ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE

FRIENDLY ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Free of any copyright






The original text of this file was taken from http://www.beaugrande.com.

This PDF Edition has been prepared by
Dr. Turnoi Turjakuunnen, 2009









2
[The Cambridge Grammar carries a similar seal -- me it reminded of a fried egg on a
platter -- brashly labeled "Real English Guarantee". The late and sorely lamented
J ohn Sinclair told me that the phrase "real English" was coined in the 1980s by the
COBUILD team, who were surpised how well it caught on befoe Cambrige swiped it.]

Dedicated to Dwight Bolinger

Motto Gallery
Grammarians would perhaps differ less, if they read more.
-- Goold Brown, 1851
As the grammarians [] began quarrelling, they lost the power of discovering.
-- Charles Kingsley, 1854
It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.
-- Sherlock Holmes, 1892
______________________________




3
Ruminations from My Students
(Emirati data)

In school they teach us English grammar in confusion way.

The grammar rules were just like a solid thing that we cannot use it.

Grammar is an essential thing for students to build their knowledgement on strong
basement.

4

CONTENTS
Part I. Managing data for a grammar
Part II. In search of grammar and GRAMMAR
II.A Three sides
II.B The double-bind of English teachers
II.C Some precepts for grammar
II.D The term grammar
II.E A bref historie of English GRAMMAR versus grammar
II.F Grammar, lexicon, lexicogrammar, and usage
II.G Six criteria for a friendly grammar
Part III. ORTHOGRAPHY and PRONUNCIATION
Part IV. WORDS and PHRASES in a grammar
IV.A Whats in a WORD?
IV.B WORD-PIECES
IV.C MULTI-WORD UNITS
IV.D Naming the Parts of Speech revisited
IV.E WORD-CLASSES
IV.F. MAJOR WORD-CLASSES
IV.F.1 NOUNS
IV.F.2 NOMINALS
IV.F.3 NOUN PHRASES
IV.F.3.1 DETERMINERS in NOUN PHRASES
IV.F.3.2 ARTICLES
IV.F.3.3 DEMONSTRATIVES
IV.D.3.4 POSSESSIVES
IV.F.3.5 INTERROGATIVES and EXCLAMATORIES
IV.F.3.6 QUANTIFIERS and ENUMERATORS
IV.F.3.7 PRE-MODIFIERS and POST-MODIFIERS
IV.F.4 PRO-NOUNS and PRO-NOMINALS
IV.F.5 ADJECTIVES
IV.F.5.1 PRO-ADJECTIVES
IV.F.6 VERBS
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IV.F.7 VERBALS
IV.F.7.1 PRO-VERBS
IV.F.8 VERB PHRASES
IV.F.9ADVERBS and ADVERBIALS
IV.F.9.1 PRO-ADVERBS and PRO-ADVERBIALS
IV.G. MINOR WORD-CLASSES
IIV.G.1 INTERJECTIONS
IV.G.2 PREPOSITIONS
IV.G.3 JUNCTIONS
Part V. A LEXICOGRAMMAR of PROCESSES in CLAUSES
V.A GRAMMAR, LEXICON, and LEXICOGRAMMAR revisited
V.B A LEXICOGRAMMAR of PROCESSES
VI.B.1 OUTER PROCESSES
V.B.2 INNER PROCESSES
Part VI. PROSODY and GRAMMAR
VI.A Four units
VI.B The spontaneity of real conversation
VI.C STRESSES and TONE GROUPS
VI.D PROSODY and GRAMMAR in CLAUSE TYPES
VI.D.1 The DECLARATIVE CLAUSE TYPE for STATEMENTS
VI.D.2 The INTERROGATIVE CLAUSE TYPE for QUESTIONS
VI.D.3 The EXCLAMATORY CLAUSE TYPE for EXCLAMATIONS
VI.D.4 The IMPERATIVE CLAUSE TYPE for COMMANDS
VI.E MINOR CLAUSE TYPES
VI.E.1 DEPENDENT CLAUSES
VI.E.2 NON-FINITE CLAUSES
VI.E.3 NON-CLAUSES
VII. PUNCTUATION in LEXICOGRAMMAR and PROSODY
VIII. On the future of GRAMMAR and grammar


6
Part I. Managing data for a grammar
I.1 Writing a book in my own breezy style -- a designation once bestowed on it by
Michael Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, whose works unknowingly started me on
my road way back in the 1970s --

CHINA, 1996
[We were photographed in 1995 near Badaling by the "Great Wall". which
Michael first visited, via steam train, back in 1949.]
to publish in my own manner on the Internet, is a welcome boon for a lively and
engaging presentation, free from the general custom of grammar books to plod
or preach. I shall earn no modest royalties for me, nor immodest profits for
publishers, yet this time around -- to borrow a phrase made unforgettable by Steve
Biko, a martyr of South African justice, whose works lent me potent
momentum in the 1990s -- I write what I like.[Note 1]
7

I.2 In fair return, you can accept or change what you like -- paraphrase, rewrite, and
translate, or even delete whatever you disapprove. Neither real English data nor
the images it invokes are necessarily genteel, nor adapted to the more sensitive
cultural mores of diverse societies where English is not the home or only language.
And if you regard grammar as a solemn convocation best conducted with a
patronising or magisterial scowl, you can delete my impish jokes, provided you
recognise them.
I.3 My own social, economic, and political views are frankly evident here, now that I
am free from pressures of editors and publishing houses controlled by octopussy
conglomerates and mutated (merged) from tinpot manufactures of biscuits,
car radios, or cigarettes to producers of all commodities whatsoever, including
paid-on-delivery disinformation in the discourse of mass media. In the 21st
century, ostrich-headed silences or Pilatous hand-washings must count as
complicity in the global disorder. And since grammar feed into a bundle of social,
economic, and political factors, to treat it otherwise overcoats it with a patina of
ritual and shamanism queasily camouflaged as discipline and formality.
I.4 Since I am freed from argy-bargies with editors about typefaces, I have followed
my own inclinations:
Italic for emphasis in my own texts;
Bold for special terms;
Underlined for items I wanted to highlight in data samples;
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SMALL CAPITALS for stressed words or syllables; and
LARGE CAPITALS where the data themselves have them.
I.5 No doubt the highest priority for a friendly grammar is to be resolutely simple
and clear -- a tall order for a subject-matter which is often neither of those, and
which has been breathily befogged by centuries of murky, opinionated
explication and instruction. Above all, its terms should be conscientiously
explained and consistently applied; I decided to make them visually distinct as
well by displaying in CAPITALS and in TIMES NEW ROMAN, whilst the
main text is in the usual Arial. This tactic may preclude confusions with
ordinary uses, e.g., PRESENT and PAST as VERB TENSES versus present and
past as expanses of time; or a SUBJ ECT in a CLAUSE versus a subject in a
language curriculum. The terms also appear in BOLD TYPE in key passages
where they are being expressly introduced, defined, or expounded. To locate those
for review or reference, I have provided an Index according to the numbering of
Parts and paragraphs.
I.6 Throughout it all, I have done my best to retain conventional terms as far as I
judged them serviceable or saw how to render them so. Some, like perfect,
voice, and mood, seemed uninformative and potentially misleading, and were
replaced. Others, like NOMINAL and VERBAL, had to be retained but with
careful specification of their uses. Still others, like DETERMINER and
ENUMERATOR, had to be adapted from the recent reference grammars reviewed
below in I.13 and II.26. And finally, some innovations had to be coined to
enhance consistency and symmetry, such as STATEMENT TAG, COMMAND
TAG, and EXCLAMATION TAG corresponding to the well-known QUESTION
TAG (Part VI).
I.7 I fully appreciate the difficulty and resistance in changing terms and notions
regarding grammar, whether among ordinary citizens or practicing English
teachers or grammarians. Please believe that my own terms and notions have been
deliberated and documented by data with all the thoroughness in my capacity. I
present what I judged to be soundly reasoned, justified and certified by extensive
evidence, of which I surveyed a vastly greater quantity than I have space to
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present here, often scanning hundreds of occurrences to single out a few among
the most appropriate.
I.8 In this spirit, unless otherwise indicated, my data are authentic; I lifted no
invented data from grammar books, grammar websites, style guides, and
such like. Authentic data are attested in actual usage among people who were
not acting the role of grammarians. I drew principally upon two corpora (or
corpuses, which sounds too much like corpuscles). The British National
Corpus (hereafter BNC, where appropriate with superscript
BNC
), installed in
software called SARA (its an anagram within an anagram, so better not ask),
offers 100 million words of mainly contemporary British usage in the broadest
sense, ranging across the entire United Kingdom along with some outlying
islands, and combining not just written English in such domains as novels,
biographies, journals, newspapers, guidebooks, business reports, school essays,
and disquisitions on topics like philosophy, religion, and health, but also an
invaluable subset of 10 million words of transcribed spoken English in television
news scripts, managerial meetings, council meetings, legal or medical
consultations, university lectures, sermons, and ordinary conversations.[Note 2] I
was delighted to find oral data from regional sources as well, like the Nottingham
Oral History Project, the Suffolk Sound Archive, and the Orkney Sound Archive.
Though I did not cover them in any detail, large data sets are becoming available
on local Englishes in former colonies like India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Nigeria,
Kenya, and so on; and such nation languages as J amaica, Barbados, and Belize.
Some of these are gathered in corpora by the International Corpus of English
(coordinated by Gerald Nelson at University College, London), which as of
March 2002 (latest homepage update) lists teams in Great Britain, Hong Kong,
East Africa, India, Singapore, the Philippines, and New Zealand.[Note 3] So far, I
am not aware of any projects for a comparative synthesis of their corpus-driven
grammars, a daunting prospect in any case.
I.9 As if aspiring not to be outdone, the Yanks (also known as Americans) [Note 4]
have tardily announced an American National Corpus (ANC) of 100 million
words, based on an update of the same software used by the BNC, hosted by the
University of Pennsylvania. As of October 2006, two small releases have been
10
posted on the website, while the project itself is being announced for 2007. A
small obstacle impends: to use the corpus for reference works, textbooks, and
software, you must join their Consortium, which requires an
annual fee of US$ 40,000! No comment is necessary (or printable) as to why I
havent been using it.
I.10 My own English Prose Corpus, installed in software called WordPilot

