Attack of the the Grammar Nazis: here's the Home Guard

Although it might be fun to weigh in on the matter picked out by this headline:
Academics chastised for bad grammar in letter attacking Michael Gove, I'm actually more interested in why the chastisers, the judges of the inaugural Bad Grammar awards. "The award is intended to draw attention to "the worst use of English over the last 12 months by people who should know better".

Now there's something wrong right there before we even get into the detail. It's the phrase 'should know better'. In other words, we are being introduced to the land of privilege and put-down and language is being rolled out as a way to mark who is 'one of us' and who is not. This is an exercise in group elitism and looking down ones nose at 'those people'. So let's immediately be prepared to ignore or even mock some of what they say. We should recall that, in effect, this is users of Elite English asserting their supposed superiority.

In fact not everything the judges say is wrong-headed: sometimes we do need to pay attention to how written language has to work in distinction to spoken, and that means learning things about how to signal words are grouped or actually not grouped, so the use of commas and hyphens and even apostrophes is quite useful for such things. However, there are signs that a lot of what this is about is pet peeves by grammar nazis motivated by a vision of language purity every bit as abitrary and prejudiced as racism.

Apparently Tesco are wrong for "using adjectives as nouns". You mean like national monuments "To the fallen" and the like? Selectivity, I think. Common shopfloor use -bad: national monument use -good.

And I have to confess I couldn't work out what this was referring to:
Transport for London was attacked for "mixing gerunds and infinitives on a safety sign. I'm finding it hard to imagine what that is referring to. But the point would be that if it communicates well-enough to the majority of users, then it is good enough and that would imply that it is using grammar in a way that is understandable to that majority. Since right and wrong in language actually only ever are to do with agreed conventions and statistical likelihood, this means that is it is probably nonsensical to describe it as wrong. I suspect that what is meant is something like "not our cup of tea in the phraseology department, don't you know". Though I'm prepared to learn that in an attempt at succinctness, just like newspaper headlines, a crash blossom has occured. The annoying thing about this particular award is that the examples don't seem to be online.

"Gwynne's attack opened with a consideration of the phrase "demands too much too young"."
Well clearly that sentence is understandable by even the detractors, which indicates that there is something about the way it is structured that 'makes sense'. So don't let's give in to suggestions that it is ungrammatical, perhaps 'differently grammared' from Elite English. Here's what is said about that phrase.

"Presumably they mean something like 'demands too much when children are too young to be ready for so much', but, as worded, it simply is not English," he said. "In that sentence as worded, 'too young' can only be two adverbs, 'too' qualifying the adverb 'young', and 'young' qualifying the verb 'demands', as would, for instance, 'soon' or 'early'. But 'young' is an adjective, and cannot ever be an adverb. And it certainly is not doing the work of an adjective in that sentence, because there is no noun that could be 'understood' and which would turn that sentence into English."

 I think we're actually dealing with elipsis here. "Too young" clearly refers to (presumably) antecedantly mentioned 'children' and so is understood adjectivally. Admittedly the phrase is pushing at the boundaries of understandable (see what I did there?), but to attempt to woodenly analyse 'young' as adverbial, relating to 'demands' is a sort of over-literal and under-imaginitive thing to do. The fact that the antecedant 'children' is not in the sentence is neither here nor there. If they are live in the mind because they are the topic of this bit of the discourse, then it is normal for English speakers to miss out saying or writing something like Nevile Gwynne's own reconstruction: "[when children are] too young [to be ready for so much]". Gwynne seems to be calling for a mandatory 11 words when 2 will do. The ease with which he appears to have (re)constructed the fuller phrase demonstrates that the linguistic tactic the writers used actually works. Hoist by his own petard.

He goes on:

"In the second clause, 'Little account is taken' is understood before the words 'that young children need'," he said. "But there is no such verb as 'to take account' but only 'to take account of' as in the first clause of that sentence. The second clause of the sentence is simply illiterate."

