Modern English Grammar

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Richard Hershberger, who usually writes about baseball, has a recent post at Ordinary Times about "Modern English Grammar":

My post today is uncharacteristically devoid of baseball content. It is about grammar, one of my many unremunerative interests. Specifically it is about modern English grammar. I don’t mean by this (except incidentally) the grammar of modern English. Rather, I mean modern grammar of English. Also, modern grammars of English. 

It's great to see this evidence of interest in grammar (and grammars), and to see an argument for the relevant of 20th-century linguistics based on an insightful exploration of an interesting corner of English syntax. But it's less great that Mr. Hershberger fails to note that his crucial examples are actually a special case of a much more general pattern, and that the 53 comments go off in various interesting directions without noticing this. As usual in such cases, I blame the linguists, for allowing general education in grammatical analysis to fall into such a sorry state that smart people with an interest in such matters are generally not given the chance in school to learn more of the content and methods of the past sixty years or so of linguistic research.

Continuing with Hershberger's argument:

My eccentric habits include collecting old grammars, in the ‘book’ sense. These run from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries. […]  An interesting feature of the earlier books is that they don’t merely repeat one another. They constitute a century-long discussion about how to model the English language. […]

This discussion was a healthy one. Then it stopped in the 1890s, at least for pedagogic grammars. Look at a grammar from this era and it will feel very familiar to anyone who has studied grammar ever since. This is what in the 20th century came to be known as “traditional grammar.”

Modern comprehensive grammars are a different matter. The discussion continued there. […] A book like Randolph Quirk, et al., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language has much that is familiar, but then goes off with stuff like determiners and adjuncts and so forth.

How do we explain this divergence of pedagogic and comprehensive grammars? I don’t have a fully satisfactory answer, but I do know a bad one: that grammarians of the 1890s finally, after years of fiddling, got it right; and that later grammarians are a bunch of pointy-headed ivory-tower types who can’t leave well enough alone. Many self-proclaimed language mavens hold to this position. Any amendment to traditional grammar is viewed with suspicion as accommodations to the inexorable decline of the English language, and indeed of Western Civilization. I will write about the supposed decline another time. My goal here is show that this explanation is inadequate. I will use a non-controversial construction that traditional grammars are at a loss to explain, yet modern grammars handle easily.

Consider the following four sentences:

(1) John put his shirt on.
(2) John put it on.
(3) John put on his shirt.
(4) *John put on it.

The asterisk at (4) is the conventional notation among linguists to denote an ungrammatical construction. And ungrammatical it is. No adult native English speaker would use it. I noticed my daughters (now five and seven) using this construction when they were younger, but this has dropped out about the same time they started getting the hang of irregular verbs.

The task at hand is to, using traditional grammar, explain why (4) is ungrammatical. For all that it sounds just awful, why this is so is not at all obvious.

After a bit more about how "traditional grammars" had no explanation for these facts, and indeed never "noticed the peculiarity of the construction", Hershberger gives what he takes to be the modern answer:

The construction is, in modern grammars, analyzed as a “phrasal verb.” A phrasal verb consists of two elements. The first is taken from the general pool of verbs. The second, called a “particle,” is taken from a shortish list of candidates. These are split between words you would ordinarily think of as prepositions (on, off, up, over, etc.) and words you would ordinarily think of as adverbs, specifically spatial adverbs (aside, away, apart, etc.).

We have seen the two peculiarities of phrasal verbs: If the phrasal verb is transitive (it need not be) and the object is a noun, said object can be placed either between the two parts of the phrasal verb or after them, as in(1) and (3). If, however, the object is a pronoun, it can only be placed between the two parts, as in (2). If it is placed after the two parts, as in (4), the result is ungrammatical. (Why is this? Heck if I know. Deep explanations would be lovely, but right now we are just describing the rules, not explaining why they are the way they are.)

The second property is that the meaning of the phrasal verb usually is not transparent. It can’t be derived by looking at the meanings of the two parts taken separately.