and
profoundly indebted to Project Gutenberg, offers roughly another 100 million
words,[Note 5] including most of the so-called classic or popular published
works in mainly British and American literature, philosophy, (auto)biography,
history, politics, science, economy, geography, exploration, and folklore of
legends and fairy tales, over the past three centuries up to the profit-minded
cut-off by International Copyright Law -- plus all of Shakespeare's plays and
the entire King James Bible. During my more recent periodic upgrades in size, I
tried my hand at accessing the swelling resources of Australian, Canadian, Irish,
South African, Native American, African American, J ewish, and Feminist data. I
have also utilized my Drama Corpus, which I hope is reasonably representative;
and only occasionally my Poetry Corpus, which is more symbolic than
representative.
I.11 Even at a total of around 200 million words, my two corpora leave all too many
blind spots, so I have often turned to the Internet, which proffers the advantages
of diversity and openness, and where contributors need not be -- and, in many I
observe, plainly are not -- self-conscious or apologetic about their usage; contact
is their objective. Large corpora can already impose tedious travails, yet the
Internet far more, at least with current software: leaky searches let target data slip
through; noisy searches present the target data in a wash of irrelevant but
superficially similar data; and bulky searches toss up hopelessly copious
quantities (thousands or millions) which may or may not be target data. Any of
these may trap us in the dizzying work I have heard called in computer circles
brute force -- trudging though dodgy wodges of data and hoping for lucky finds.
So, stating which data are frequent in English is a risky move; stating which do
not occur at all is worse. I can only report what I did or did not find, without any
aspirations toward completeness or finality.
11
I.12 Under such circumstances, I must proceed within some boundary assumptions. I
notice myself saying plausibly more often than good style might prefer,
simply because grammar is not a field of certainties, validations, and proofs.
For my part, I can at least police my own usages as author: if I have felt unsure
about a whether people (still) say what I would, I have queried the BNC or the
Internet, and sought to tap the opinions of the language community. If I do treat
myself to occasional echoes from Shakespeare, Milton or such like for brisk
variety and entertainment value, then always in contexts where, if not recognised,
the meanings should still be evident. As for usages I present as instances or
samples of English, if one is nowhere attested in my corpora nor on the Internet, I
feel justified in disregarding it unless it serves as a counter-example, signalled
with
?
or
???
for (very) doubtful, or with * for nowhere found (by me, you see);
if I find it rare or uncommon, I say so. If an attested usage from some older or
regional usage might seem obscure to less fluent or non-native users of English, I
provide a rough-and-ready translation in [square brackets].
I.13 Regarding which issues might merit description, I have thoroughly familiarised
myself with A Grammar of Contemporary English (CGE) and its thoughtful
revision, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (hereafter CGEL);
plus the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (hereafter just COBUILD). Ill say
a bit more about them later (cf. II.26ff); here I would merely justify my
confidence by their basis upon authentic data and by their laudable intent to be
comprehensive. If an issue is not treated in any of these, I feel safe in assuming
it has not been treated in the turgid Sargasso Sea of past grammar-books since
Elizabethan times, or else has been firmly discredited in the interim. In exchange,
I shall be reporting some issues and usages which I have found to be authentic,
yet which have apparently been missed by my sagacious predecessors.
I.14 For convenient reference, my examples are numbered in square brackets; that way,
I can spare obtuse phrasings like the second of the three examples given two
paragraphs back. Alternative versions of the same example are identified with
lower-case letters after the numbers, e.g., [1] being shown in several variations as
[1a], [1b], [1c] and so on. To highlight items inside the samples, I use underlining,
which is the easiest to spot, especially for short bits like PRO-NOUNS.
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I.15 Again for convenient reference, each paragraph bears its own number printed off
in the left margin. These provide a precise means for cross-referring from one
section to another, as is frequently needed in describing grammar, with its
myriad interconnections.
I.16 Footnotes appear far more sparingly than in my recent New Introduction (2004),
and mostly where I thought there might actually be occasion to follow up a
reference. They appear as [Note 1] and so on, because tiny superscript
numbers can get uncharitably mangled on the Internet. To keep the presentation
uncluttered, I put the Notes at the end of each uploaded section.
I.17 To formulate my beginning, I stay clear of the convention of jumping right into the
grammar itself with a staid opener like The parts of speech in English grammar
are these:; or The English sentence is composed of subject and predicate. I feel
allowed, indeed obligated, to first explore some weighty issues and problems
pervading the term grammar in its various applications, as well as the
teaching and learning of a subject-matter. Insofar as conventional approaches
have been ineffectual in the past, we evidently still need to modify and deepen our
understanding of what English grammar is about and how it might be made
more friendly for all concerned.
I.18 By following and reporting the flows and currents in my authentic data, I am
released from the practices of inventing data out of my own intuition; or of
posing as a great expert who knows whats what without even consulting data.
Here, I must in some manner re-invent the role of the author (many editors and
publishers spurn that, too), since my own voice is but one in a many-headed
multitude. In the BNC, I talk back to omnivorous periodicals like Today, the
Independent, and the Guardian; trendy ones like Sky, The Face, and New Musical
Express; sober ones like New Scientist, Practical Fishkeeping, and the British
Journal of Medicine; stilted, verbose rhetoric from the House of Commons via
Hansard; well-meaning guidebooks and pamphlets on every aspect of life, as if
the dear Brits cant manage anything for themselves, not even how to be fuddy-
duddies; and modern literature, some high enough to imbue the wide world with
intellectual sense and soul, but some low enough to appease the pubescent
sensationalism or voyeurism with formulaic fables fantastical, apish, shallow,
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inconstant, full of tears and smiles, such as Mills & Boon. In the EPC, I engaged
with astute writers who made over the English language to suit themselves, like
Shakespeare, Dr J ohnson, Addison and Steele, Austin, Dickens, or J oyce; but also
pioneers in the frontier life of Australia like Henry Lawson and Rolf Boldrewood,
or of Canada like Ralph Connor and Tekahionwake; but also visionary advocates
of social reforms as yet unrealised, like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin,
and W.E.B. Du Bois; heart-warming humorists like J erome K. J erome, Stephen
Leacock, and P.G. Wodehouse; intrepid tellers of Native American tales and
legends like Ohiyesa, Owindia, and Zitkala-Sa; and writers who were legends
themselves, like Sojourner Truth, Harry Houdini, and Sarah Bernhardt. And in
their wake parade the myriad characters portrayed or created, like a procession of
endearing acquaintances. So grand a family of voices must have something to
reveal about the grammar of English, beyond all reach of any lone
grammarians intuition or invention.
I.19 Which is why all of my presented data is at best a highway of road signs. A
lifetime of experiences around the globe has convinced me of the impracticality of
teaching English and learning English as subject matters cordoned off in the
schools. Our task cannot realistically be to dispense our own individual
knowledge of English into the minds of learners like empty containers being
filled to the brim; all too often, the results are disappointing. The more successful
learners are those who go foraging for the language out of class. Our task should
rather be seeking to kick-start this diligent enterprise, turn them loose on all the
data they can get, and help them along with guidance and demonstrations of how
to dig and explore, what to look for, and how to make workable use of it.
I.20 Which is also why I have not included Exercises using data samples of my own
choosing, even though I hope this cyber-book may be useful for courses in
schools and colleges. Learners can construe my presentations as demos of what
they can do in gathering and interpreting data in order to make their own
presentations, thus assuming the role and authority of local experts in the eyes
of their peers -- a rare and stimulating experience in education on any level. The
grammar is best understood by those who can seek out further examples of the
usages and patterns I describe.
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I.21 To make the Grammar come more to life, I have introduced illustrative cameo
visuals (carefully restored as appropriate in PaintShop

