English-language curriculum in colleges by reintroducing the enterprise of discovering, justifying, and describing principles of grammar -- provided the subject is framed in terms that make a bit more sense than the traditional grammars that held sway a century ago.
Rodney D. Huddleston is an honorary research consultant at the University of Queensland. Geoffrey K. Pullum is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. They are the authors of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, published recently by Cambridge University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 17, Page B20