He's right about the fact that the constructions called "phrasal verbs" are not generally semantically compositional (though see CGEL p. 274 for an argument that the term phrasal verb is inappropriate).

But he's wrong that the ungrammaticality of "*John put on it" is crucially a fact about phrasal-verb constructions, under whatever name. Rather, it seems to be a fact about the position of object pronouns (and other prosodically and pragmatically weak objects) relative to the associated verb:

(1) She learned the power of thought quite quickly.
(2) She learned quite quickly the power of thought.
(3) She learned it quite quickly.
(4) *She learned quite quickly it.

(1) He took the people who criticized him seriously.
(2) He took seriously the people who criticized him.
(3) He took the bastards seriously.
(4) *He took seriously the bastards.

(1) We gave George the book.
(2) We gave him the book.
(3) We gave him it.
(4) *We gave George it.

I'm not a syntactician, traditional or modern, and I have only a superficial knowledge of the controversies that have swirled around such facts over the past few decades. But as far as I can see, the relevance in this context of "phrasal verbs" — that is, verbs whose complement includes an intransitive preposition — is only that

  • these constructions are a common source of examples where a direct object can occur either before or after another verb-phrase element; and
  • the intransitive prepositions are "light" enough (and maybe also strongly enough associated with the verb) that direct objects don't need to be very "heavy" to be ordered after them.

A (rather random) sample of relatively accessible modern articles on related topics:

Kyle Johnson, "Object Positions", NLLT 1991
Peter Svenonius, "The Optionality of Particle Shift", Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 1996
Thomas Wasow and Jennifer Arnold, "Post-verbal constituent ordering in English", in Rohdenburg & Mondorf, Eds., Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English, 2003.
Patrick Farrell, "English verb-preposition constructions: Constituency and order", Language 2005.

Syntactically-aware readers are likely to have some additional (and maybe better) references.

Update — I should also note that although the term "phrasal verb" seems to have been coined 100 years ago or so, the non-compositionality of such verb-preposition combinations was noted by Samuel Johnson (in the preface to his 1755 dictionary):

There is another kind of composition more frequent in our language than perhaps in any other, from which arises to foreigners the greatest difficulty. We modify the signification of many verbs by a particle subjoined ; as to come off, to escape by a fetch ; to fall on, to attack; to fall off, to apostatize ; to break off, to stop abruptly ; to bear out, to justify ; to fall in, to comply; to give over, to cease ; to set off, to embellish ; to set in, to begin a continual tenour ; to set out, to  begin a course or journey ; to take off, to copy ; with innumerable expressions of the same kind, of which some appear wildly irregular, being so far distant from the sense of the simple words, that no sagacity will be able to trace the steps by which they arrived at the present use. These I have noted with great care ; and though I cannot flatter myself that the collection is complete, I have perhaps so far assisted the students of our language, that this kind of phraseology will be no longer insuperable ; and the combination of verbs and particles, by chance omitted, will be easily explained by comparison with those that may be found.

According to Stefan Thim (Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History,  2012), the term itself was first used in Logan Pearsall Smith, Words and Idioms 1925 — Smith writes:

The term 'phrasal verb' was suggested to me by the late Dr. Bradley [Henry Bradley (1845-1923), an editor of the OED]; not, as he wrote, that he was satisfied with it, or would not welcome any alternative that he could feel to be an improvement. But, as he said, one cannot write of these verb without some workable description; and although the word 'phrasal' is perhaps objectionable in formation, it fills a want, and is sometimes indispensable.

 



27 Comments

  1. Richard Hershberger said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 9:06 am

    I am an amateur, but try to be an informed one. ("Educated layman" would be on my calling card, had I a calling card.) So it is entirely possible that I get some of this stuff wrong.

    That being said, it seems to me that you have pointed out that the restriction on the position of a pronominal object I describe as a characteristic of phrasal verbs is merely a subset of the broader class of constructions that display this restriction. This is interesting, but incidental to the point I am trying to make.