) of interesting folks. After

all, GRAMMAR is for people, by people, and about people. My choices of people
were serendipitously steered toward notables who I thought could also become
engaging topics of student discovery projects for class presentation and for
inclusion in a communal workbook.
I.22 Regarding potential copyright issues, I would cite current legislation, such as Title
17 in Section 107 of theUS Copyright Law on fair use:
reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or
research, is not an infringement of copyright.
My own use of Internet imagery is certainly not commercial, since my grammar is a
non-profit venture if ever there was one.
I.23 More generally, a narrowly economic and proprietary outlook belies the essential
spirit of the Internet and its founders. The Internet is the most public domain we
have ever had, and attempts to squeeze and filter people who need information
constitute rapacious abuses. For my part, I have repeatedly gone on record in my
writings that knowledge, the foremost commodity you can share with gain rather
than loss, carries the obligation to do so everywhere and for everyone, expressly
working against social or economic restrictions upon so-called intellectual
property. Whats mine must be yours as well, or it will be nothing.
I.24 Some years ago, textbooks were the targets of a stinging jeremiad:
Most textbooks [are] impersonally written [and] give the impression that the
subject is boring; They have no voice, reveal no human personality. []
And still worse, there is usually no clue given as to who claimed these are the
facts of the case, or how it discovered these facts. [] There is no sense of
the frailty or ambiguity of human judgment, no hint of the possibilities of error.
Knowledge is presented as a commodity to be acquired, never as a human
struggle to understand, to overcome falsity, to stumble toward the truth. (Neil
Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School)
Though I would have to largely concur stressing however the compelling pressures
of publishers upon authors I believe I can state with some confidence that this
15
cyber-textbook is the dialectical antithesis of the type here invoked. J udge for
yourselves.
Notes to Part I
1. Actually, this winged phrase, before being used for a whole book, began as the title of a paper
published in a student journal under the pseudonym Frank Talk (a phrase I expropriated on my
website for topics that our jolly old profession rarely speaks about frankly, if at all), and cited as
evidence at his trial ostensibly for planning the (later banned) rally at Curries Fountain in Durham,
to celebrate the Frelimo victory in Mozambique in 1974, but in reality for his role as the voice of the
Black Consciousness Movement. As the world knows, he was brutishly assassinated in jail in
September 1977, which sparked international outrage. Yet his writings are very much alive.
2. The BNC material is largely under copyright, though not owned by Oxford University Press,
which markets the corpus. The texts are in any case so handled that converting them to commercial
uses is hardly feasible. The books are represented only in parts; the periodicals are out of date; and
all text files are crammed with complex markers (e.g. for Parts Of Speech) before each and every
word, so that reformatting them back to their original state is horrendously toilsome and tedious. My
own uses of BNC material are assuredly not commercial, and the license was duly purchased. The
corpus was at first only online, which made large searches grindingly slow for me in the remote
outreaches of Africa and Arabia; the fast CD version, which can be ordered from the OUP website at
http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/, can be installed on your PC in Windows 98 and later, as well as UNIX;
my Windows version occupies 5.05 gigabytes of hard disk space. (Important: Install Texts before
SARA; and after clicking install, you must touch nothing until commanded to do so -- and
click once, not twice -- even though the computer periodically appears to have stopped. Watch the
green light on your CD drive. And keep an hour or two of reading matter at hand for the wait.)
3. The website is www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice. Several of the corpora can be downloaded.
4. No offence, but after living five years in South America, I balk at reserving Americans for natives
of the USA. I know that Yanks is used over there in the south for northerners and northeasterners,
mostly seen as tiresome tourists or suspicious investors. Yet over two centuries of ruthless
exploitation, the USA have indeed been yanking away everything they could from their
defenceless hemispheric neighbours, so there we have it. Yanks a lot.
5. The computed total of my EPC as of J uly 2005 was 101,942,700 words, but this must reflect some
bloating, due, for example, to the systematic (but indispensable) repetition of characters names
before each of their speeches in the drama sub-corpus. Where I found it feasible and fitting, I
removed extraneous material, such as the Project Gutenberg small print that totals over 2000 words
in every downloaded item; let me express here my deepest gratitude, and my hope that I am using
their materials as they would welcome. The EPC is installed in WordPilot, which can be downloaded
for a modest $49.95 from http://www.compulang.com/. You can make your own library out of any
16
files saved as text only. But if, like me, you are interested in word combinations, you need to
remove all extra blank spaces and all line-end carriage returns (abounding in Internet files) that do
not mark the end of paragraphs; I literally extracted millions of them. If you want some tips on how
do this without ravaging your sanity, contact me at the e-mail address on my website.
17
Part II. In search of grammar and GRAMMAR
II.A Three sides
II.1 Though such a beginning is hardly conventional for a grammar, I shall
straightaway affirm the three-sided premise that language as a potential system
of choices available, and discourse as an actual system of choices made should
both be described from three sides.[Note 1] Most basically, both systems are
linguistic in the broadest sense because their prime modality is of course language;
cognitive because both supply our major resources for formulating, expressing,
and sharing knowledge; and social because both define and sustain the
organisation of society. The premise would hardly seem controversial, had not the
respective disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and sociology long been
pernickety about their borders, which I at least have been working to surmount or
reconcile throughout my own career.[Note 2]
II.2 Among the most gratifying e-mails I receive are acknowledgements that my
efforts have indeed guided and encouraged people in their works and aspirations,
e.g.:
I am a retired lecturer in English for Specific Purposes, Applied Linguistics,
English for Communication and Teacher Training for 35 years. [] Your triple
vision of discourse as linguistic, cognitive and social was the foundation of my
thesis, [although] my then counsellor [said the three were] irreconcilable. [...]
But I went ahead all the same. [...] Today, my thesis, written in Portuguese, is
quoted by other post-graduation students far beyond my expectations. That has
also been the basis of all my teaching.
-- Susan Nicholls in Brazil (age 72)
I could desire no more welcome reward for my solitary and far-roving odyssey
upon the swirling oceans of language and discourse -- and now, grammar.
II.3 A second three-sided premise would be a direct corollary: GRAMMAR --
written in BLOCK CAPITALS to designate the actual human capacities and
activities ( II.19) -- must in turn be a system with three sides in the service of
language, cognition, and society. On the linguistic side, GRAMMAR offers a
repertory of forms, classes, and patterns that underwrite the detailed linear
18
organisation of speech or writing. On the cognitive side, GRAMMAR packages
and finalises the expression of what people have in mind and, for the moment at
least, helps to bring their minds closer together. On the social side, GRAMMAR
is replete with subtle or unsubtle signals of origins, roles and status, plus signals
of power or solidarity.
II.4 This second premise must sound more controversial, after a long-standing trend of
fencing off grammar inside some narrowly linguistic purview. The trend has
been intensified those approaches in modern linguistics, the academic science
of language, preoccupied with formal approaches highlighting the static
arrangement of sentences over functional approaches highlighting the dynamic
roles, intentions, and attitudes of participants in communication. My own theme
has insistently been the reverse: as functional as possible, and as formal only as
necessary.
II.5 As a third three-sided premise and further corollary, MEANING (also written in
BLOCK CAPITALS to designate the significances of human of action and
communication) can also be grasped from three sides. On the linguistic side,
language is the most basic yet most precise modality for being meaningful, and
to fluctuating degrees prefigures how we put thoughts or ideas into words. On the
cognitive side, MEANING is part and parcel of what we know or understand,
including ourselves. As such, it cannot be exclusively restricted to language,
witness the diverse items occurring after the phrase the meaning of: God,
faith, life, death, existence, time, history, fidelity, and
intelligence, plus emotional expressions like flushed face and sparkling
eyes (BNC data). On the social side, MEANING both regulates and is regulated
by the organisation of society, especially in deciding how far its members may
mean the same thing or mean different things, or again what they may mean
but not actually say -- and what consequences may ensue, such as confusion,
fistfights, marriages, divorces, pre-emptive wars, etc etc).
II.6 These three-sided premises might seem to counsel a careful triple apportionment
of distinct terms like linguistic grammar or social meaning. But these seem
too unwieldy for frequent use and may foster distinctions that are not adequately
clear or secured in the data. To assert the significance of the three sides by no
19
means implies they can be reliably filtered out separately for description. Rather,
we can, as it were, revolve our data to bring one side into focus when it merits it.
II.7 Perhaps too, schooling is reluctant to venture too deeply into those matters of
language which are prone to raise uncomfortable questions about the tilted
cognitive and social agenda of education at large.[Note 3] The official agenda
centres on acquiring knowledge, learning the material, or mastering the
subject-matter, made equally and fairly available to all; the unofficial (or
hidden) agenda is to spread learners across a hierarchy of relative success or
failure depending to a large extent on the learners individual language varieties
and social ambiences. For many, both the subject-matter and the language used to
present it is remote from their lived experience. But schooling either ignores this
incongruence or even exploits it -- remoteness as a levelling factor. And, until
recently, the area of grammar in the curriculum was tamed and channelled into
safe exercises, such as naming the parts of speech (cf. IV.D).
II.8 The natural outcome has been a disembodied, desiccated vision of the cognitive
and social purposes and relevance of the real GRAMMAR as opposed to any
school grammar. Allow me here just one rather droll demo of a key mode of
information that gets excluded, namely ATTITUDES, which in my grammar
will receive its proper attention. The opposing poles can be called
AMELIORATIVE for whats judged good and PEJ ORATIVE for whats judged
bad (POSITIVE and NEGATIVE are needed elsewhere for DEGREE and
POLARITY, respectively -- see IV.184 and IV.194). The PASSIVE sub-pattern of
PERSONAL PRONOUN + AUXILIARY be + invariant to be + PAST
PARTICIPLE carries, with unnerving persistence, a PEJ ORATIVE ATTITUDE
about how people are to be treated, e.g.:
[1] The girl was to be guarded until she delivered, at which time she was to be
stoned to death. (Amnesty)
In BNC data, among the sinister inconveniences using this pattern I find
demoted, cut out, despised, hounded, punished unfairly, investigated,
arrested, prosecuted, convicted, incarcerated, imprisoned for life,
chained hand and foot, and hanged. In EPC data, I find humbled,
abandoned, persecuted, trampled upon, devoured, condemned, and
20
hanged all over again -- and, for bad measure, boiled alive, burned at the
stake, and buried at sea.
II.9 Why a seemingly innocuous linguistic pattern should be so cognitively and
socially loaded is a puzzle. True, the PASSIVE in general has traditionally
languished under a cloud, and I have met with plenty of English textbooks and
teachers who still counsel against it, even whilst using it in their counsel (cf.
IV.218). But authentic data do not reveal it in so dire a fate as this sub-pattern,
which may have stemmed from memorable uses in the 18th and 19th centuries,
either by hugely respected speakers [2-3], or in hugely popular books [4-5].
[2] Am I to be HUNTED in this manner? (Dr J ohnson)
[3] Am I to be cut off before I do anything to effect permanent improvement
in Africa ? (Dr Livingstone)

[4] Do you expect enemies? Am I to be shut up here, to be killed in a siege? [...]
Am I to be blocked up here to die? (Mysteries of Udolpho)
[5] This is not to be borne! Am I to be bearded in my own palace by an insolent
Monk? ( Castle of Otranto )
My conjecture would be that such an ancestry might attract a PEJ ORATIVE
custom for a pattern which had not figured this way before, since I do not find it
so in, say, Shakespeares plays and the King James Bible -- trusty lodestars for
historical issues of usage.
21
II.10 I have yet to encounter an English teacher or grammarian who had noticed this
regularity. But then, they had not build their conceptions of grammar on the
large data banks needed to render such things noticeable. Their invented data was
routinely bland and neutral, not to say bland and inane, such as I hear with my
ears and My brother is a boy (published examples). For compiling a realistic
grammar, real data in unending supplies are veritably a brave new world.
II.B The double-bind of English teachers
II.11 While I was composing my multidisciplinary tomes back in the 1980s (now
also freely downloadable from this website), I always had the English teacher in
mind. After all, I was one, in title at least, and have remained so throughout my
wandering life. All the more was I troubled by what I saw as I worked, lectured,
and counselled my way around the globe. In West and East Europe, in North and
South America, in Africa, Arabia, Asia, and Australia, English teachers were
being caustically short-changed: in status, esteem, salaries, resources, office space,
and technical support, and, most importantly in my own view, deprived of a
consolidated, coherent programme or mission, whether within the educational
system or within society at large -- and, insult to injury, getting scapegoated for
low standards or even a decline in standards, and by implication, denying
future social opportunities to our learners (cf. II.46, 103).
II.12 Recently, the powers that be (or imagine they be), hoping to save face for
themselves, bombard us with official syllabuses or curricula, which (to
jumble up metaphors) conjure the wish-list of a cloud-cuckoo-land bureaucracy
for English taught by a generation of fairy godmothers, wands at the ready.
22

The Tories excelled in 1988 with their Revised National Curriculum for English
in England and Wales (hereafter NCE) for ages 5 through 16, which stipulates
instilling a command over seventeen distinct forms:
[6] The range of forms in which pupils write should be extensive, eg notes,
diaries, personal letters, formal letters, chronological accounts, reports,
pamphlets, reviews, essays, advertisements, newspaper articles, biography,
autobiography, poems, stories, playscripts, screenplays. (their italics)
The Chair of the Committee that cobbled together this list was Brian Cox,[Note 4]
the waspish co-writer of Black Papers on Education and a of a provocative book
Cox on Cox. Cox says he was dissuaded by Sir J ohn Kingman, chair and
namesake of the predecessor committee (and a professor of mathematics, if you
please), from saying far more about in what ways would it be implemented in the
classroom; Sir J ohn thought that this was not our brief, and that the
complexities of this problem would prevent us from submitting our Report on
time.
23

Posilutely wrong on the first thought, Sir J ohn -- if you tell somebody to go do
something new and difficult, then your brief must be to tell them how -- but
absotively right on the second -- it could indeed not have been submitted on
time.[Note 5] So for English teachers in Britain, the motto for this revision
might read: you just muck in or muck out, and watch out too, because youll be
watched. Crikey, I myself couldnt write all 17 of those forms! Whats more,
Id wager Cox or Kingman couldnt either, not to mention their bosses, the then
Secretaries of State for Education, Kenneth Baker followed by Kenneth Clarke,
both of whom understood hardly more about education than their distant
predecessor in the same post: the frozen soft ice cream specialist and later
Baroness, or better, Ironess, Margaret Thatcher, whose first swat at her job
was to abolish universal free milk for school children.
24

[Baker days were holidays when hapless staff had to donate unpaid labour anyway. In
retirement, Lord Baker wrote a biography of King George IV subtitled
Caricature of a Life, which, to judge from Amazon.com, nobody bought.]

[Clarke is reputed to have taunted his own party chairman, Brian Mawhinney: "Tell
your kids to get their scooters off of my lawn, meaning, I suppose, keep party
members from opposing Clarke, who coveted the chairmans post himself and
25
contested vainly it three times. In student days, he twice invited reformed
British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosely to lecture at Cambridge .]

[Thatchers degree was in chemistry, where she helped develop the first soft ice cream.
Unfortunately for Britain, she changed jobs. To kick off her interminable siege of
Downing Street, she filched from St. Francis of Assisi (friend of the poor!) with pious
cant of this formula: "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error,
may we bring truth. And where there is despair, may we bring hope." She obviously got it
all exactly backwards from what she had in mind and in fact achieved.]
II.13 To complete the cycle of scapegoating, those same powers visit upon us a
galloping charade of teacher evaluations to implicate us as the weak link in the
chain. The forms are designed for computer marking, with a woozy faith in
quantifying everything, say, between 1 and 10. They imply that learners somehow
know, better than their teachers, just what makes teaching good or bad, and just
how the subject-matter should be taught. And -- insult to injury again -- they are
carried out in a cloud of concealment and mistrust that bluntly question the
teachers fairness and integrity, as if we lusted to reward or punish the good or
bad evaluators, or to substitute mysteriously prefabricated and concealed packets
of ten-out-of-ten evaluations along the way to department heads or evaluation
committees. I have known plenty of students who saw only an occasion to vent
their frustration and anger upon the whole university system, irrespective of the
26
identity of the teacher-victim -- which wipes out any remaining vestige of
rationality from the show trial.
II.14 In such a world of curricular ostentations, I have played the role of an itinerant,
iconoclast explaining in frankest terms why this short-changed shop-keeping
forces us teachers to short-change our students too. Many students I spoke with
were just as frankly aware of the abuses, though many bought into the scapegoat
myth, and, at the terms end, wrote snarly teacher evaluations that might better
have been called eviscerations.
II.15 This disheartening situation can hardly improve until teachers and students can
interact upon a unified and consensual foundation, and with genuinely sufficient
resources. What is the rightful subject matter of English, and whose English
is the aim of the enterprise? How should the pieces of the enterprise be fitted
together, such as writing, reading, pronunciation, orthography, literature,
linguistics, and so forth? What processes make writing and reading fluent for
some and not for others? Implicated somewhere among these questions is the
rightful but so far unsettled purview of grammar.
II.16 In my best assessment, English within the native-language educational system
is mainly an enterprise of standardisation. For most learners, the real task is to
acquire an alternate variety of English beside the home variety which they
bring from family and friends and which they are likely to retain outside the
classroom. Now, this task is predictably misdirected by practices that in effect
struggle to intervene and tamper with home varieties whilst spurning them as
incorrect or bad English, and -- insult to injury on this side too -- indicators of
poor manners and low intelligence (cf. II.54). Learners are understandably
bewildered and disaffected, misled to see Standard English as a patent
expurgation or indeed denigration of their own English rather than a coherent
system designed for alternative contexts.
II.17 Meanwhile, the double-bind pinches the grammar teacher most savagely. We
above all others are conjured to be the petty pelting officers of correctness, and
the eradicators of errors that seem most glaring and unforgivable in peoples
grammar. Unable and unwilling to fulfil these captious roles, we are most
vulnerable to such recriminations as you shall presently see ( II.46, 103). But
27
first I should seek to clarify potential designations of the term grammar itself,
and then the one I propose to pursue.
II.C Some precepts for grammar
II.18 Aside from sporadic sallies, I hadnt focused my attention directly upon
grammar until 1997, when I was assigned to a compulsory team-taught third-
year grammar course which lacked tangible teaching resources, much less a
reliable textbook. I was then at the University of Botswana at Gaborone in south
central Africa. A substantial clientele among our 350 or so restive students, fluent
enough in English, would later be English teachers if they werent already, and
deserved workable, accurate materials for future use. And so began in earnest the
explorations whose eventual outcome you see before you.
II.19 My logical first step, I reasoned, was to formulate some basic precepts:
q We should distinguish fundamentally between GRAMMAR (written
here throughout in BLOCK CAPITALS) as the system of guidelines and
strategies actually applied to forms, patterns, and positions by speakers
and writers of English; versus grammar (written here throughout in
ordinary type) as a notion or description of the GRAMMAR sustained or
constructed by some individual or group for such purposes as teaching
children or edifying the general public.
q A grammar should place more emphasis on showing how the attested
patterns of English (PHRASE, CLAUSE, etc.) are put together than on
simply inventing dismantling them for drills like diagramming or
naming the parts (cf. IV.D).
q A grammar can have no firmer legitimacy than it derives from
authentic data as evidence of the GRAMMAR being put to use in
discourse. The grammarians intuition should be harnessed to predict,
test, and interpret data, not to invent them.
q The GRAMMAR is always more encompassing and diverse than even
the most ambitious grammar could describe. In that sense, writing a
grammar is a utopian enterprise that we could always expand or
improve. Having it on a computer for easy data access and easy revision
28
is a godsend, but also a challenge not to be prematurely complacent or
content.
q The GRAMMAR must be so designed that items which are
functionally related (e.g., expressions sharing a topic) can also be
formally related (e.g. phrases sharing a clause). In most discourses, the
functional relations are substantially more flexible and extensive than the
formal ones, so that relevant linguistic expressions, cognitive ideas, and
social traits can sustain an overarching topic far beyond the boundaries of
the single sentence or utterance -- precisely the two officially largest
units of many grammars.
q The GRAMMAR must also be so designed for active integration with
lexical resources in the LEXICOGRAMMAR (cf. II.136ff), which drives
the actual use of the GRAMMAR upon richer cognitive and social bases
(Part V). For example, the familiar TENSES of PAST, PRESENT, and
FUTURE must accommodate the temporal organisation of the
PROCESSES expressed by individual VERBS or indeed diverging uses
of the same VERB. Running for your house [7] must be much quicker
than for the White House [8]; an event can run for years yet only for
a small part of each year [9].
[7] In agony and terror I ran for the house. (Creative Writing)
[8] movie stars had supported John F. Kennedy when he ran for the
White House. (Dustin Hoffman)
[9] First performed in 1946, this series of concerts ran for 37 years,
earning an entry in the Guinness Book of Records. (Brighton
Festival)
And in each usage, the action is radically different. No one would
suppose that Kennedy literally ran for the White House in order to
punch the current president in the nose.
29

Or that the Brighton musicians ran up and down the famous beaches with
their instruments trying not to miss any visitors.

q More precisely, the GRAMMAR of English is in reality a family of
GRAMMARS of Englishes whose members are partly alike and partly
distinct, due to such conditions as history, geography, migration, or
30
social class. Most disputes among grammarians or English teachers are
more or less family quarrels arising from this diversity. We do better
service reporting such disputes as social attitudes than fomenting or
exacerbating them ourselves.
q The personal GRAMMARS of English used by individuals, families,
or groups such as a literary society or a rugby club, constitute a vastly
more numerous and diversified family; perhaps no two are completely
alike. The peril of disputes is still more imminent.
q As if in compensation, the term Standard English -- apparently a
brain-child of the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED) (cf. II.45)
-- has been brandished for over a century as the ultimate model of what
English should be or become, eventually to be imposed on everyone
through standardisation (cf. II.16). Yet inevitably, even Standard
English is a family of Englishes, e.g., British, Canadian, Australian,
South African, or US American. What they have in common may be
the tendencies to model speech upon writing, and to steer away from
distinctly regional usages, like gitty for alleyway (Midlands), fizog
for face (Yorkshire), whigmaleeries for silly whims (Scotland),
culchie for a country person (Ireland), scrut for stupid fool (Wales),
dekey for fashionable (Canada), bludge for shirk (Australia),
gromit for child (New Zealand), or boopie for prodigious belly
(South Africa).
q Contrary to what self-serving grammarians preach, the GRAMMAR
of English does not require explicit grammars to maintain or protect it.
Rather, it is staunchly maintained in the linguistic, cognitive, and social
capacities of the members of the language community. The
grammarians job is not to legislate how the GRAMMAR should be used,
but to report how it is used.
II.20 In my own view, the precepts just stated hardly seem disputatious or radical. But
I must confess they do not represent the practices that have dominated the history
of English grammars I shall review below (II.E). In particular, traditional
grammarians have been complacent in implying that my grammar is the
31
GRAMMAR; and in thereby sustaining the expedient myth that English has only
one GRAMMAR, full stop, all usages outside it being errors.
II.21 I would propose more precise and apt definitions: an error is saying what you
couldnt mean [10-12], and perhaps amending it [12]; a solecism is saying what
you do mean and can be readily understood, but with expressions that are not
commonly so used [13-15]; and a variation is using expressions which are
commonly so used and understood, but in a regional or social variety not accepted
as standard in some other quarters [16-17].
[10] The spacecraft is moved forward by throwing onions out the back. [ejecting
ions] (Emirati student data)

[11] The government should help the ministry of education with funds to
promote the abuse of alcohol and drugs in schools. [publicise]
( Botswana student data)
32

[Ngwao ya Setswana: Setswana cuture. Batho! People! (expressing surprise);
Shakeshake: sorgum beer; boerwors: a beloved local sausage. The image is the
then colourless president, Festus Mogae, who showed scant interest in culture.]
[12] I have heard that two or three dozen native lobsters give an appetite; [...] I
meant oysters (Nickelby)
[13] We should all fall for [choose] the traditional wedding ( Botswana student
data)
[14] They tried to learn English, but their native language was the hamper
[hindrance] (Emirati student data)
[15] Miss Raymond looks smelly [smiley] face but speaks in pride ways. Her
teeth look when she talks, and she owns angry tone. She is a liar person who
lied to disappear her ignorant. (same)
[16] I thought they was going to catch a train, and thats why they was hugging
and kissing and that, but I dunno -- maybe they was just planning to go away or
summat [something]. (Billy Bayswater)
[17] I were just pretending to him, because I aint really full of beans [feeling
spirited]. Truth is, Im still ever so peaky. And them other doctors said I
werent to go back up London for no operation (Paper Faces)
Now, a particular error or solecism may be remedied, yet variations are the most
likely to be singled out for disapproval in grammar books. They belong to the
33
relevant variety as a system, and the English teacher cant just reach in and yank
out an isolated piece, like a dentist extracting one bad tooth. At best, learners
acquire the alternative variety as a system which the educational process accredits,
as I have remarked (II.16).
II.22 A friendly grammar registers attested variations as far as is feasible, at least
from varieties that are accessible. If the long-standing project to standardise
everybodys English has proven unrealistic, the goal of providing more accurate
information about the GRAMMAR of Englishes has not. That goal is if
anything more vital than ever when English in its family of varieties is
ceaselessly expanding its reach, and when its status as a language either of power
or of solidarity hangs in the balance.[Note 6]
II.D The term grammar
II.23 Since the term grammar seems to me vague and unstable, I shall seek to sort
out some uses before pursuing one of my own devising. I begin with uses of the
term for compilations.
II.24 The term reference grammar can apply to compilations purporting to supply a
reasonably comprehensive account of the real GRAMMAR. They are less
intended to be read whole, like a history or a novel, than to be consulted on
specific points or problems, such as agreement of the verb with a group noun.
My personal view, aired back in I.11, is that if some topic or explanation does not
appear in the more substantive referencegrammars (which I have carefully read),
it is unlikely to do so in countless school grammars and grammar handbooks,
accumulated over the years (which I have not read).
II.25 With this factor in mind, I would commend three fairly recent data-based
grammars that I have found invaluable.
34
The Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985, by Randolph Quirk,
Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and J an Svartvik, was in fact a thoughtful
revision of the earlier Grammar of Contemporary English (1972), both based
upon the large Survey of English Usage centred on University College
London.[Note 7]


The quartet of grammarians decided that each would contribute different sections
than before, and a curious permutation ensued:
35
When we started work on it, however, we found ourselves rewriting the whole
grammar, changing its organization, and introducing much additional material
based on the Survey of English Usage. (Geoff Leech)
They had struck upon a phenomenon that was destined to become obtrusive when
ever-larger corpora were made accessible: new attestations appear; subtler
significances come into focus; finer distinctions take shape; and so the appearance
of the GRAMMAR evolves as whole.
II.26 Much the same experience arose from the Collins COBUILD English Grammar
(1990), with J ohn McHardy Sinclair as editor-in-chief.

It was derived from the COllins Birmingham University International Language
Database, which would become the worlds largest corpus: as of 2006, 650
million words of authentic discourse. While still using a small corpus -- the book
vaguely says many millions of words -- the Grammar simply advised:
36
[18] When you want to talk about groups of people who share the same
characteristic or quality, you often choose an adjective rather than a noun as a
headword. [] It is possible to use almost any adjective this way. (p. 21).
In 1996, when the corpus was many times larger, Sinclair pointed out what had
been overlooked: that this pattern is routinely PEJ ORATIVE, applied to groups
who deserve pity and aid: even the 1990 examples should have revealed this trend:
the sick, the blind, the injured, the unemployed. I would further surmise
that the omission of any noun can have a distancing or even dismissive effect of
suggesting these groups are conclusively defined by this sole characteristic. Too
bad, of course, but, well, you know, facts of life
II.27 More recently still, Longman re-entered the field with a computerised corpus for
the ambitious Longman Grammar of Written and Spoken English (1999), by
Douglas Biber, Stig J ohansson, Geoffrey Leech (again), Susan Conrad, and
Edward Finegan.

