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Grammar Wars: The United States

JOHN ALGEO

1 Introduction

Grammar war is not a new phenomenon, nor has it been limited to the United States. The Greeks had a word for it – logomachia, “a war about words.” St. Paul used that term in his first epistle to Timothy (6:4–5), where he wrote of one who “is puffed up, knowing nothing but doting about questionings and disputes of words [logomachia], whereof cometh envy, strife, railing, evil surmisings, wrangling of men corrupted in mind and bereft of the truth.” In the anglicized form logomachy, it has been used in English since 1569 (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). The usual sense is “an argument that is about words rather than things,” but because that is what most grammatical disputes are, they have their place in the ancient, if not honorable, tradition of the logomachy.

Logomachy, including grammar wars, is not limited to unimportant arguments about words, however. Words are powerful things, and disputes about them can have significant, indeed catastrophic, results. Because logos means “word, reason, order,” arguments about words may be arguments about the perception of order in society or, for that matter, in the cosmos.

To dispute about words is to dispute about how we conceptualize the world around us, as Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) pointed out long ago. To dispute about grammar, that is, about how we conceptualize words, is to dispute about epistemology – how we know the world. Grammar wars are thus philosophical in their nature, but they have also been linked, more or less closely, with disputes about usage, in the sense of what is genuine, correct, or proper language. And usage disputes, in their turn, are often linked, again more or less closely, with sociology, specifically views concerning social classes. So grammar wars have these two major aspects: theoretical (or philosophical) and usage based (or sociological).

2 Grammar Wars over Theory

The history of grammar wars over theory illustrates the evolutionary pattern called punctuated equilibrium, co‐identified by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould (1972) and popularized by the latter (1981). This pattern sees evolution not as a slow, continuous process but rather as consisting of long periods of stability (equilibria) that are interrupted (punctuated) by events of relatively sudden and rapid change. In the case of the western grammar wars, the equilibrium lasted for a couple of millennia, beginning with the Alexandrian Dionysius Thrax in the first century BCE and extending through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That equilibrium included a number of fluctuations, but they did not disturb or seriously modify the approach to grammar study that was established by Thrax in Alexandria during its heyday as an intellectual center of the Western world and that continued until the nineteenth century. Thus American grammar wars interrupted the traditional grammatical equilibrium late in its history.

The traditional equilibrium focused grammatical study on written language (hence the term grammar from Greek grammatik, “the study of letters”). The main purpose of grammar was to assist in the interpretation of literature (which was also a matter of letters, from Latin litteratura, “writing, learning”). Its major categories were defined philosophically (as in “a noun is the name of a person, place, or thing”). The orientation of grammar was pedagogical, that is, its purpose was to teach someone how to use language. The main subject of grammar was the word – its identity and relationship to other words.

The earliest study of grammar in America is continuous with that in Britain. However, early on, new directions developed in the New World, some of which were parallel with those of the motherland, but others not. The history of English grammar in America can be seen as consisting of several major phases, defined by scholarly approaches to the subject (Algeo 1986 approaches the subject from a more pedagogical standpoint).

2.1 Latinate and nativist grammars

In the first phase, American English grammar was solidly in the Latinate tradition. In early works of this phase, an opposition appeared between (1) descriptions that imposed Latin categories on English and (2) nativist ones that presented English on its own terms. An example of Latin‐bound grammar is Thomas Dilworth’s New Guide to the English Tongue, first published in London in 1740, but soon and often reprinted in America. It describes the morphology of the English noun as consisting of six cases: nominative “A Book,” genitive “Of a Book,” dative “To a Book,” accusative “The Book,” vocative “O Book!” and ablative “From a Book.” An example of nativist grammar is John Ash’s Grammatical Institutes (1760), another British work that became popular in America. The acme of the nativist works is Goold Brown’s Grammar of English Grammars, which was published in 1851, underwent 10 editions, and continued to be reprinted at least until the end of the century. Its thousand‐plus pages are a compendium of the tradition, offering rules to be memorized, sentences to be parsed word by word, and “false syntax” (i.e. errors) to be corrected.