    What is my point? That this is a restriction that traditional grammar cannot account for. I could have made it with a broader set of examples, or an entirely different set. I chose phrasal verbs because they are a narrow enough phenomenon to show briefly, and they are something that most native speakers have never heard of, yet intuitively understand. They also illustrate the extended argument that grammatical analysis, good or bad, has real-world implications. In this case, that they are an issue for non-native speakers, hence the numerous dictionaries of phrasal verbs aimed at students of English as a second language.

    Note also that the post is advertised as part I. The intent of the series is to extend the argument that grammatical analysis has real-world effects. The second part will dredge up an obsolete usage war and show how it arose due to the inadequacy of traditional grammar. This will then be followed by more current usage wars, and show the same thing.

    The whole shebang is aimed at the non-linguist crowd. It wouldn't be appropriate here, because it would be preaching to the choir.

    As for the comments going off in different directions, that's the internet for you. There is no fighting it: better to go along.

    [(myl) I meant to praise you for insightful exploration of an interesting corner of English syntax, and to complain that smart people with an interest in such matters are generally not given the chance in school to learn more of the content and methods of the past sixty years or so of linguistic research. Reading it over, I see that it comes off as much more critical of you than I intended it to be — I'll try to adjust the wording! ]

  2. Robot Therapist said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 9:30 am

    Okay, but that doesn't detract from the main thrust of his argument

  3. Robot Therapist said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 9:43 am

    My comment above was cross-posted with Richard Hershberger's, and in it, "his" refers to Richard

  4. Coby Lubliner said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 11:44 am

    Dr. Johnson doesn't seem to have been familiar with German, in which such composite verb abound, with the difference that when the verb is in a non-finite form the particle becomes a prefix (aufmachen, zumachen, mitmachen etc.).

  5. Neal Goldfarb said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 12:07 pm

    Mark, I think you're being unfair, not only to Richard (for the reason he gives in the second paragraph of his comment), but also to the linguists, who you blame for Norma Loquendi's failure to conclude the Richard had missed the point of his crucial examples.

    In what possible world would it be reasonable to expect the educational system to equip Herman and Norma Loquendi to have an informed conversation about a grammatical topic as specialized as "the position of object pronouns (and other prosodically and pragmatically weak objects) relative to the associated verb"?

    Which brings up an interesting question. What is the body of knowledge about grammatical analysis (and semantic, and pragmatic, and…) that should be part of a everyone's education?

  6. Guy said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 12:20 pm

    I'm not sure it's fair to describe describing a special (and extreme) case of a general phenomenon without mentioning that it's part of the more general phenomenon as "missing the point", though I agree it would be nice if everyone were taught enough about English grammar that they would have been taught this kind of thing in school. Of course, this is because grammar isn't really taught in school at all. A smattering of extremely basic grammatical termology is really only taught to children to give a basic language for teaching the children how to do formal writing. It's usually taken as a given that the student knows English grammar intuitively through their native competence, and for whatever reason it is not considered worthwhile to teach them to examine grammar reflectively.

    I think the above is a fine example of something that modern linguists could tell you about but isn't taught in school, which helps to disabuse the notion a distressingly large number of people have that "grammar" is really just a set of rules people are taught in school to sound educated.

    this example makes me think of an example I like to use when I get the impression that someone thinks I'm spouting PC nonsense if I start talking about the grammar of informal or vernacular forms is:

    I'm going to find out
    I'm gonna find out
    I'm going to the store
    *I'm gonna the store

    One thing these two examples have in common that I think makes them rhetorically effective is that they show that some things are ungrammatical that wouldn't be predicted by "schoolbook grammar". If you say that an alleged grammatical rule overclassifies things as ungrammatical, then you're just a bomb-throwing anarchist, but if you say that it underclassifies, people are more likely to listen. Similarly, people are generally ready to deem something ungrammatical that "sounds fine" to them if there is a "logical" argument that it is wrong (here, "logical" means analytical argument, right or wrong, that the person understands), but people are usually (though not always) not so willing to ignore their native grammar-checker when it says something is wrong but the "logical" argument says is right.

