The title page of the very copy of Kirkham’s English Grammar used by Abraham Lincoln. Mounted inside the front cover is a promissory note for $30 witnessed by Abraham Lincoln as agent.
Courtesy: Library of Congress
In its usual sense, grammar is the set of rules governing how words are put together in sentences to communicate ideas—or the study of these rules. Native speakers of a language learn them unconsciously. The rules govern most constructions in any given language. The small minority of constructions that lie outside these rules fall mostly into the category of idiom and customary usage.
It [the doctrine of usage] asserts that “Good use is the general, present-day practice of the best writers.” One bone we could pick would be with that “best.” How are they the best writers except by using the words in the best ways? We settle that they are the best writers because we find them using their words successfully. We do not settle that theirs is the right, the “good usage” of the words because they use them so. Never was there a crazier case of putting the cart before the horse. It is as though we were to maintain that apples are healthy because wise people eat them, instead of recognizing that it is the other way about—that it is what the food will do for us which makes us eat it, not the fact that we eat it which makes it good food.
—I. A. Richards
The Philosophy of Rhetoric
There are many schools of grammatical thought—and differing vocabularies for describing grammar. Grammatical theories have been in upheaval in recent years. Seemingly the more we learn, the less we know. As the illustrious editor in chief of the Oxford English Dictionary wrote in 1991: “An entirely adequate description of English grammar is still a distant target and at present seemingly an unreachable one, the complications being what they are.”1 In fact, the more detailed the grammar (it can run to many large volumes), the less likely it is to be of any practical use to most writers and speakers.
Grammar should be an attempt to describe the English language as it is actually used—beginning with the facts and not with ingrained biases about what should and should not be considered grammatical. But that’s not the whole story. Describe English, yes—but whose English? The traditional view of English grammar is that it should record the linguistic habits of refined speakers and writers: the best English, or standard literary English shorn of dialect and idioms that typify the language of uneducated speakers. It is the type of English, in other words, that marks its user as an educated speaker or writer. It can be found in the pages of reputable newsmagazines and nonfiction books (and much fiction, too, but less reliably so because of the utility of dialectal usage in dialogue and experimental usage within narrative).
Not everyone aspires to the standard language—and as a result our culture becomes more varied and interesting. But anyone who does aspire to it will find that it can be cultivated, partly through wide reading of serious writing and partly through close study of its techniques. Although nobody speaks or writes standard literary English infallibly—just as nobody behaves or exercises judgment infallibly—good English exists as certainly as good behavior and good judgment do.
During the 141 years from 1711 through 1851, grammars were among the most popular books published in English. There were hundreds of them. Seemingly every English-speaking household had, at a minimum, a Bible and a grammar. Lindley Murray, sometimes called “the father of English grammar,”2 sold some 15 million copies of his English Grammar and other literary books from 1795 to 1840.3 In 1851, Goold Brown’s humongous Grammar of English Grammars appeared, occupying 1,102 pages on the subject.
For the rest of the 19th century, the teaching of grammar was fairly stable. The top names in school grammars after 1850 were John Seely Hart,4 Allen Hayden Weld,5 Thomas N. Harvey,6 Simon Kerl,7 and William H. Maxwell.8 The dawn of the 20th century saw the rise of the first scholarly grammars and “college grammars,” still along the line of traditional grammars but somewhat more elaborate and standardized. Among the leading texts through the mid-20th century were those by Henry Sweet,9 George Lyman Kittredge and Frank Edgar Farley,10 Otto Jespersen,11 Janet Rankin Aiken,12 and George O. Curme.13
A campaign against traditional grammar had started by the early 20th century. In 1910 a leading commentator wrote:
What was the meaning of the reaction against the study of formal Grammar of the Lindley Murray type? The main count against it was that it failed of practical results; failed as a communicable “art of speaking and writing the English language with propriety,”—to quote the Murray definition. The endless formalities of rule and precept were found to be wasteful burdens of knowledge unrelated to practice.14
What was not then known was that nothing better would replace traditional grammar—at least nothing better that might still be comprehensible to the educated public in general, and nothing related to the teaching of composition.