 So the whole phrase is 'Little account is taken that young children need'. Except that you can't insert an 'of' in that phrase. One tactic would be to rephrase: perhaps '.. is taken of the fact that ...'. but that's a bit clumsy, so attempting to use the usual 'verb + that + phrase' is smoother. I confess that it isn't a form I would naturally use, but it is a usage which is understandable and if picked up by a number of English speakers could become quite unremarkable. I suspect for many it already is. In a sense it's a new grammatical rule about dropping prepositions in such phrases. It's not that it's wrong; it's that it is new and jars on the expectations of Elite-English speakers

In the end, we should be focussing not on conformity with Elite-English as defined by these upper-middle class professionals, but on clarity. And (see what I did there?) clarity can be bad even when grammar is 'good'. To be sure many 'ordinary' English speakers need to learn Elite-English, but not to be correct. Rather they/we need to learn it in order to fit in, make arguments and otherwise extract value from the elite. We need to play their game sometimes, but it doesn't mean they're right, merely powerful.

I would like to give a couple of cheers to Michael McCarthy, emeritus professor of applied linguistics at the University of Nottingham, who said "I think we should be concerned when things overstep certain marks but... English grammar... is actually a plurality of grammars (from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22378402). Well said. Plurality will entail difference.

Well, let's have a look at a few infelicities here. Same topic but this time comment by Michael Moran. "Bad grammar. We all know it when we hear it, but we don't necessarily know why." Well, clearly that's not true: who is this 'we' because some people don't heare what Elite-English users hear as ungrammatical. And yet, strangely, 'they' hear Elite-English usages as strange and unwieldy and reeking of privilege and snobbery. In 'their' terms those usages are ungrammatical and lack street cred. Genuinely ungrammatical sentences we do know and the reason we wouldn't know why is that the bit of our minds and brains that processes language is not, in most people, connected up to the verbalising-rationalising bits. And, incidentally, in terms of Elite-English, the sentence "Bad Grammar." is not a grammatical sentence; there is no verb in the sentence. Ironic, eh?

At least Michael Moran tries to acknowledge that there's a degree of social relativity involved even if he can't quite let go of the notions of right and wrong in grammar understood in the traditionalist sense that he unsuccessfully tries to distance himself from.

It's just mild hothousing when I correct my daughter's grammar, but it would be pretty annoying if I were to chide adults for writing "should of". Telling strangers in a pub that they should say "she was sitting" rather than "she was sat" would probably result in a glassing.

 Well, we've got some confusions there. 'Should of' is a misanalysis of speech sounds ("should've" would save the day): not strictly a grammatical error: the speaker would still be using a perfect tense modified by a modal verb; they've just spelt it wrong. To be sure it (the spelling) could be corrected by becoming aware of the grammatical structure of what they've written, but they are clearly using a modally-modified perfect tense.

'Was sat' is just normal in some forms of English. In any case, it could be analysed as emphasising the seatedness of the person in question; in my understanding of the sentence, there is a semantic difference to 'was sitting'.

But, oh dear ... "I picked up some useful stuff about split infinitives from reading Clive James's reviews of Star Trek in the Observer". Because, of course, there is no such thing as a split infinitive strictly; two words are made to be split in a way that a single Latin word isn't. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brotes and other members of the EngLit canon did use English in a way that sometimes inserted adverbs between the antecedant 'to' and a following verb 'stem', and we can see that this 'proper' English is very silly indeed.

Now I like his attempt to make a politically correct argument which makes it sound all compassionate:

Right now unprecedented numbers of non-native English speakers are living in Britain. They have learned their English from textbooks, not from birth as I did. They'll probably never think in English.
Most of us know the stress of translating on-the-fly when we're on holiday. Imagine feeling that pressure for the rest of your life. Removing the stabilisers of grammar from the bike of language isn't clever – it's cruel.

The problem is that it doesn't work. The kinds of things he is concerned about in usage of English are not, on the whole about having no grammar but rather having different grammar or making spelling errors based on sound. So there's no question about 'removing the stabilisers of grammar' -its more like which brand of stabilisers you have. The only language users who don't use grammar appear to be chimpanzees who have learnt sign langugae signs. They consistently fail to get syntax; they just string two or three signs together haphazardly and let context be our guide.