  7. Guy said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 12:39 pm

    "In what possible world would it be reasonable to expect the educational system to equip Herman and Norma Loquendi to have an informed conversation about a grammatical topic as specialized as "the position of object pronouns (and other prosodically and pragmatically weak objects) relative to the associated verb"?"

    I can't agree that this is some kind of arcane or specialized topic. Word-order is pretty basic part of grammar, and I certainly would expect these considerations would be taught in any decent EFL classroom (are we not going to teach that the forms "I gave him it" and "I gave it to him" are selected in part based on these considerations?), and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that we teach grammar to native speakers as well as we do to non-native speakers. It's not like we're asking people to be familiar with, say, the notion of c-command.

    [(myl) And for people with a deeper interest in the topic, like Mr. Hershberger, it seems appropriate to give them easy access to some of the "inside baseball" terminology and technology…]

  8. J. Goard said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 12:53 pm

    @Neal Goldfarb:

    "In what possible world would it be reasonable to expect the educational system to equip Herman and Norma Loquendi to have an informed conversation about a grammatical topic as specialized as "the position of object pronouns (and other prosodically and pragmatically weak objects) relative to the associated verb"?"

    I think the main hope isn't that everyone would have detailed knowledge about such things, or even know how to go about investigating them productively (as anyone with a linguistics B.A. ought to be capable of). Rather, it's that we would convey to the broader community of professional language-users (teachers, journalists, novelists, orators) that there really is specialized scientific information there, which they don't possess merely by using the thing that is the object of investigation. If elementary linguistics were broadly taught like elementary physical science is taught, at least all educated people would bear the same kind of general awareness that a better way to write an article about language is to consult an expert, rather than simply to report your untrained intuitions.

  9. J. Goard said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 12:59 pm

    By the way, please understand that my above comment is not directed specifically at Richard Hershberger, whose piece is actually exceptionally good for the genre.

  10. mike said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 2:06 pm

    First, kudos to Hershberger for taking on grammar at all–interesting piece, thanks! The comments on the piece, while they do wander, are surprisingly engaged on the issue of grammar; what is distinctly lacking (mostly, and surprisingly) is the usual descent into "I hate it when people say …" that tends to erode any piece about grammar in popular media.

    The topic of inadequate linguistic materials in the pre-university curriculum has come up here before. I like Neal Goldfarb's question: "In what possible world would it be reasonable to expect the educational system to equip Herman and Norma Loquendi to have an informed conversation about a grammatical topic as specialized as 'the position of object pronouns?'" What DOES the syllabus for a semester-long high school class in linguistics look like? Week by week and goal by goal. (I know that John Lawler has a proposal posted on his site.) And would a syllabus like that equip the student to analyze the type of constructions that Hershberger is talking about?

    And PS: Could that Sam Johnson write himself some prose or what? Dang.

  11. xtifr said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 4:22 pm

    I'm not sure it's actually fair to blame linguists for the current state of our curricula, any more than it's fair to blame biologists for any omission of evolutionary theory. And I'm not a linguist (though I have worked in NLP), so this is not self-defense speaking.

    It is definitely refreshing, though, to see a journalist embrace a science-based approach to language, since journalists often seem to be leading the fight against allowing any analysis or criticism of their most treasured linguistic superstitions. So, kudos to Hershberger indeed!

  12. Richard Hershberger said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 6:32 pm

    @Guy: "If you say that an alleged grammatical rule overclassifies things as ungrammatical, then you're just a bomb-throwing anarchist, but if you say that it underclassifies, people are more likely to listen. "

    Yes, this exactly. This is the laying the groundwork for just the argument about bogus claims of ungrammaticality.

    @xtifr : Thank you, but I'm not a journalist. I am just one guy who contributes to a group blog. If anyone wants to pay me to write this stuff, I would be happy to talk…

  13. krogerfoot said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 6:53 pm

    I agree wholeheartedly that linguists should patiently and generously share "inside baseball terminology and technology" to encourage laypeople to understand and engage with the field. One of the points Mr. Hershberger made in his great post was that old-timey grammars present more valuable insight into how languages operate than we moderns imagine, since for most of us, a "grammar" is a how-to-talk-right instruction manual.

    Would updated terminology help to avoid confusion with e.g. the linguistic term "grammatical" and the lay understanding of it? Even well-intentioned commenters end up expending a lot of energy about whether it's somehow intolerant or provincial to describe something as ungrammatical.

    I won't be surprised to learn that this entire issue was discussed and abandoned for good reasons while I was out buying breakfast tacos or something.

  14. krogerfoot said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 6:55 pm

    Hm, I should have read Guy's comment before posting, since he made my point more clearly than I did.

  15. Matt said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 7:13 pm

    Am I the only one who wants at least a question mark before "We gave him it"?

  16. Neal Goldfarb said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 7:27 pm

    I agree with much of what has been said in response to my comment, and to the extent I disagree, much of the problem is that I didn't explain myself very well. I was probably more pleased with myself than I should have been at coming up with the "in what possible world" line. (And if, as a result of that line, my comment came off as snarky, my apologies to Mark.)

    I agree 100% with Mark when he says that "for people with a deeper interest in the topic, like Mr. Hershberger, it seems appropriate to give them easy access to some of the 'inside baseball' terminology and technology." And that idea is very much what's behind what I've been doing on LAWnLinguistics and in the amicus briefs I've done that have drawn on linguistics. The point I was trying to make was that the specific issue about the placement of object pronouns is much narrower and more specialized than what I would expect to see in a "Language for Nonlinguists" curriculum.

    That said, I don't think I agree with Guy when he says, "Word-order is pretty basic part of grammar, and I certainly would expect these considerations would be taught in any decent EFL classroom.. and I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that we teach grammar to native speakers as well as we do to non-native speakers."

    There's a difference between teaching what the grammar of English is (which is the goal of TEFL) and teaching how to do linguistic analysis. Obviously doing the latter requires some of the former, but the purpose is to introduce a way of thinking about language, and a methodology for analyzing grammatical issues, not simply to explain a bunch of grammatical rules (or regularities, or whatever you want to call them).

    That's essentially what Richard is doing in his blog post — he's using phrasal verbs as an example to demonstrate the inadequacy of traditional grammar (and by implication, of the pop-culture conception of grammar). But there are many other constructions that he could have used for that purpose instead.

  17. Neal Goldfarb said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 7:29 pm

    Hey Mike, can you provide a link to John Lawler's proposed syllabus for a high-school course in linguistics? I looked on his website but couldn't find it.

    Or maybe if John sees this, he could post the link.

    Thanks.

  18. Jerry Friedman said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 8:33 pm

    Matt: You're not the only one. COCA results:

    gave him it: 0
    gave it him: 0
    gave it to him: 202

    [(myl) I thought about giving this one a question mark. But both orders are variously possible with direct object "it" and indirect object "him" or "her". Americans seem to prefer "…gave him it", while Brits (at least traditionally) prefer "…gave it him". Google Books yields:

    She had applied to you for a second, and before you gave it her you went and searched the file?
    How did you come to give it him, did he ask for it?

    Before I make a promise of giving any particular thing to a man, I am at liberty whether I will give him it or not.
    Always thought Lindsey would beat the Cancer, had an ornament to give her to do with cancer but I kept forgetting to give her it.

    ]

  19. Scott said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 9:10 pm

    "We gave George it" is ungrammatical? It sounds all right to me, especially if the stress is on "George."

  20. Adrian Morgan said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 9:21 pm

    Trying to discuss modern grammar with people who have preconceptions can be frustrating.

    I remember an incident from my Usenet days when I mentioned one of the innovative conclusions of CGEL (I don't remember which one, maybe about how conjunctions work), and an intelligent citizen of the Netherlands responded along the lines of, "I sincerely doubt [innovative account] is true in English, because I know [traditional account] is correct in Dutch."

    At the core of that argument is a refusal to think of linguistics as a science. How do you know [traditional account] is correct in Dutch? Because it has withstood the tests you've thrown at it so far. But what if it isn't? What if Dutch grammar is awaiting its equivalent of CGEL too? Then the argument is equivalent to, "I sincerely doubt general relativity is true in Germany or America, because I know Newtonian gravity works perfectly well in England."

    My Dutch correspondent was, however, closed to further argument. This was far from the only frustrating grammar discussion I've had, but it's the one that came to mind as I read this post.

  21. Neal Goldfarb said,

    August 22, 2015 @ 10:38 pm

    Shit. Just before I posted my note to Mike, I posted a long comment addressing much of what had been said in response to my original comment—or at least I thought I posted it, because it's not there. Fuck.

    [(myl) Hi Neal — it looks like that comment was held up for moderation — who knows why, the ways of WordPress are mysterious — and I was out until late last night, and didn't check until this morning. Should be there now.]

    I'm not going to try to recreate what that lost comment, so let me boil it down to two points. First, I didn't express myself very well in my first comment. Second, I agree with much of what has been said in response to me, including Mark's statement that "for people with a deeper interest in the topic, like Mr. Hershberger, it seems appropriate to give them easy access to some of the 'inside baseball' terminology and technology."

  22. David Marjanović said,

    August 23, 2015 @ 7:00 am

    "We gave George it" is ungrammatical? It sounds all right to me, especially if the stress is on "George."

    Fascinating.

    I remember an incident from my Usenet days when I mentioned one of the innovative conclusions of CGEL (I don't remember which one, maybe about how conjunctions work), and an intelligent citizen of the Netherlands responded along the lines of, "I sincerely doubt [innovative account] is true in English, because I know [traditional account] is correct in Dutch."

    Well, perhaps it is correct in Dutch?

    I don't know any Dutch, but German verbs with separable prefixes have been mentioned above. As it happens, "put on" is anziehen, so I can take these examples from the OP

    (1) John put his shirt on.
    (2) John put it on.
    (3) John put on his shirt.
    (4) *John put on it.

    and translate them just about literally (the 3sg simple past of ziehen being zog):

    (1) J. zog sein Hemd an.
    (2) J. zog es an.
    (3) *J. zog an sein Hemd.
    (4) *J. zog an es.

    Putting the object between the verb and its separated prefix is obligatory for all objects in German, not just for short ones as in English. If all else is equal (which I don't know), you need one fewer rule to describe the German situation than the English one.

    (…OK, (3) is allowed in German poetry, while (4) still isn't. But the relaxations of word order in poetry are largely another story, I think.)

    This is borne out by the bastards (take seriously = ernst nehmen):

    (1) He took the people who criticized him seriously.
    (2) He took seriously the people who criticized him.
    (3) He took the bastards seriously.
    (4) *He took seriously the bastards.

    (1) Er nahm die Leute, die ihn kritisierten, ernst.
    (2) *Er nahm ernst die Leute, die ihn kritisierten.
    (3) Er nahm die Arschlöcher ernst. [Sorry. There's nothing comparable to "bastard".]
    (4) *Er nahm ernst die Arschlöcher.

    No such thing happens with a verb and a random adverb cluster (translations less literal this time; Macht is a "she"):

    (1) She learned the power of thought quite quickly.
    (2) She learned quite quickly the power of thought.
    (3) She learned it quite quickly.
    (4) *She learned quite quickly it.

    (1) Sie erkannte die Macht der Gedanken sehr schnell.
    (2) Sie erkannte sehr schnell die Macht der Gedanken.
    (3) Sie erkannte sie sehr schnell.
    (4) *Sie erkannte sehr schnell sie.

    Suddenly it's just like English. All else being equal, I prefer (1) over (2), but (2) is fine for emphasizing what it is that she learns.

    Add the distinction of dative and accusative into the mix, however, and everything breaks down – in ways I could not have predicted:

    (1) We gave George the book.
    (2) We gave him the book.
    (3) We gave him it.
    (4) *We gave George it.

    (1) Wir gaben G. das Buch.
    (2) Wir gaben ihm das Buch.
    (3) *Wir gaben ihm es.
    (4) *Wir gaben G. es.

    The grammatical alternative to (3) is wir gaben es ihm. Remaking (2) the same way would be ungrammatical: *wir gaben das Buch ihm does not work even when "him" is meant to be stressed. And yet, doing the same thing to (1) is a perfectly cromulent way of putting emphasis on George: wir gaben das Buch G..

  23. David Marjanović said,

    August 23, 2015 @ 7:02 am

    Actually… before the spelling reform of 1996–2005, the trend was going towards spelling ernstnehmen as a single word in all situations. It's probably going there again, and I think I've just explained why. :-)

  24. John Lawler said,

    August 23, 2015 @ 8:07 am

    The URL of the paper mentioned by Mike and requested by Neal is http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/LanguageScience.pdf.

    It's from my undergraduate "Grammar and Writing" class, which used McCawley 1998 as the texe, and featured weekly writing, This degree of advancedness in content plus this amount of writing satisfied a College requirement at the time — this was 2004, if memory serves — for a writing class at a high level in the discipline. This is a term paper from that class, well-thought-out but not without flaws; my comments are included in the pdf.

  25. John Lawler said,

    August 23, 2015 @ 11:33 am

    I probly should've added above, that, notwithstanding my approval of the program outlined in the term paper, my view is that it's simply not possible in the current American educational system; any more than simplified speling, and for the sem riznz.

    Instead, I think that linguists should be fulfilling their educational role by getting folks to pick up linguistics on the street, like any other fun activity unavailable at school.

  26. Ray said,

    August 24, 2015 @ 8:09 am

    hershberger wrote:

    “An interesting feature of the earlier books is that they don’t merely repeat one another. They constitute a century-long discussion about how to model the English language. […]

    “This discussion was a healthy one. Then it stopped in the 1890s, at least for pedagogic grammars. Look at a grammar from this era and it will feel very familiar to anyone who has studied grammar ever since. This is what in the 20th century came to be known as ‘traditional grammar.’”

    I wonder if it stopped because it was around the 1890s that standardized public school education became compulsory in the u.s.? (I don’t know the actual history, just wondering if there’s a connection)…

    (also, some places in the u.s. still call elementary schools “grammar schools”, which we got from the brits, who got it from medieval times when schools were set up for teaching latin grammar…)

  27. maidhc said,

    August 29, 2015 @ 1:50 am

    I must have been in the last generation that was taught sentence diagramming in middle school. I went to a conservative private school though. We also learned Latin.

    Both the sentence diagramming and the Latin have turned out to be valuable in later years for diverse reasons.

    The reason, it appears, that sentence diagramming was taught in schools was the assumption that it would make people better writers. However, in the 1960s it was pointed out that there was not any evidence that learning sentence diagramming made people write better, and no one could produce any, so sentence diagramming was scrapped as being a waste of time. That ignores the question that perhaps sentence diagramming might be valuable for some other reason.

    Personally I found learning sentence diagramming a real eye-opener. I had never before thought of the concept that language could have a structure, and learning that gave me a whole new way of looking at the world.

    I don't know about sentence diagramming as an isolated skill, but integrated into some kind of introductory linguistics program I think it would be great.

    When I got into Latin, I figured out for myself that the verb endings were related to the personal pronouns, so that was an introduction to the concept that languages evolve over time.

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