2.2 Word‐focused and clause‐focused grammars

Despite the opposition between Latinate and nativist grammars, they agreed in being pedagogically oriented and word focused. In a second phase, the pedagogical emphasis continued, but word‐focused grammar was replaced by clause‐focused grammar. The latter is less concerned with individual words – their parts of speech and inflectional characteristics – and more concerned instead with types of constructions (sentences, clauses, and phrases) and their functional components (subjects, objects, heads, and modifiers), often displayed by diagrams of various sorts. Examples of clause‐focused grammars are S. W. Clark’s Practical Grammar (1847), which diagrammed sentences by writing their components in cartouche‐shaped balloons linked together in various ways, and Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg’s Higher Lessons in English (1877), which introduced a style of sentence diagramming still used today. Clause‐focused grammar became the standard on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching its acme in the scholarly‐traditional Comprehensive Grammar of English (1985) by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik. That work belongs essentially to the clause‐focused approach of grammatical description though it lacks diagrams of syntactic structure and is vastly improved by a thorough grounding in data and an incorporation of insights from the later structural and transformational phases.

2.3 Historical, dialectal, and variation linguistics

Clause‐focused grammars, like the earlier word‐focused ones were synchronic in their orientation and were concerned primarily with the standard language, whether in Britain or in America. Their development, however, coincided roughly with that of a new phase in language study: historical and dialectal linguistics. These disciplines, both originally motivated by diachronic interests, emphasized variation over time and space but returned to a primary focus on the word – its phonology, semantics, and morphology – rather than on syntax (at least until relatively recent times).

Historical and dialectal studies were more narrowly academic in their constituency, rather than broadly pedagogical or popular. They both had an Old Curiosity Shop appeal to the general public, but that was incidental to the interests of the scholars who pursued the studies. Well‐grounded popular presentations of their results have been made (for example, McWhorter 2003), but for the most part their domain is academia. Only a few scholarly works in the area can also be appreciated by general readers; one of those is Frederic Cassidy and Joan Hall’s (1985–) Dictionary of American Regional English.

By the later twentieth century, however, variation study became more concerned with language differences of a social nature: urban versus rural, class and gender correlations, first‐ versus second‐ or foreign‐language varieties, and so on. William Labov’s work beginning in 1966 redirected American interests to urban and sociological linguistics. For international English, Braj Kachru is the central figure for defining the types of English found around the world (Thumboo 2001). Those expanded concerns had implications for both pedagogy and the wider social context. The study of language variation over time, space, and social groups ultimately proved to be a significant change because it increased scholarly knowledge, affected teaching, and contributed to a change in social awareness about the meaning of linguistic and hence other forms of cultural variation. It also prepared the way for theoretical developments that were to follow.

2.4 Structuralism: Descriptive and generative

In the twentieth century, the grammatical tradition received a still stronger challenge from scholarly study – the rise of structuralism in two principal forms: descriptive and generative. These two forms were sharply different in one respect. Descriptive structuralism in the tradition of Ferdinand de Saussure – including such American practitioners as Leonard Bloomfield, Charles Carpenter Fries, Kenneth Pike, Charles Hockett, George Trager, Henry Lee Smith, Jr., and many anthropological linguists – started with a corpus and aimed at a grammatical description of its system. Generative structuralism, in the tradition of Chomsky and his followers — including Chomsky’s own developing theories – aimed at a set of rules that would not merely describe the system of a given corpus but would predict or define all possible utterances of that system and would do so in terms of universal principles of language (Chomsky 2002).

Descriptive structuralists were free to have recourse to various “hocus‐pocus” descriptive techniques as long as they accounted adequately for the corpus; their descriptions could be regarded as convenient fictions. The emphasis of the generativists on explanatory adequacy (especially in its later, minimalist, variety), implied that they were committed to finding the correct account, one that corresponded to the reality behind surface appearance. Generative theory is often equated with transformationalism, but the latter is simply a technique proposed by Harris (1951), which can be used either descriptively (as a hocus‐pocus device) or generatively (as an aspect of universal grammar).

The aim of generative grammar – to predict all possible utterances of a given language – was attacked by Charles Hockett in The State of the Art (1968). In that work, Hockett argued that the generative aim presupposes a language to be a well‐defined system, like chess (with which language has often been compared) – a mental reality for which the physical system is useful but unnecessary. But in fact every language is an ill‐defined system, like sandlot baseball. That is, it is a system whose rules are constantly changing, as some players manage to convince other players to handle the physical system as they prefer. An ill‐defined system, like sandlot baseball or language, cannot be defined generatively because its margins are unclear and constantly shifting. The best you can do with an ill‐defined system is to describe what its users generally accept as part of it and generally regard as not part of it. The quest for what the language really is, is chimerical.