And finally, he writes "at some point in the future, voice command is likely to overtake keyboard input as our primary method of controlling computers. It's sensible to remove ambiguity from language as much we can before we reach that point. " Well, as I've pointed out earlier, at least some of what he has picked up is actually spelling errors which, presumably, a speech-to-text machine would deal with. As to the 'ambiguity' issue, well that's the case with whatever variety of English, and in fact most of the difficulties we have in writing are pretty much disambiguated by the intonation and phrasing of spoken language. And in any case, the point about human machine interfaces is to get to the point where we don't need to train the humans to use the machines, because the machines will understand the humans -in several dialects if necessary.

Don't let the Language Crazies win

Another helpful piece at Language Log : it discusses the difficulty that while it is true that split infinitives are actually standard English, the opinionated but misinformed ("the crazies") are sometimes in positions of power and could take against the split infinitive on your job application or mark your dissertation down. The problem is that altering our linguistic behaviour to accommodate their unfounded prejudice only encourages them. So Arnold Zwicky's advice, at the end of it all is this: "The objective fact is that split infinitives are standard English. So my advice is: split an infinitive if it suits you (or don't, if that suits you). Good writers do it. And you don't even have to have a defense for it; do it because it sounds right for you. Don't let the crazies win."
And yet, do we want to risk it? Well one of my tactics has been to have a standard footnote to (a) recognise that 'yes: I have split an infinitive' and (b) it's deliberate because (c) it is standard English and here's a reference or two to demonstrate it (and perhaps mention Shakespeare and Jane Austin, inter alia, used them).

Real English grammar

A couple of good items on my two English usage hobby-horses: first on singular 'they' from Language Log: Everyone knows each other.

"“Everyone knows each other”, ... The -s suffix on the present-tense verb knows tells us that the subject ... counts as singular for purposes of subject-verb agreement. But each other, famously, requires a semantically plural subject. That is why They know each other is grammatical and *He knows each other is not. From this and nothing else it follows that semantic plurality and morphosyntactic singularity are compatible in English."

The rest of the article points out that singular they has a long history.

The second article, Irrational terror over adjunct placement at Harvard, also at Language Log, bears on so-called split infinitives, also making the point of their long history of good English usage. In this case, it's by way of noting bad usage arising from trying to avoid a split infinitive. Picking up a section from a Harvard publication, the issue becomes clear:

David Rockefeller,... has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates through international experiences

What's the issue? Well, read it again and if that doesn't work here's the thing: ""What are “dramatically learning opportunities”, you might ask? We’d normally expect an adjectival rather than adverbial modifier on “learning opportunities”; is it a typo for “dramatic learning opportunities”?
Now here's the analysis:

Standard English in both its American and British varieties permits a manner adjunct (like the adverb dramatically) to occur in various places in a clause, one of them being between to and the plain form verb in an infinitival clause, but it does not normally permit any adjunct to occur between a transitive verb and its direct object. Thus [1] and [3] are grammatical, but [2] is not:
[1] This gift has dramatically improved things. (before verb)
[2] *This gift has improved dramatically things. (before object)
[3] This gift has improved things dramatically. (after object)

A further piece of evidence to show the legitimacy of the split infinitive. Students: use 'em and be happy.

Linguistics' new buzz...

I've been following this story for a few weeks now, and this article, though long, seems to be the best at explaining what the big buzz is in linguistics with the Piraha language. The interesting thing for me, not a convinced Chomskyan, is this. "In a comment on Everett’s paper published in Cultural Anthropology, Michael Tomasello, the director of the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, endorsed Everett’s conclusions that culture can shape core grammar. "
In part it interests me because it seems to put Sapir-Whorfe hypothesis into reverse, despite the Whorfian perspective of the linguist at the centre of the debate. And that is important because a lot of academic post modernism seems to be linguistic-determinist in approach, whereas this seems to actually turn that on its head.
A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: