Lecture #2: Two Types of Grammar
Lecture #2: Two Types of GrammarImportant: these notes are intended as a supplement, and are not a substitute for regular attendance in class. They will be posted after class, often a number of days later (they do take a while to prepare!), and much of the content of the notes will be difficult to understand if you have not already attended class.
These notes go as far as we did in class on 9/2. This page will be completed after Tuesday's lecture.
The term mental grammar refers to the systematic knowledge of language that is in the mind/brain of every competent speaker of a language. It refers to whatever body of knowledge allows the speaker to be a fluent speaker/understander of his/her language. It is this grammar-in-the-mind that linguists aim to characterize when they study the descriptive grammar of a language.
This usage of the term grammar may be different from the way in which you have heard the term grammar used before, and you should take care to not confuse it with the notion of 'correct' grammar or prescriptive grammar which you may have come across in the past.
All competent speakers of a language have a mental grammar, regardless of whether their knowledge and use of the language conforms to the 'prestige' form of the language. Non-prestige varieties of English (such as varieties that freely use 'double negation' are just as systematic as prestige varieties of English.
People have been complaining about the 'decline' of English for centuries. For centuries, they have been claiming that 'incorrect' English will surely lead society into disarray and even violence.
For centuries, these complaints have been without any scientific justification. Society may have problems, and we may fear crime and violence, and it may even be true that criminals and thugs often speak differently from the people in power ... but this does not mean that the language of these people is the cause of the problems!
When we look to find the origin of some well-known prescriptive rules of English, we find that they have some rather surprising sources.
3a. "What did the president talk
about?"
3b. "About what did the president talk?"
4a. "Who did you sit
with?"
4b. "With whom did you sit?"
Although the sentences above with 'stranded' prepositions sound quite natural in English, some 'authorities' tell us that we should not form sentences in this way, and should instead use the more awkward sounding forms like (3b) and (4b). Why so?
Stranding of prepositions is descriptively impossible in Romance languages, e.g. Latin, Italian, French, Spanish. Speakers of these languages find the equivalent of (3a) and (4a) very unnatural sounding. On the other hand, they find the equivalent of (3b, 4b) to sound entirely natural.
5. *"Quien ha hablato con?" (literally: who did he speak with; this is terrible Spanish)
Based on the prestige enjoyed by Latin in the 17th-19th centuries, some people decided that English ought to conform to the word order patterns of Latin, hence the introduction of the notion that it is 'poor grammar' to end a sentence with a preposition. However, this rule has nothing to do with the way that English really works: sentence-final prepositions have always been quite natural in English. Conforming to the avoid-sentence-final-preposition rule can lead to some quite ridiculous results, as the following quote from Winston Churchill illustrates:
5. "This is a rule up with which we should not put"
The source for this 'rule' in English is again Latin and other Romance languages.
6a. "To boldly
go where no man has gone before."
6b. "To go boldly where no man had gone before."
7a. "I want to quickly
read the newspaper."
7b. "I want quickly to read the newspaper."
For most speakers of English, the sentences in (6a, 7a), in which an adverb appears between to and the verb stem, sound more natural than (6b, 7b), but some 'authorities' tell us that the (b) examples are more 'correct'. Why so?
In Romance languages like Latin and Spanish, infinitives consist of just one word. This single word obviously cannot be split up by an adverb. In English, on the other hand, infinitives generally consist of two words, which can easily be split up by an adverb. Some people assumed that because the one-word infinitive of Latin could not be split up, the two-word infinitives of English shouldn't be split either.
Fundamental error: English is not Latin!
8. Infinitives in Romance languages = 1 word
Double Negatives
The prohibition against 'double negatives' has a different source. Ironically, this prescriptive rule instructs us to avoid forms that are quite natural in languages like Latin and Spanish.
Many colloquial varieties of English allow sentences like (9a,b). Although we almost never have difficulty understanding what these sentences mean, some people tell us that these forms are 'incorrect', because two negatives cancel each other out. These people assume that human languages work like mathematical languages or formal logical systems (such as are used in computer programming).
9. English
Surprisingly, then, Romance languages like Spanish, French and Latin generally require that negative sentences be formed using two negative words. This phenomenon is quite widespread across languages, and is known by linguists as negative concord or negative agreement.
10. Spanish
11. French
Therefore, some reasons why we shouldn't assume that double negation is 'illogical':
(a) If 'double negation' or 'negative agreement' is illogical, then all speakers of Spanish, French etc. etc. are highly illogical ... including a great many famous mathematicians and logicians!
(b) Not only is it unjustified to assume that human languages work like mathematical languages, there are good reasons to think that human languages don't work in that way. To see this, just open a book on mathematics or formal logic, or some part of a computer program, at random. If you find that the organization of expressions in these languages is not very easy for you to understand, then this may well reflect the fact that human language works differently from familiar mathematical systems.
Note that this does not affect the fact that 'double negation' is a stigmatized feature of English, which many people associate with low social prestige or low educational status. It does not affect the fact that to most people it seems much more natural in speech than in writing. These are genuine facts about the social attitudes surrounding the English language, and they are facts that children should know about. However, the convention of avoiding 'double negation' in formal situations cannot be justified on the basis of logic - for the reasons outlined above. It can only be justified on social grounds.
In a series of Radio lectures, Prof. Jean Aitchison (Professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University) suggests that we can find independent proof that non-prestige varieties of English do not reflect 'lazy' speech patterns. To find out what 'lazy' speech really looks like, we can examine the speech of people under the influence of alcohol. The sound changes induced by intoxication do not look at all like the kinds of sound and word-order changes observed in colloquial speech.
Although these first two accounts of the source of descriptive rules are popular, it is easy to show that they cannot be the correct accont.
The subject precedes the object (in English)
Absent in German - case markers show subject and object:
The object follows the verb.
The verb agrees with the subject.
Some constructions disallow certain verbs
Compare with:
Comparative '-er'
but not
"The students who knew all the answers were sleeping in their rooms when the rest of the class was taking the test."
"The doctor who the intern who the nurse supervised had bothered lost the medical reports."