Despite their differences, Bloomfieldian and Chomskyan linguistics (to identify them with their two most prominent American exponents) have enough in common to justify both being called structuralism, as they are concerned with describing or predicting grammatical structures in formal terms. They – together with historical, dialectal, and social variation studies – were a major punctuation in the traditional grammatical equilibrium. The tradition concerned itself primarily with writing and literature; the new theories, whenever possible, preferred speech and everyday language. The tradition was philosophical and semantic in its approach; the new theories aspired to scientific and formal approaches. The tradition’s main concern was teaching people how to use language; the new theories were concerned with understanding how language works. The tradition was primarily lexical in focus; the new theories were primarily systematic.

Efforts were made to present the issues of structuralism, both descriptive and generative, to the general public and to adapt them for use in the classroom. Classroom efforts were notable but also notably unsuccessful. Among successful efforts to communicate with the general educated public are the works of Steven Pinker (1994, 1999).

A major grammar war was thus the conflict between traditional grammar, principally European in its origin, and structural grammar in its American developments or (in the case of generative theory) its provenience. Although there are still echoes of this war in the subsequent conflicts dealt with below, it was settled in favor of structuralism. The distinguished scholarly traditional grammars that continue have simply absorbed much of the structuralist agenda, while omitting its more abstruse formalisms.

The grammar war between descriptive and generative structuralism, however, was not so much settled as stalemated. For linguists interested in grammatical theory, one or another of its varieties has clearly won the day. But for linguists interested in other pursuits (dialectology, lexicography, social variation, first‐ or second‐language acquisition, literary analysis, and so on), the dispute has become largely irrelevant because neither formalism (descriptive or generative) proved to be particularly useful for their purposes. Consequently, the field of language study has divided into two camps: one pursuing generative theoretical concerns and the other pursuing data‐oriented concerns and using whatever approach is helpful for those concerns, but often with relatively little attention to the underlying theory. The result is not a new grammar war, but a grammar détente in which each side uses the work of the other when it is useful but regards the other side as otherwise uninteresting.

3 Grammar Wars over Usage

The grammar wars that have been most fiercely fought and that have most engaged the attention of the public have been usage wars. These are by no means unrelated to the earlier disputes, but they have a life of their own. Traditional grammar, especially in its Latinate form, tended to look on correctness in usage as an absolute. Historical linguistics, dialectology, variation studies, and descriptive structuralism, by their very natures, all adopted a relativist approach to usage. The theoretical stance of generative structuralism is implicitly absolutist, but the practice of most generativists has been relativistic, except for a tendency to declare structures “grammatical” or “ungrammatical,” sometimes it seems merely on the basis of the declarer’s usage. Thus the earlier theoretical grammar wars set the scene for a usage war that pitted purists (those who adhere strictly and often excessively to a tradition, especially those preoccupied with the purity of a language and its protection from the use of foreign or altered forms) against relativists (those who hold that there are no objective standards by which to evaluate a culture and that a culture can be understood only in terms of its own values or customs) – each term being used by the other as a slur.

The usage wars have been fought on several fronts: (a) purism versus relativism or maintaining the standard versus recognizing linguistic diversity (of which the great battle was the flap at the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary); (b) ethnocentrism versus multiculturalism in educational practice (of which the great battle was a call for “back to basics” versus the students’ right to their own language); (c) official English versus non‐English languages (of which the great battle was the move in many states and on the national scene to establish English as the only official language of the United States versus requiring the use of other languages in communities where they are prominent); and (d) the gender war over the generic use of masculine forms versus sex‐neutral language as well as the struggle about how to name minorities. All of these fronts have a common concern to preserve historical norms rather than to reform practices to suit changing circumstances – the conservative versus liberal axis. One is tempted to agree with Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards, who sings Sir William Gilbert’s lyrics in Iolanthe:

I often think it’s comical

How Nature always does contrive

That every boy and every gal

That’s born into the world alive

Is either a little Liberal

Or else a little Conservative!

