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There
Ain't No Grammaticality Here
Michael Bulley
The following piece first saw the light in
1999 in English Today, No 59, as a postscript to a
debate that took place in four articles from 1997 to 1998 in that journal. I
had begun it by attacking the Chomskyan ideas that language was a
"rule-based" system and that grammatical structures were genetically
innate. Chomsky was defended, and I was attacked, by Patrick Honeybone, of the
There are some uses that provoke no controversy as,
for example, when you speak of a "grammatical analysis"— of a
sentence, for example. In that sense, the term ‘ungrammatical’ is
unusable. Conflict of approach arises about how they can be used of examples of
language. In English Today, No 55, I had explained
briefly why I thought ‘ungrammaticality’ was an impossible concept.
In reply, in ET57, Patrick Honeybone quoted the example *"Sid
inquired me a question", saying of it "we know the syntax is wrong -
it is ungrammatical." Now, what follows is almost exactly as it appeared
in English Today.
Contents
Ungrammatical or unconventional?
"The wall is building" - ungrammatical?
There is nothing in language to decide the issue
Why imagine ungrammatical sentences?
ungrammatical
or unconventional?
If the example, "Sid inquired me a
question", had really occurred in real life, it might have been said by a
foreign learner, in which case the teacher might have commented
"That’s wrong—it’s ungrammatical." But that would
be no more than a shorthand way of saying that ‘inquire’ is not
currently used in standard English in that way to express that sort of idea.
There is nothing in the word itself to limit its use, no hidden force, for
example, compelling words beginning ‘inq-’ to be used in certain
ways but not in others. For all I know, "Sid inquired me a question"
might be a normal form in some current variety of English somewhere or might have
become a standard, educated form in a hundred years from now.
"The
wall is building" - ungrammatical?
There is variety and continuous
change in all languages, and there are no places or times where something
suddenly changes from being ‘grammatical’ to
‘ungrammatical’ or vice-versa. Take the present-day standard
British English examples "She married Arthur, didn’t she?",
"I omitted to tell the others" and "The wall is being
built": the first is ungrammatical for Welsh English—"She
married Arthur, isn’t it?", the second for USA English, which does
not allow ‘omit’ plus the infinitive, and the third for early
eighteenth-century English, which would have said "The wall is
building". And goodness knows how all three will compare with how people
are speaking in five hundred years time.
there is
nothing in language to decide the issue
The word ‘ungrammatical’ implies
‘wrong’, but in what sense? Clearly, not a moral one, but not a
technical or systematic one either, in the way that "2 + 2 = 5" is
wrong for the internal logic of mathematics. It only means ‘wrong’
in a social way. It implies that something does not conform to the transient
linguistic conventions of some group at some time. There is nothing in language
itself to decide the issue. If a sentence is comprehensible, it is bound to
have a grammatical structure and cannot therefore be
‘ungrammatical’ in that sense. If it diverges from some standard
usage, we would be better using the shorthand phrase ‘grammatically
incorrect’ rather than ‘ungrammatical’. If the
‘incorrect’ sentence is an invention of a grammarian and no-one has
ever meant it, then, although we could use it for teaching purposes to show
what to avoid, we need not consider it as a real part of language.
why
imagine ungrammatical sentences?
Imagining sentences that are grammatically bizarre
is a bit like imagining how a language is unlikely to develop. Certainly, we
can guess that some developments in English are unlikely, such as the
reduplication of the article, making "the cake" into "the the
cake", but there is nothing in language to stop it; it is just a
reasonable guess about human behaviour. Guessing correctly is harder. It is
unlikely, for example, that the average Greek in classical times would have
predicted accurately the forms that would eventually replace the infinitive, or
the Dative Case.
I should not like to be taken here as deprecating
standard English. I think that British English is fortunate in having a
standard, educated variety as a reference point, though, like every variety, it
is slowly changing and has many fuzzy edges. With my students, I am a stickler
about it, always correcting them if they write "a good deal of
people" for "a good number of people" or "she convinced him
to do it" for "she persuaded him to do it". If they challenge
me, I tell them that what they have written is not inherently incorrect, since
it is comprehensible, but that it diverges from recommended standard usage.
Can we all agree, then, that:
(i)‘grammatical’ can be used descriptively (e.g. "a
grammatical approach"), but that ‘ungrammatical’ cannot; (ii)
that neither of them can be used for defining the consequence of grammatical
analysis; (iii) that both may be used evaluatively (though ‘grammatically
incorrect’ is preferable to ‘ungrammatical’), but only in a
loose, colloquial way to mean conforming to, or not conforming to, the vaguely
defined, temporary conventions of some variety of a language?
Revised layout 20 April 2010
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