A. What is grammar?
The term ‘grammar’
can be understood in a number of ways in everyday use. Firstly, it can be used
in the way Eliza Dolittle in Pygmalion does
when she says: ‘I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.’ In other
words, grammar is to do with a whole lot of rules which would tell people on
what they should do; it is ‘the art of speaking and writing a
language correctly’; or as the Beatles
put it,
I used to get
mad at my school,
the teachers who taught me weren’t cool,
holding me down, turning me round,
filling me up with your rules …
Secondly, you can also use the term ‘grammar’ to refer to a book on grammar.
Finally, we can also see grammar as a science of describing how
language is used. As
All languages and dialects have ‘grammar’
We sometimes, however, hear people saying things like: ‘English hasn’t got a lot of grammar (when compared to German, French or Latin)’ or ‘Their language is totally devoid of grammar’ or ‘Dialects have less grammar than the proper language’ or ‘This grammar is better than that one’.
(1) We will use the label dialect to refer to varieties within the same language. Regional (or geographical) varieties like Canadian English or Scottish English or Australian English or Singaporean English can be said to be dialects of English. Sometimes, we can make finer regional distinctions, and within England, think about Geordie (around the river Tyne), Cockney (based around London), Yorkshire or Liverpudlian English as dialects of English. We can also use the term dialect to refer to the varieties spoken by different social classes: as in an upper-class dialect, a middle-class dialect and a working-class dialect of English. In other words, we can use the term dialect to refer to a variety regardless of whether the variety is prestigious or not, regardless of whether it is only a spoken variety or not. This use is therefore different from the way it is used outside linguistics. The dialect that is prestigious and taught in schools is known as the standard dialect or variety.
Using this definition of dialect, we can say, for example, that the dialects of Chinese include Hokkien, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin, etc. – ie Mandarin is no less a dialect than Hainanese. We could go further and talk about the sub-dialects of Mandarin – eg Beijing (Peking) Mandarin, Taiwanese Mandarin and Singaporean Mandarin; the sub-dialects of Hokkien – eg Amoy (Xiamen) Hokkien, Taiwanese Hokkien, Penang Hokkien and Singaporean Hokkien.
(2) Bear in mind Leith’s definition of grammar above, you will see that we have a broad definition of grammar to include notions such as affixes (eg word endings) and the arrangement of words.
All languages and all dialects have their own regularities about what kinds of arrangements are normal, which form of a particular word should be used in a particular sentence context. As far as I know there is no language or dialect where it is the case that anything goes. This stands to reason: if there are no regularities, hardly any communication (if any at all) can be achieved. All languages and dialects therefore have their own grammars. Someone studying a foreign language or foreign dialect is therefore liable to make errors and come up with ungrammatical versions of a dialect or language, so we can talk about ungrammatical Penang Hokkien for example. If someone says ‘Me queued up very long’, we can say this is ungrammatical Standard English; and if someone says ‘I queued up very lah long’, we can say this is ungrammatical Singaporean English (because the lah was put in the wrong place).
Using the definition of grammar above, it also does not make much sense to me to talk about good or bad grammar. It is similarly difficult to say that one language or dialect has more or less grammar, although we can certainly say that certain languages or dialects use more affixes, etc.
Levels
of grammar
How would you divide up this passage?
My first sight of England was on a foggy March night in 1973 when I arrived on the midnight ferry from Calais. For twenty minutes, the terminal area was aswarm with activity as cars and lorries poured forth, customs people did their duties, and everyone made for the London road. [Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1995), p. 11]
Breaking up the passage into two sentences here is not problematic as
this is signalled orthographically by the presence of the full stop at the end
and the capital letter at the beginning. (Having said this however, I need to add
that some might want to make use of other criteria for defining ‘sentence’.
Many will remember being penalised for writing, in answer to a comprehension
question, ‘Because he was late’ – this being labelled an incomplete sentence
or a sentence fragment.)
We could informally break up the second ‘comma units’. (For
twenty minutes, || the terminal area was aswarm with
activity as cars and lorries poured forth, || customs people did their duties,
|| and everyone made for the London road.) Here, orthography is rather less reliable. The comma is often optional,
and the comma can be used to separate different kinds of units. Clearly, ‘For
twenty minutes’ is a different kind of unit from ‘and everyone made for the
London road’. (Consider: do the commas separate out the same kinds of units in
the following examples? Because I fell ill, I postponed my visit. I would,
however, have loved to be there. I will now only visit Copenhagen, The Hague,
Amsterdam, Brugge and Brussels later.)
We could, however, try to section off biggish sections based on how they can convey units of information. ‘For twenty minutes’ does not convey any kind of ‘complete’ information that would be a response to a question like ‘What happened?’ or ‘What was the situation?’, so ‘For twenty minutes’ must ‘belong’ to something else. Here is my solution.
For twenty minutes, the terminal area was aswarm with activity || as cars and lorries poured forth, || customs people did their duties, || and everyone made for the London road. |||
I will call the units separated by double vertical lines clauses.
Here is a definition of clause .
[W]e have to be able to combine words into meaningful message structures and the most fundamental message structure in any language – in terms of a message that has any sort of completeness about it – is a clause. [Butt et al. 1995: 35]
Now, if we look at the first clause, it will also be clear that
sub-division is possible.
For twenty minutes, | the terminal area | was | aswarm with activity ||
I will call these units, separated by vertical lines, phrases.
Phrases can sometimes be moved about as chunks when we want to give different
kinds of emphasis. You can move ‘For twenty minutes’ to a number of positions.
You can put the last phrase earlier for a more dramatic effect:
Aswarm with activity was the terminal area for
twenty minutes.
Phrases can clearly be separated out into words, eg
For twenty minutes (3 words)
the terminal area (3 words)
This seems unproblematic largely because English orthography insists on a space between words. (This might be more difficult in languages employing logographic writing systems.)
Finally, words can be further separated into morphemes. Note: this is different from syllables, which is to do with pronunciation. Morphemes contain at least some minimal vestige of meaning, whereas syllables need not be meaningful at all. Here are some words divided up into morphemes.
fog-(g)y (2 morphemes)
arriv(e)-ed (2 morphemes)
mid-night (2 morphemes)
a-swarm (2 morphemes)
act-iv(e)-ity (3 morphemes)
We can therefore break down the sentence into the following components.
A sentence is made up of one or more clauses;
a clause is made up of one or more phrases;
a phrase is made up of one or more words; and
a word is made up of one or more morphemes.
The study of the way morphemes combine is known as morphology.
The term syntax is used to refer to the way words combine into phrases,
phrases into clauses and clauses into sentences.
Now you have a go. Try analysing this.
Then abruptly
all was silence and I wandered through sleeping, low-lit streets threaded with
fog, just like in a Bulldog Drummond movie. [Notes from a Small Island,
p. 11]