By the early 20th century there was a drumbeat of dissatisfaction with the doctrine of grammatical “correctness.” Things like the parts of speech and sentence diagramming were criticized—mostly among expert linguists, not practical teachers. New schools of thought arose, each with its own nomenclature and classification system.15 That trend has only continued in the years since.
Between charges that it was not being taught and should be taught and charges that it was being taught and should not be, grammar has had a very bad time of it for more than a quarter of a century.
—Bertrand Evans
“Grammar and Writing”
Some saw growing standardization as outright dogmatism, and in 1927 Charles Carpenter Fries, in his Teaching of the English Language, urged “the overthrow of the traditional view”16 of correctness as determined by the rules of conventional school grammars. He wanted to jettison past methods: “For more than a century good English has been one of the major concerns of our educational system. . . . [Yet] we do not by any means agree as to what this good English is.”17 Fries was an influential voice, and over time—with the backing of the National Council of Teachers of English—the grammatical putsch succeeded.
By the mid-20th century, the structural linguists—also known as generative grammarians—rose with a wholly new way of describing the English language: transformational grammar. Unlike traditional grammar, this new discipline was not a didactic system to help students use “good grammar”—in fact, the linguists no longer believed in “good grammar” or in using grammar as a vehicle for teaching English composition. They came to believe that if a native speaker utters a sentence, it is necessarily appropriate to the speaker’s dialect. They sought to record linguistic structures and describe syntax dispassionately and scientifically—usually with no preference for Standard Written English over regional and class dialects.
Transformational grammar was a descriptive method based on a theory first proposed by the linguist Noam Chomsky in 1957.18 Chomsky sought to describe how people produce and understand original sentences without formally learning rules for grammatical structures. According to his original theory, native speakers assimilate the natural rules of the language and internalize them. Transformational grammar attempts to describe those internal rules by first looking at a sentence’s structure and then deriving a formulalike rule or a tree diagram to show how a sentence or sentence part is formed. Sporadic, mostly unsuccessful attempts to teach grade-school children English using transformational grammar were made during the 1960s and early 1970s. Today it is taught mostly in colleges and graduate schools. Outside linguistics, transformational grammar is used mostly in computer-language-processing applications. It has an alien look and feel to traditionalists, but it can convey interesting insights into how the language works (see §§ 365–413).
In the late 20th century, it was common for the high-school and college courses that still taught grammar to treat it on dual tracks: traditional grammar plus transformational grammar.
Since then, no clear consensus has been reached, and the more advanced grammars have become so specialized and jargon-filled as to be incomprehensible to all but other specialists. In the mid-1980s, the literary critic Christopher Ricks observed that many modern grammarians express themselves in a manner “as inviting as a tall wall bottled-spiked.”19 About the same time, Robert W. Burchfield, then editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, said that this impenetrable grammatical gobbledygook had led to an “unrelieved intellectual apartheid” that left most educated speakers of English “disastrously uninformed and uninstructed.”20
Small wonder that the subject is hardly studied today—given that many of these moderns call themselves grammaticographers who study grammaticology.21 And small wonder that the grammatical heyday of the 18th and 19th centuries remains a dim memory on the literary landscape—an implausible past in which grammars were exceeded in sales only by the Bible.
In 1952 a bewildered and frustrated Harry C. Warfel, professor of English at the University of Florida, wrote Who Killed Grammar?, in which he detailed the demise of the subject in American secondary schools and colleges—laying blame mostly at the feet of Fries.22 Together with other linguists, Fries had succeeded in divorcing grammatical learning from the pedagogy of English composition. The sad saga was updated and elaborated in an excellent 2003 book by David Mulroy: The War Against Grammar.23
In any event, grammar was never killed—even if it was wounded. It is very much alive, as evidenced by the interest you’re showing at this very moment. Your own learning about grammar will help hasten its recovery.
Perhaps the most important reason for learning about grammar is that language is basic to almost everything we do—and the more nearly you can master it, the more effectively you’ll think, speak, and write. You’ll be more aware of ideas and how they’re expressed. You’ll make finer distinctions. A knowledge of grammar is fundamental to critical thinking.