Though its scope was limited somewhat by adopting the grammatical framework
and concepts of the Comprehensive Grammar of 1985 (p. viii), all examples are
authentic data (often with frequency statistics) directly cited from a computerised
corpus with much American (i.e. US) data, three of the compilers after all being
Yanks (in my sense), and lends renewed importance to spoken data. The books
says the size was over 40 million words of text (p. viii) (but not how far over)
and claims the research-based work required for this project has been on a scale
probably unmatched in the writing of any previous grammar of the English
language (p. vii) -- which I consider unfair to the venerable Otto J espersen,
37
whose Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles,[Note 8] laudably
backed up with authentic data, filled thousands of pages in seven hefty volumes
published over the biblical span of 40 years.

Moreover, I absolutely cannot agree that for many purposes of grammatical
research, the absence of prosodic information may make little difference (p.
1042). One might as well say that you can critique a song without the melody.
II.28 Sensing in its turn that hefty grammar books may be good business, the
Cambridge University Press entered the arena in 2006 with a Comprehensive
Guide to Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage, by Ron Carter and
Mike McCarthy.

38
They had devoted to years producing a grammar based entirely on a large corpus
of spoken English. But the CUP boffins surmised -- correctly, I reluctantly
concede -- that most people who concern themselves with grammar have
written English in mind; and that the population at large is uneasy about whether
and how far speech is really grammatical in the sense dinned in by the schools.
The result was a transmogrified project: a Guide to Spoken and Written English.
Even so, the product betrays its origins in its extensive and respectful coverage of
speech, though the corpus has not been systematically coded for phonetic and
prosodic features, such as intonation contours, loudness, and tempo.[Note 9]
The sound bites on the accompanying CD have been read out, in plummy voices
(one male, one female), by the project team.

The term guide might paper over the traditional ambivalence between
GRAMMAR (how it is used) versus grammar (how it should be used) (cf. II.19).
In fact, affixed to the cover is a quaintly challenging real English guarantee seal
which whimsically seems to have been inspired by a fried egg on a platter,
whence my own seal on my title page.
39

According to J ohn Sinclair, the term real English was adopted by the
COBUILD project in the 1980s without high hopes, yet soon proved a
serendipitous selling point. Since reality is after all a bottomless concept, I
would interpret the meaning as actually attested English not invented simply to
illustrate grammar and usage, even though, framed in a project like mine, it can
illustrate them. Yet I do my best to show that it also does much more whilst
interfacing linguistic, cognitive, and social concerns.
II.29 A reference grammar is chiefly aimed at professionals and specialists. The
terminology is elaborated and technical, as attested by a complex and hierarchical
index. In return, ordinary speakers and writers may have to go wading to locate a
particular point, if they dive in at all. So the quartet at the Survey of English
Usage shown in II.25 split up to produce friendlier versions: A University
Grammar of English, (1973), A Students Grammar of the English Language
(1990), and A Communicative Grammar of English (1972, my fave). Similarly, a
smaller Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English has appeared
(2002). No doubt there will be a compressed Cambridge Grammar in due time.
II.30 The term textbook grammar can apply to compilations, on paper or on websites,
intended for active use in teaching and learning. The safest ones consistently
rely on reference grammars. But the disconcerting tradition has rather been to raid
older textbooks, some going back for centuries; or else to dispense advice and
rules based on personal intuition or home-baked philosophising, which may
seem meaningful for some seasoned teachers, but hardly for untrained learners,
viz.:
40
[19] The sentence is important. Why? Because it gives us a complete thought
which offers clarity. (My Writing Coach)
WWW
[Oho, a sentence fragment!]
[20] The noun is a word used for naming an object of thought; [] the verb is a
word that makes a statement about something else. (Business English)
I could adduce a multitude of sentences lacking in clarity or completeness of
thought [19]; and the distinction frankly eludes me between naming an object of
thought and making a statement [20].
II.31 Even less helpful are explanations clouded in impenetrable bafflegab, as when the
participle and the infinitive were described in these terms: [Note 10]
[21] Although a following participle may be demanded from a preceding verb,
yet it is understood to be written in place of a suppositum, or else it is governed
by the verb through the suffrage of a suspended point, which after a verb
performs the function of a copulative conjunction.
[22] As for the bare infinitive, it can be shown that in all of its uses it implies
that the extra-verbal supports place in time cannot be conceived as a before-
position with respect to the infinitives event. In cases where the bare infinitive
evokes the actualization of its event, the use of the bare infinitive incident
directly to the finite verb implies that the agent who realizes the latter is
directly and simultaneously involved in the action of the infinitive.
I think I could safely offer cash prizes for any English teacher who could explain
what is meant here.
II.32 Worse than any of this is an explanation going plain wrong, viz.:
[23] A proper noun is the name of a religion, person, etc.: Christian, J ewish,
Muslim. (Noun and Verb Center )
WWW

[24] The subject is whatever verb agrees with in person and number. The
predicate [is] whatever follows the subject. (Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace)
[25] So when the copular-verb basic sentence Sir Edmund gave the diatribe is
embedded with an adverb phrase in Twenty years ago Sir Edmund gave the
diatribe, it becomes a complex sentence. (The Well-Bred Sentence)
WWW

[26] The definite article and the indefinite article are of course [!!] adjectives.
(Business English)
41
Evidently, statements about grammar are exempted from critical examination,
even passing the scrutiny of otherwise meticulous editors and publishers. Any
English teacher ought to know that J ewish is not a proper noun [23]; that
parts of the PREDICATE can go before the SUBJ ECT [24]; that a SIMPLE
SENTENCE only becomes a complex sentence by adding a DEPENDENT
CLAUSE [25] (IV.369); and that the distinction between ARTICLES and
ADJ ECTIVES [26] is among the best secured in the whole GRAMMAR.
II.33 To exploit the confusion, miracle textbook grammars promise all things to all
people, quick easy, foolproof. A luminescent instance worthy of P.T. Barnum is
entitled Grammar Crammer (2004), which certainly does cram. Printed on just
136 pages, and subtitled How to Write Perfect Sentences, it is touted on websites
not merely as a concise, sensible grammar handbook that explains lucidly how to
remember correct word forms and sentence structures, but also as a guide for
improving spelling and vocabulary, developing skills for research and note-
taking, and revealing secrets for putting these skills together in great essays.

I notice the same authors have published a tome called How to Improve Damn
Near Everything around Your Home, plus handbooks for the do-it yourself repair
of lawnmowers and snowmobiles. Authors for all seasons indeed.
42
II.34 Meanwhile, the examples of English in many textbooks are patronisingly simple,
not to say silly, viz.:
[27] I hear with my ears.
[28] A cat is not a vegetable.
Authentic data are less predictable before the fact but more memorable after the
fact, viz.:
[29] I heard with wounded Ears your cruel Father give the strict Orders for your
hasty Voyage. (Mary Leapor, The Unhappy Father)
[30] The European Community has decreed that the carrot is not a vegetable --
that it is a fruit. (New Scientist)
We do our learners a disservice by feeding them fictitious examples and
postponing the development of skills to navigate the GRAMMAR of real-life
English.
II.35 The term linguists grammar can apply to a compilation expounding some
theory, model, or description within the academic field known as modern
linguistics.[Note 11] In the early stages, the field inadvertently created its own
prescriptive stance by marking off language in and for itself from the
heterogeneous mass of actual speech facts (Ferdinand de Saussure,
1916).[Note 12]

Though touted as a brilliant insight, this demarcation hamstrung in midair the
linguists who maintained it, like tightrope artists tapped in their own safety net.
43
II.36 But most did not, even if they purported to. The majority of grammars rested on
actual usage -- not some prescriptive remake -- not intended so much to be used in
teaching and learning, as to bring the subject-matter into the purview of science.
Two opposed approaches seem to have dominated the mainstream, or so Im
told. Within descriptive linguistics, the intention was stated like this:
[31] Although a descriptive grammar gives detailed coverage of the facts about a
language, it is not written in a form which can be used directly to acquire
speaking control of the language. (Language Learning)
WWW

Within the more recent generative linguistics, the intention was to further relocate
grammar on a more formal plane of abstraction and technicality:
[32] The construction of a generative grammar represents an attempt to
formulate a system of rules for the formation of the sentences of a language.
(Large Vocabulary)
WWW

The latter approach bodged up a new demarcation between competence for the
abstract language system versus performance for actual speech, which latter
was said to abound in deviant expressions (Noam Avishtai Chomsky).[Note 13]