3.1 Purism and relativism

The purism‐versus‐relativism war raged during the twentieth century. Purism is concerned with an inventory of usages that were identified as shibboleths, some as early as the eighteenth century. That inventory of shibboleths has been augmented over the past 300 years, but many of its items have persevered, and its spirit has never faltered (Algeo 1977). The earliest study seeking to establish the facts of usage objectively, which thus inaugurated the relativist opposition to purism, was J. Lesslie Hall’s English Usage (1917). It was followed from the 1930s onward by a series of usage works based, not on the writer’s opinion or on previous usage guides (though works of that ilk also abounded), but on studies of actual use. An impressive, because extensive and thorough, example of such works is Ward Gilman’s Merriam‐Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1994).

The purism‐versus‐relativism war reached a sort of climax with the publication of Philip Gove’s Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961). That work, based on the best linguistic and lexicographical principles of its day, reported facts of usage for the most part unfiltered by the editor’s personal judgment. For example, it recorded of the shibboleth ain’t: “though disapproved by many and more common in less educated speech, used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers, especially in the phrase ain’t I.” That comment was based on extensive evidence, although the cultivated speakers were doubtless rather conservative (though not in the purist sense) and old fashioned, as the usage in question was upper‐class standard in the eighteenth century before it acquired its negative status as a shibboleth. Webster’s Third was received with outraged reviews in many periodicals. The history of the flap over Webster’s Third was recorded at the time by James Sledd and Wilma Ebbitt in Dictionaries and That Dictionary (1962). The history of the making of the dictionary and of its reception was later told in detail by Herbert Morton in The Story of “Webster’s Third” (1994).

3.2 Ethnocentrism and multiculturalism: Back to the basics and the students’ right

A conflict between ethnocentrism and multiculturalism was the natural consequence of applying the concerns of purism versus relativism to the cultural context, especially of education. Each side of that war has something to be said for it and something to be said against it. There is much to be said for placing the historical ethnic traditions of the nation at the center of education; but there is also much to be said against confining education to a single ethnic tradition. Similarly, there is much to be said for educating children and the public to the fact that cultures vary in many and interesting ways and that such variation exists, not only in exotic places around the globe, but in most communities in America; but there is also much to be said against fragmenting cultural education so greatly that the traditions underlying American democracy are lost. A via media is needed.

Applied to education, the idea that correctness is relative to a context and that variation is normal in language was misunderstood by purists as a lack of standards and an “anything goes” attitude. It was also similarly misunderstood by some who embraced the idea. The result was that some of Private Willis’s “little Liberals” denied the existence of a standard language, apparently ironically agreeing with the purists that, if uniformity is lacking, a standard cannot exist. The result was a position that came to be known as “The Students’ Right” (to their own language), in a 1972 resolution of the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication:

We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language – the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.

(Committee on CCCC Language Statement 1975)

At its best, the “Students’ Right” statement aimed at educating teachers and everyone in the realities of language: that no variety is inherently better or worse than any other, that varieties are linked with social structures, and that one’s native variety is part of one’s identity. At its worst, it was interpreted as prohibiting teachers from the “linguistic imperialism” of teaching standard English to students whose native variety was nonstandard, and it denied the right of a prestige variety to exist.

The controversy is far from resolved, as indicated by a number of Georgetown University Round Table papers published as Language in Our Time (Alatis & Tan 2001: 253–313). The controversy over teaching in African‐American English (under the name Ebonics [a blend of ebony and phonics]) sparked a controversy parallel to that over teaching recent immigrants’ children in their native language (Alatis & Tan 2001: 111–148). A crucial difference, however, is that, despite some claims to the contrary, African Americans speak a variety of English. Consequently, bilingual education, with respect to non‐English languages, has stronger support from professionals than does the Ebonics movement.

The direct response to the “Students’ Right” movement was to ignore it and to continue teaching the sort of English that English teachers had always taught. However, there was also an indirect response directed toward the curriculum in general. It was the Back to Basics movement, which rejected “frills” in education, including the sort of human social engineering implicit in the “Students’ Right” movement, in favor of the traditional focus on the three r’s. The online Oxford English Dictionary defines the term back to (the) basics as “a catch‐phrase applied… to a movement or enthusiasm for a return to the fundamental principles in education… or to policies reflecting this.” Its citations are from the mid‐1970s onward, such as the following from the National Observer (8 January 1977): “The current ‘back to basics’ movement, the campaign to give the highest priority to the teaching of the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic.” The OED’s first citation in 1975, however, applies the term to churches rather than schools, and the expression has become extraordinarily popular, with a positive application to a wide variety of subjects, from agriculture to zoology, as evidenced by a Google search that generates millions of results for the phrase.