We cannot know too much about the language we speak every day of our lives.
—Simeon Potter
Our Language
You’ll also find that a knowledge of grammar and usage opens up doors for you. Without it, your opportunities in life would be limited. That’s true in any culture and with every language—and it’s true of English-speaking countries. If you’re an ambitious speaker of English, you’ll want to learn Standard Written English. You’ll find a richer appreciation of English literature, and you’ll benefit in ways both tangible and intangible—ways that you can’t possibly appreciate until you’ve gained the knowledge.
An illustrative story: Many biographers of Abraham Lincoln have noted his early preoccupation with Samuel Kirkham’s English Grammar in Familiar Lectures (1820). When he first heard about the book, Lincoln walked six miles to get a copy.24 He burned pine shavings in a blacksmith shop so that he could read it at night.25 He committed whole sections of the book to memory, often wheedling friends into quizzing him.26 He wanted to learn to speak well and write well. And so he did: he is widely considered the foremost orator and writer ever to have served as president of the United States.
The title page of the very copy of Kirkham’s English Grammar used by Abraham Lincoln. Mounted inside the front cover is a promissory note for $30 witnessed by Abraham Lincoln as agent.
Courtesy: Library of Congress
Another story—a little less sublime: A professor acquaintance of mine had a college student who was determined to teach Greek philosophy. But the student couldn’t pass his first semester of Greek. The professor told the student what his problem was: he didn’t know the first thing about English grammar. (Other profs had said he just lacked innate ability.) After taking a couple of courses in English grammar, which he found challenging, the student tried again and succeeded with distinction. In fact, he went on to study medieval Latin as well. That competence, combined with his mastery of Greek, was decisive in getting him a good college teaching post the same year he earned his Ph.D. Today his academic career is flourishing. Both he and his advisers declare that English grammar paved the way.
Your own path will be unlike those. It will assuredly be unique. But one thing is certain: in the long term, your acquiring Standard Written English will only help you reach your most ambitious goals. Wear it lightly. Be practical, not pedantic. Seek to be astute in the way you handle language. In addition to speaking well and writing well, learn to listen well. You’ll perceive more. And listen sympathetically.
As traditionally understood, grammar is both a science and an art. Often, it has focused—as part I of this book does—on parts of speech (or word classes). Each part of speech performs a particular function in a sentence or phrase. Traditional grammar has held that there are eight parts of speech: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.27 Some grammars have added a ninth: articles.28 But as you’ll soon discover (see § 5), reckonings vary.
The first 285 sections of this book deal with the traditional eight; each part of speech is discussed in some detail. The purpose here is to sketch some of the main lines of English grammar using mostly traditional grammatical terms.
Part II deals with syntax: the rules governing the arrangement of words and phrases into sentences. Traditional grammarians classified sentences into four types according to their purposes (statements, questions, directives, and exclamations), as well as four structural types according to the structure of clauses (simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex). More modern grammarians have isolated seven fundamental patterns into which English sentences can be classified by word order. Part II explains these ideas along with the basics of sentence diagramming and the newer “sentence trees” of transformational grammar.
In part III we take up the subject of word formation, also known as morphology: the study of how small word-units known as morphemes compose words.
The multifariously detailed questions of English usage occupy part IV. The customary forms and meanings of words and phrases are constantly and often imperceptibly shifting. Some speakers and writers push words in new directions, often unconsciously; others resist and reject these innovations, often (in the long run) to no avail. But undesirable linguistic changes needn’t—and shouldn’t—be immediately acquiesced in. The usage glossary here presented gives a snapshot of the language as it stands today: a compilation of editorial judgments that experienced copyeditors make routinely.
More than that, though, part IV contains an unprecedented degree of empirical evidence in the form of Google ngrams, which reflect big data as applied to Standard Written English. These ngrams show the relative frequency in print of two or more competing forms. So let’s say that someone is arguing that *between him and I should be accepted as standard—there are such people.29 And let’s say that our disputatious friend cites outlier instances in literature of *between him and I (it should be between him and me, of course—each pronoun being the object of a preposition). An ngram will show relative frequencies in massive amounts of literature—more than 5.2 million books from 1500 on—to assess the truth or falsity, or maybe just the plausibility, of the contention. It’s also possible to calculate ratios of use through time. Here’s what we find:
1820 Ratio of Frequency in Printed Books: 93:1
2008 Ratio of Frequency in Printed Books: 53:1
Even a ratio of 3:1 would be enough to establish serious predominance—and perhaps enough to declare (depending on the usage involved) the less-frequent form nonstandard. But anything more than 20:1 is powerful, objective evidence that the traditionally stigmatized form is in no position to be declared Standard Written English. In fact, many of the instances of its appearance in the database are probably owing to discussions of its ungrammatical nature.
Or consider a related construction—one I heard a television broadcaster use just as this book was being readied for publication—*Him and I are good friends. Because both pronouns are subjects of the plural verb are, they should both be in the subjective case. A few language commentators will hear such instances and opine that this phrasing has become standard. They may go so far as to say that English is gradually losing its declension of pronouns altogether—a highly indefensible position. Let’s see what the ngram tells us about instances of He and I are (educated usage) and *Him and I are (uneducated usage)—from 1500 to the present day:
2008 Ratio of Frequency in Printed Books: 109:1
The frequency ratio of 109:1 in printed books just from the latest year we can now use, 2008, provides powerful evidence that Standard Written English is hardly on the brink of a shift toward acceptance of the nonstandard form.
This previously unavailable big-data tool allows us to gauge questions of English in a way never before possible, so that judgments about standard forms are based on something more than one person’s lifetime of reading and study, however reliable that may have been. Some 67 of these ngrams appear in part IV, where they are further explained. You may well find that they make part IV compulsively browsable.
Part V consists of a full restatement of the principles of English punctuation. Each principle is illustrated with verbatim examples drawn from writers of high repute. No writer, of course, is infallible in either usage or punctuation, but these sentences illustrate sound instances of punctuation. And the illustrations’ great variety contributes piquancy to what is often a dry topic.
The select glossary (see pp. 401–89) isn’t to be overlooked. Learners of any subject—your author included—benefit tremendously from treating it partly as an exercise in vocabulary-building. Learning the terminology of grammar represents a huge step toward mastering the subject as a whole. Hence I have gone into more detail in the glossary than many readers might have expected. Try browsing through it from time to time as you’re reading or consulting the book. You’ll find that the terminology is like good wine: once you get a taste for it, you’ll start picking up the nuances.
Throughout the text are inset quotations in shaded boxes. You’ve already encountered some. These quotations are intended to enrich the discussions with insights from writers and commentators of the past—most of them linguists and grammarians whose statements reinforce the basic message of the book: that linguistic study can be both practical and enjoyable. For the precise sources of these quotations, see pp. 491–95.
In most but not all ways, this book conforms to the recommendations found in The Chicago Manual of Style. I take a somewhat different stance, for example, on commas after years in month-day-year-style dates, recommending their omission when the date is used adjectivally (§ 458); on en-dashes, recommending them for expressing tension or pairing as well as for numerical ranges (§ 503); and on ellipsis dots, recommending a space before the first of four dots if the elision occurs in midsentence as opposed to after a sentence’s end (§ 555). Naturally, all the grammatical discussions and usage recommendations line up closely with chapter 5 of the Chicago Manual—given that I am the author of that chapter.
Beware the naysayers who tell you that learning Standard Written English will stifle your creativity or cause you to write “correct” but bloodless prose. This common concern is a slight one at best. The truth is that without Standard Written English, it will be all but impossible to produce “incredibly clear, beautiful, alive, urgent, crackling-with-voltage prose.”30 That’s not a bad description of what you might ultimately aim for—though the first step is straightforward and simple clarity.
Pursue your interest in words and in writing well—together with their many settled conventions. You may find that you’ve changed the direction of your life. As one of my multilingual friends likes to say, fall in love with language, and it will love you back.