This approach abjured all ambitions to assist the teaching or learning of
grammar -- a language acquisition device was conjured up for the job anyway.
Indeed, the Maximum Headman has declared:
[33] Your professional training as a linguist [] just doesnt help you to be
useful to other people. (Chomsky again) [Note 14]
44
Well, his training sure didnt help us all that much.
II.37 At all events, an English teacher might well be perplexed by the linguists
portentous ambition to outdo each other in making their grammars look
austerely formal (cf. II.4). Sometimes they chucked out meaning from their
science; replaced real speakers with an ideal speaker-hearer who knows the
language perfectly; and levelled society into a homogenous community.[Note
15] Grammar became a travelling circus of structures and rules to
transform one sentence into another, like a magic hat for making white rats
into white rabbits and vice-versa -- and the whole shebang was advertised as an
explanatory triumph of science. (Science with a capital sigh, as I said.
Nobody laughed.)
II.38 The veriest shibboleths of generativism were two sentences flaunted for
donkeys years like sleeve-patches or bumper-stickers:
[34] J ohn is easy to please.
[35] J ohn is eager to please.
The fact that these superficially identical structures differ by whether someone
pleases J ohn [34] or J ohn pleases someone [35] was trumpeted as an epochal
insight. I need not dwell upon the limpid facts that I found neither sentence
attested in the largest corpora of English (the COBUILD and the BNC), except
when brandishing this same insight; and that neither sentence implies any actual
pleasing (maybe everybody avoided J ohn like a sewer flusher with the avian
flu). Instead, my point would be that I consistently found easy to please in my
EPC with an explicit or implicit NEGATIVE in, e.g. [36]; whereas I found eager
to please in the BNC occurring mostly with an AFFIRMATIVE, e.g. [37].
[36] Why dont you get married yourself, Peg? queried Uncle Roger teasingly.
Because Im not so easy to please as your wife will be, retorted Peg. She
departed in high good humour over her repartee. ( Golden Road )
[37] The local curate [was] a merry young man and yet, quite firm in his
discipline, so that the child was eager to please him and her education made
rapid strides. (Fields in the Sun)
45
On the cognitive side, being eager is more praiseworthy than just being easy.
On the social side, power inheres having people eager to please you [38], but
also in your acting not easy to please [39].
[38] Mauer had barely swung the police car out when the radio crackled into life.
Can I answer it, Sergeant? Mauer smiled to himself. Rookies were all the
same in the beginning, eager to please and desperate to be judged favourably
by their superiors. (Death Train)
[39] The maid-servant [was] represented from time to time by girls of various
extraction, for Mrs. Hurstwood was not always easy to please George, I let
Mary go yesterday, was not an infrequent salutation at the dinner table. (Sister
Carrie)
Mrs. Hurstwood -- in Dreisers words, a type of woman who has ever
endeavoured to shine and has been more or less chagrined at the evidences of
superior capability in this direction elsewhere -- doubtless aspired to power by
firing maid after maid in her own perfectly appointed house with its soft rugs,
rich, upholstered chairs and divans, a grand piano, a marble carving of some
unknown Venus, etc; maybe she would have also let go the Venus for out-
shining her if she werent afraid it might fall on her social climbing foot,
leaving her well and truly chagrined.
II.39 The term corpus-driven grammar can apply to a compilation achieved by direct,
extensive and systematic contact with large corpora of authentic, attested
English. Before this resource became readily available, such data had entered into
grammars by other modes of contact, such as the grammarians prior reading
and occasional, individual citations from respected authors. Now, we can refer
each point to plentiful sets of data and try to finalise our interpretation whilst
selecting the data that seem best to secure it. We can also move well beyond the
formal issues of word or word class (noun, verb, etc) to the functional issues
of usages and combinations. For example, we can single out VERBS used mainly
in the ACTIVE, like elude [40], and VERBS used mainly in the PASSIVES
like be rumoured [41]; they may be hardly acceptable in the opposite uses [40a-
41a].
46
[40] Dorothy Wordsworth found fulfilment in ways that elude precise analysis.
(Missing Persons)
[40a]
??
Precise analysis is eluded by the ways of Dorothy Wordsworths
fulfilment.
[41] [Ukranian pole-vaulter Sergei] Bubka was rumoured to have been
emasculated by the absence of his usual appearance money. (Today)
[41a]
??
The absence of his usual appearance money rumoured Bubka to have
been emasculated.

Wheres the money?
The signal pioneer work was the already mentioned Collins COBUILD English
Grammar, which probed deeper and more delicate levels than most predecessors
(cf. I.14; II.26).
II.40 Whether a grammar can actually be derived from a corpus is a disputed
question. Some version of the real GRAMMAR is undeniably acquired by young
children from lots of data. But an adult grammarian naturally approaches corpus
data with already elaborated notions about the language and its GRAMMAR. Our
work focuses on pondering, reconsidering, adjusting, specifying, or reformulating
those notions, or discarding some and introducing others. So our grammar is not
data-derived so much as data-driven. It reminds me of an exhilarating treasure
47
hunt with many small gems I couldnt seek before because we had different,
sketchy, or misleading maps or none at all.
II.41 Next, I shall try to sort out the uses of the term grammar for viewpoints. The
term traditional grammar can fittingly apply to the viewpoint cultivated during
long European traditions since classical antiquity, often after the models of
the grammars of Latin and, to a lesser extent, Greek. A given usage was most
readily certified grammatical in English if its most direct translation into Latin
yielded a grammatical result -- not workable, say, for a split infinitive or a
preposition at the end of a sentence, still held by some in stern disdain for
English today.
II.42 Traditional grammar has been moodily busied with setting down rules that
prescribe (like a medicine) what users of English should say (e.g. It is I) and
proscribe (like a banishment) what users should not say (e.g. Its me). Such
became the groundwork for the bastion of language guardians who have for
centuries, in the gross and scope of their opinion, been boding some strange
eruption to the state of the English language (cf. II.62, 78, 92, 120; III.3).
They have shirked or spurned the labours of collecting and reporting what users of
English speakers do say, which has been viciously slandered as going out into
the field and finding the most benighted group of speakers or non-speakers [huh?]
and recording every one of their miserable grunts (J ohn Simon in Esquire). Their
latest and trendiest incarnation on the Internet are grammar Nazis. No comment
necessary.
II.43 The moralising overtones may defy belief. A panel of authors and editors,[Note 16]
when asked to judge the use of the ADVERB hopefully to mean it would
hoped that, responded:
[42] It is barbaric, illiterate, offensive, damnable, and inexcusable.
[43] I have sworn eternal war on the bastard adverb.
[44] This is one that makes me physically ill.
[45] Its an abomination, and its adherents should be lynched.
Grammatically, this hopefully is consistent with fortunately or happily as
ADVERBIALS for expressing the speakers attitude about the future, and so
48
cannot be an error. I find it attested both in casual speech [46] and in formal
writing [47]:
[46] Thats really all you could ever ask for, isnt it, a long and he althy life? --
And hopefully, a happy one too. (Denise Bulger in the Liverpool Daily Post)

[47] Hopefully, if the management information system in an organization is one
that reflects control and accountability, [] then the accounting information
thereby generated should demonstrate the attainment of value for money from
public services. (Public Sector Financial Control)
Those peevish judges with the instincts of army ants, who swore eternal war
and clamoured for lynchings had better stockpile weapons and rope for a long
campaign. Grammar Nazis indeed.
II.44 And yet I see less morality than effrontery in the custom whereby rules are
fabricated in defiance of real usage and yet accorded solemn honour and endless
life. The proscription of never begin a sentence with And or But has
survived from one traditional schoolbook to another and even down to the
grammar checker of Microsoft Word XP. However, my EPC containing nearly
every major prose writer of the last three centuries shows 29,973 SENTENCES
(or utterances written down as SENTENCES) beginning with And, e.g. [48];
and 49,917 with But, e.g. [49]. The higher frequency for But reflects its
clearer function of introducing contrary content, which also encourages a division
between sentences.
[48] Little of beauty has America given the world; [] the human spirit in this
new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty.
And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song -- the rhythmic cry of the slave --
stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful
49
expression of human experience born this side of the seas. (W.E.B. Du Bois,
Souls of Black Folk)
[49] Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all
animals and plants have descended from some one prototype. But analogy may
be a deceitful guide. (Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species)

Some advisors on grammar abide the usage but claim it impairs formality:
[50] Contrary to what your high school English teacher told you, there is no
reason not to begin a sentence with but or and; in fact, these words often
make a sentence more forceful and graceful. [Yet] beginning with but or
and does make your writing less formal (Grammar and Style Notes)
WWW

