Why grammar isn't grammar and writing isn't language
Hello again!
It’s April, and the trees in the park are green, not just sad sticks pointing at the sky.
I don’t have any news, once again; I’m chugging away at my freelance gig and on the worldbuilding book, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for revising the novel whose first draft I finished a year ago.
We’ve talked a bit about what language is, what a language is and what makes it different from a dialect, and what makes a dialect different from an accent. Now we’re going to talk about some terminology and why writing isn’t language.
Read to the end for a link to a short story (not by me) 😃
Grammar
What linguists generally mean by “grammar” is different from what your English teacher in school meant by the word, and this leads to a lot of confusion, much like when a scientist talks about a “theory,” and someone dismisses it as “just a theory.” You can probably come up with all sorts of jargon vs. general usage mismatches.
To a linguist, a grammar is the internal representation of language in the brain. Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar is the idea that all languages have the same basic branching internal representation or structure in the brain, but they set the principles and parameters differently. (Apparently, the most recent developments of this theory abandon the principles and parameters entirely and use a different explanation, but I avoid generative syntax as much as I can.)
There are other competing theories of grammar, like Construction Grammar, which posits that language is represented in the brain as building blocks (constructions), which are different from language to language, and language users rearrange the blocks or fill in the blanks. (I don’t know as much about this as I would like, because the only theory taught in most universities in the US is Chomskyan generative syntax.)
Both theories state that the brain determines what is correct grammar for that language by example. As a child is exposed to language in its surroundings, the brain somehow (we literally don’t know) takes this language input and figures out patterns and rules from it. This is why a small child might say things like “I eated dinner” or “I seed it” – they figured out that the most common way of saying something in the past in English is to stick an -(e)d on the end of it. Then their caregivers will correct them, saying “Oh, you ate dinner” or “You saw it?”. There are only about 150—200 verbs that form the past tense differently, out of thousands of verbs, so it’s easier to learn them as exceptions to the rule.
A language’s grammar includes word order (syntax); how words change for time, case, or number (inflectional morphology); how to build words from smaller word-units (also morphology); what sounds are permitted and how they’re allowed to be put together (phonology); and what words exist and what they mean (lexicon).
Every language user is an expert in their native language, and no language is superior or inferior to any other. (This is probably the only linguistics thing I will agree completely with Chomsky about.) Recall that different dialects have different grammatical structures, so things that are “incorrect” in the standard dialect are perfectly correct in the other dialect.
This is where your grammar teachers come in. Their job was to teach you the standard dialect of your language, US English, in my case. This means eliminating things like ain’t and double negatives (“I ain’t see nobody” → “I don’t see anybody”) and standardizing verb conjugations (“I haven’t ate yet” → “I haven’t eaten yet”). This is what most people mean by “grammar”: the set of standard rules that make language correct or incorrect. And then there’s the whole heap of spelling and punctuation rules that also get thrown into the “grammar” pot!
You can see why there’s a failure to communicate.
Writing isn’t language
This isn’t a controversial statement to make among linguists, but around the general population, you’ll get some Looks.
Writing systems represent a language. A language is what’s in the language user’s brain. Language is what children acquire naturally by existing in the world around other language users; writing systems must be taught separately. Many languages never developed writing systems and relied solely on the oral tradition. Writing cannot exist without language, but language can exist without writing.
Not being able to follow the fairly arbitrary spelling and punctuation rules of English doesn’t mean someone has “bad grammar.” English has a lot of words that sound the same but are spelled differently (homophones) and words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently (homographs). A lot of English spelling doesn’t match the modern pronunciation, but it’s kept that way (or was artificially made that way) for historic reasons. The ough/augh combination is dreadful. I mean, I had no idea that draught was just the UK spelling of draft for many many years, so I thought it was pronounced “drawt” or something, like naught.
And then there’s the punctuation. My 10th grade English teacher, Miss Gutwalt, gave us a sheet with every punctuation rule listed on it, sorted by mark (!, ., etc.) and numbered. When we had tests, we had to correct the punctuation in a paragraph and give the correct rule number for why we added or took away a piece of punctuation. (The only two I remember, because they were used all the time, are comma 7 (opens a dependent clause) and comma 8 (closes a dependent clause).)
And it’s honestly almost entirely arbitrary. The main reason to use punctuation and spaces between words is to enhance clarity for your readers. Will a stray comma confuse your reader? Will a missing one make things unclear? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
People often make the case for the Oxford comma (aka the serial comma) with examples like this:
I would like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
This is unclear, because in situations like this, the expectation is that what follows (if there is no serial comma) is the names of the parents. With the serial comma, it’s a three-item list. Ironically, the UK standard is no Oxford comma, while most US style guides prefer it.
But this isn’t an essay about comma rules; it’s an essay about why proper adherence to comma rules isn’t the same thing as “good” grammar, let alone language. That said, there’s a case for using some kind of written standard when you’re trying to reach as broad an audience as possible. Just remember that it’s all arbitrary and the rules are made up.
A short story
Fellow Codex member Christine Amsden wrote this delightful flash story that makes excellent use of the arbitrary nature of punctuation rules: Please Stop Murdering Grandma. I think it’s a good illustration of the general perception that using “wrong grammar” means someone has a poor education and also a darkly humorous take-down of that idea.
Media I have enjoyed
The end of March and beginning of April were filled with reading so I could vote in the Nebula Awards. I really enjoyed The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang, which is a queer retelling of the Chinese classic Outlaws of the Marsh. I read Vajra Chandrasekera’s The Saint of Bright Doors last year, when everybody I knew was talking about how good it was. It was absolutely that good, so if you haven’t read it yet, you should.
Until next time!
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