3.3 Ethnocentrism and multiculturalism: Official English and non‐English languages

Another aspect of ethnocentrism and multiculturalism is the war between the promoters of Official English and those who oppose it. It is difficult to find objective and nonpartisan treatments of the subject. A reasonably dispassionate one is Tatalovich (1955). The Official English movement, whose main organization was US English (established in 1983), seems to have been a response to pressure by local ethnic communities for multilingual education and government services. Although the US has seen repeated waves of immigrants, the Hispanic influx of recent years was exceptional in size and concentration, and it was among this group that the pressure began.

The proponents of Official English see it as promoting cultural continuity and national unity. Its opponents brand it as xenophobic, anti‐immigration, and racially or culturally biased, a charge that may apply to some of its advocates, but hardly to all, such as to Senator S. I. Hayakawa (1985), who in 1981 first proposed a constitutional amendment to establish English as the official language of the United States. That proposal, if it had been approved by a two‐thirds vote of the House and Senate and ratified by three‐quarters of state legislatures, would have outlawed practically all uses of languages other than English by federal, state, and local governments. But the measure never came to a Congressional vote, even in committee.

The academic response has been strongly in opposition to Official English. Baron (1990) places the movement in its historical context while arguing strongly against it. An even more one‐sided presentation of the question is González and Melis (2000).

3.4 Generic masculine and sex‐neutral language: Terms for minorities

At one time, the primary linguistic taboos were on terms for sexual activities and excretion. Today they are on terms for gender and minority status. The gender issue is particularly that of sexist language, which is the generic use of words deemed to be masculine in reference. The minority‐status issue concerns a variety of factors, especially race and ethnicity.

The widespread concern to avoid offensive terms has resulted in a successful effort to engineer the language. Publishers have adopted strict codes to avoid offensive terms, and much colloquial use has also been affected. Those who waged this war have clearly won. And it is noteworthy that those who would normally bristle at any suggestion of censorship determinedly censor language in this respect. It has become not only permissible but obligatory to control such use of words. The Modern Language Association’s Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession produced a guide, Language, Gender, and Professional Writing, by Francine Frank and Paula Treichler, which ends thus (1989: 278): “The use of nonsexist language is… the only linguistic choice that enables us … to be responsible members of our profession.”

Marilyn Schwartz, on behalf of a task force of the Association of American University Presses, produced Guidelines for Bias‐Free Writing (1995), which covered five areas of new taboos: (a) gender; (b) race, ethnicity, citizenry and nationality, and religion; (c) disabilities and medical conditions; (d) sexual orientation; and (e) age. The following advice is notable under the heading of sexual orientation (p. 86): “Instead of husband, wife, or spouse, writers are encouraged to use the more inclusive terms [partner, companion, etc.]… instead of marriage, they may employ terms such as committed relationship or primary relationship.”

A problem is that terms recommended as inoffensive may turn out also be offensive. One person’s euphemism is another’s dysphemism. One aged professor was known to complain, “You can call me a dirty old man, but not a senior citizen.”

3.5 Usage and politics

Usage wars are disputes over the best way to phrase an idea. But they are not therefore superficial. A notable example is the work of George Lakoff, who departed from Chomsky’s formalism to emphasize the connection between worldview and language expression in a theory of cognitive linguistics. Lakoff’s position is that both our thought process and our language are fundamentally metaphorical (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987). Because the metaphors that underlie the way we think and talk are largely unconscious, they are extremely powerful.

To explain the success of right‐wing politicians in recent US elections, Lakoff analyzed the metaphorical basis of their discourse and subsequently proposed that, to be successful at the polls, politicians on the left must frame their discourse in equally evocative metaphorical terms. His handbook of political usage, Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (2004) has become a vade mecum for many liberals. If Lakoff is right, metaphor trumps logic by tapping into the deepest level of our minds. And thus usage wars are not about etiquette but about ethos.

4 Conclusion

If we look at the recent history of linguistic theories, it is clear that any equilibrium in logomachia is not likely to last very long. In this era of globalization with rapid advances in information distribution and technology, the intense war over usage is likely to continue. The relative peace of the previous 19 centuries has inexorably given way to new controversies and debates.

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