Imagine that the national government controlled education down to fine details of what to teach and how to test it, and in your own subject the government required that modern research should be ignored, and unreconstructed 18th-century beliefs should be taught.
Welcome to my world. I’m not talking about the attempts of dull-witted US school boards to push creationism into the science curriculum. I’m talking about a sample grammar test published by the Standards and Testing Agency of the British government’s Department for Education (brought to my attention by Michael Rosen’s recent article in The Guardian). Tests like this will be required as of next year. But the sample test is an atavistic horror show.
Much in the test is appalling; here I discuss just one point (it happens to be relevant to material I was teaching to second-year undergraduates last week). Question 38 asks, for each of the following sentences, “whether the word after is used as a subordinating conjunction or as a preposition":
- He moved here after the end of the war.
- Entry is free after 5 pm in the evening.
- I went to the cinema after I had eaten my dinner.
This presupposes an ancient but incorrect analysis of words like after, before, and since (see my earlier discussion). The “subordinating conjunction” category of traditional grammar mistakenly unites two sets of words that are quite different: (i) meaningless and sometimes optional subordination markers like that and whether, and (ii) meaningful and syntactically obligatory lexical items like after and since.
Tell me that you love me is synonymous with Tell me you love me: Although that signals the beginning of a subordinate clause, it can be omitted. (In other contexts, like That the ship was unseaworthy was news to the crew, it’s meaningless but grammatically required.) In I went to the cinema after I had eaten my dinner, things are completely different: The word after contributes crucially to the sense, and omitting it is grammatically disallowed.
Classes (i) and (ii) should never have been collapsed together. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls that a subordinator, and treats after, in all its occurrences, as a preposition that can take a clause complement.
Unfortunately, all published dictionaries list after as three separate words, labeled “prep” (preposition) to cover I went to the cinema after dinner; “conj” (conjunction) for I went to the cinema after I had eaten my dinner; and “adv” (adverb) to allow They lived happily ever after.
This isn’t like the case of bear (“ursine animal”) versus bear (“carry”), where semantics, syntax, and morphology tell us that the words are distinct. There is clearly just one word after, its temporal meaning being roughly “later in time [than],” and you either specify the time with a noun phrase like dinner or a clause like I had eaten my dinner, or you just leave it to be figured out from the context.
If this was a new point original with The Cambridge Grammar (2002), we might excuse the test makers: a lag of 13 years in knowledge transfer from research literature to school tests is not unprecedented. But the unity of prepositions like after was cogently defended by the great Danish grammarian Otto Jespersen in 1924 (The Philosophy of Grammar), and can be tracked back further, at least to 1784: John Hunter’s “A Grammatical Essay in the Nature, Import, and Effect of Certain Conjunctions” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1, 113–134) opens with an explicit argument that it is irrational to treat sentences like I arrived after his departure and I arrived after he departed as employing two different words after, belonging to two different parts of speech. The Department for Education is more than 230 years out of step with developments in grammatical description.
You may say that this seems a footling matter; “takes a clause complement” or “used as a subordinating conjunction": who cares? Well, we should care. As Jespersen remarked in his retirement address, “To anyone who finds that linguistic study is a worthless finicking with trifles, I would reply that life consists of little things; the important matter is to see them largely.”
Until the middle of the 18th century, even ichthyologists believed that whales were fish. Not until 1758, in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, did Linnaeus overturn this ancient fallacy and recognize the mammalian lineage of the cetaceans. Correct classification matters, and the old taxonomy was just wrong.
Zoologists didn’t just shrug and stick with the fish categorization; they took note, and eventually popular works and British textbooks and biology tests followed suit. All I’m saying is that if the British government plans to micromanage children’s grammar lessons, then it should pay at least some attention to the past 200 years of discovery in the field of syntax.