This too is disproved by ample data. Among the consummately formal texts where
the two usages abound, I find Milton s Areopagitica, Lockes Essay Concerning
Human Understanding, and Bertrand Russells Proposed Roads to Freedom.
II.45 The term standard grammar would presumably conform to the view of
Standard English so reverently invoked this many a year (cf. II.19), and would
be the variety patronised by such august authorities as National Curriculum for
English and Microscoffed WORD. It seems to have been a creation of Victorian or
Imperial England and had major repercussions upon the identity of social
classes. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), with
unintended irony, dates its first usage from 1858 for a language variety the OED
itself proposed to define or establish.[Note 17] The OED Supplement of 1933
50
trotted out Henry Sweets complacent assertion from 1908 that it was the
language of the educated all over Great Britain; and, for its own part, the OED
defined standard as applied to the variety of speech of a country that is widely
held to represent the best form -- which hardly covers the main meaning of
standard in ordinary usage, namely usual and normal (COBUILD).
II.46 Since then, the grammar of Standard English has been enshrined as the
hallowed target of nearly all English teaching, which by implication charges us
teachers with a mandate as standard-bearers. The carrot on the linguistic stick
for standardisation is ever economic advancement. The Revised National
Curriculum for English (NCE), cited back in II.12, prods us sharply that we
encourage pupils to be confident in using the grammatical, lexical and
orthographic features of Standard English -- assuming as a matter of course that
we know exactly what those are -- and menaces us with a dire guilt trip should we
fail:
[51] If pupils do not have access to Standard English, then many important
opportunities are closed to them, in cultural activities, in further and higher
education, and in industry, commerce and the professions. [] In our
democracy, Standard English confers power on its users, power to explain [sic]
political issues and to persuade on a national and international stage. []
Those educationalists who deny children these opportunities are confining
them to the ghetto, to a restricted discourse which will close to them access not
only to the professions but also to leadership in national politics.
In August 2006, BBC Online ominously reported a survey by Hertfordshire
University indicating that three-quarters of employers would be put off a job
candidate by poor grammar; they found bad English alienated 77% of the 515
companies it spoke to -- more than twice the 34% annoyed by CV exaggerations.
Everyone involved, including the Beeb, evidently believed to know just what
counts as poor grammar and bad English; no examples were quoted. The only
link I can see between these issues and the reported biggest draw for potential
employers, namely relevant work experience, would be the discrimination
against speakers of regional Englishes who aspire to enter the urban workforce but
cannot point to equivalent experience.
51
II.47 As to what for those grammatical features might be, the NCE itself mentions
only subject-verb agreement and the use of the verb to be in past and present
tenses -- pet peeves of English teachers from time immemorial. At a safe remove,
the compulsory schools of England and Wales are airily enjoined to teach the
standard written forms of nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs,
prepositions, conjunctions and verb tenses -- and presumably to frown
indignantly upon all non-standard spoken forms that affright the fug-filled air in
ghettos. Still, the NCE elsewhere sanctions non-standard forms for effect or
technical reasons, an ungainly phrasing that would make more sense to me as
technically non-standard forms for special effect, like Oliver Mellors teasing the
posh Lady Chatterley with his Darby English:
[52] Appen [i.e. maybe] yerd better ave this key, an Ah min [might] fend for
t bods [birds] some other road. [...] If yer want ter be ere, yoll non want me
messin abaht a th time. She looked at him, getting his meaning through the
fog of the dialect. Why dont you speak ordinary English? she said coldly.
Me! Ah thowt it wor ordinary.
II.48 If the conception of standard has threatened to become an obsession, so too has
the counterpart non-standard, fomenting a timid over-avoidance of wholly
innocuous usages. Quite unaccountably, Richard Grant Whites Words and Their
Uses (1870) spent an entire chapter excoriating the PROGRESSIVE PASSIVE
such as is being built. Not long after, William Cullen Bryant, self-righteous
editor of New York s Evening Post, issued a list of usages forbidden to his
writers, and sure enough, among them was: is being done and all similar
passive forms. I shall merely cite the frequencies on the Internet (via Alta Vista):
is being built at 2,100,000; and is being done at 6,950,000. So much for Old
Bill, the language guardian.
II.49 It seems that the power and commercial advantages of exclusion have a strong
appeal. In a society of evaporating economic opportunities, you wont get rich
yourself selling books to perpetually evaluated teachers or to financially strait-
jacketed parents if (like me) you tell them that their usage or their childrens is
valid if it is attested in general usage. No, you boost sales by cherry-picking
supposedly non-standard usages which you claim trample upon the proprieties
52
of cultivated society, and which just might antagonise a pernickety personnel
boss like Bryant, secretly yearning for a gallows out back to lynch whoever says
hopefully (cf. II.43).
II.50 Sadly, these interventions, which ought to take the biscuit for greed and arrogance,
are far from new. As we shall see in the next section, the long history of English
grammar is largely a dismal charade of fault-finding and scare tactics, witness
such book titles as Richard Baches Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech
(1868), William B. Hodgsons Errors in the Use of English (1881), and -- the
most audacious hyperbole of all -- Vincent Hopper and Ruth Craigs 1001 Pitfalls
in English Grammar (1986), like some vast minefield of Piglets traps to catch
Heffalumps. Since you need at least a little novelty to make profitable sales you
either invent new and different errors from those impugned by your
predecessors, or else rehabilitate theirs as correct after all. The split between
standard versus non-standard will be invoked as long as it generates
marketable commodities.
II.51 The term regional grammar -- the term dialect is overburdened -- can apply to
views of English from a particular region of origin or concentration. The
patchwork of Englishes in Britain , as well as in North America, the Caribbean,
Asia, Australia , and Africa , may well reflect historical trends in migration,
transportation, or colonisation. In lack of long-term recorded evidence, we are
often hard put to tell if regional usage either preserves older forms longer than the
standard or else evolves newer ones faster (cf. IV.154)
II.52 Regional varieties are paradoxically both hardy and elusive. For a long time, they
might survive without leaving reliably direct traces. But many might have been
transmitted indirectly through lifelike characters created by influential writers,
such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy in Britain, or Mark Twain and Harriet
Beecher Stowe in the US.
53


Later, some direct fieldwork was taken up by dialectologists,[Note 18] and
recently complemented by the Oral History Projects or Sound Archives for
regions like Suffolk, Nottinghamshire, and the Orkney Islands, which are now
happily accessible through the BNC (cf. I.8). Also, regional Englishes are going
public in earnest on the Internet. For example, Scots, or Scottish English, of which
a survey by the General Registrars Office in 1996 reported some 1.5 million
speakers -- unbeknownst to the Daily Mail , whose editorial declared it
effectively extinct for generations in 2003 -- is now working out its identity on
the web in respect to matters of pronunciation and orthography, witness sample
[53]. As my transcription shows [53a], most of its distinctness resides in sight and
sound, set off by occasional vocabulary.
[53] I ken the reader micht finnd it haurd gaun, as the feck o readers isna weel-
acquant eneuch wit ti read it as oor een eyes reads Inglis, gollopsin hail
sentences an paragraphs at a quick sklent. We canna coont on ye kennin whit
54
wey things is ettelt ti be sayed; ilka writer haes his or her ain wee hamelt
quiddities sae ye can tell us apairt! As wi aa things, uiss maks maister. (J ohn
Law in the Edinburgh Review)
[53a] I know the reader might find it hard going, as the quantity of readers is not
well-acquainted enough with it to read it as our own eyes read English,
swallowing whole sentences and paragraphs at a quick squint [=glance]. We
cannot count on you knowing what way things are intended to be said; every
writer has his or her own wee domestic quiddities so you can tell us apart! As
with all things, use makes master. (Standpoint)
The Internet offers resources like grammars, word-lists, dictionaries, and
instruction for learners.[Note 19]
II.53 In Australian English, the vocabulary stands out more, not least in the flora and
fauna of that unique continent:
[54] Spinifex plains, mallee scrubs, desert-gum forests, dense thickets of mulga
[and] a few quondongs. [...]. None but West Australian brumbies could live on
such fare (Spinifex and Sand)
The Net helped me out here as well to learn what these expressions mean, and
indeed what they look like:

55

These grasses, shrubs, and trees are ideally adapted to Australia s bush country:
they are tough, hardy, and drought-resistant; they collect the sparse rain by
ingenious means; and after a brushfire, they readily grow back. [The brumby is
apparently a horse released or escaped from domestication, and correspondingly
skilled in foraging from such otherwise indigestible plants.]
II.54 As I have argued, specific regional variations, which may be in reality marks of
solidarity with friends and family, are all too readily misjudged errors if not
marks of low intelligence or wilful spite (cf. II.16). The unctuous guardian
against Slips of Speech in [53] also singled out feller, taters, cowcumbers,
sparrowgrass, and sot, (for sat) -- all of which I used to hear in rural Florida
without sensing any damage to proprieties. To comment or correct them there
folks would be at best plumb reediculus and at worst plumb dangersome.
II.55 Meanwhile, educational policies keep on blithering and dithering. In Scotland, for
example, the National Guidelines proposed respecting the languages that
children bring to school; yet the McGugan Report from the Learning and
Teaching Support Network at Queen Margaret University College in Edinburgh
interpreted a democratic approach to mean that teachers are not obliged to
include any Scots language element in their classrooms (Liz Niven).
56

Again, J ohn Law frankly put the matter spot on:
[54] Ye hae ti fairly howk [dig into, excavate] education policy ti finnd explicit,
thocht-throu support for Scots, an whit ye finnd is nocht but crottles [crumbles,
lichens].
I see no reason to expect sound policy in any country ruled by fat-brained
politicos who happily deploy language variations to divide and rule, and who
dump the blame on us English teachers for the social ills festering in their own
cavalier policies (cf. II.46, 103).
II.56 Ordinary citizens are no more enlightened. They only believe you must have a
proper grasp of English, however oddly this goal may be pursued:
[55] In a swank neighbourhood of Seoul renowned for plastic surgery clinics,
anxious parents drag frightened toddlers into Dr. Nam Woo's office and
demand that he operate on the childrens tongues. J ust a snip in a membrane
and the tongue is supposedly longer, more flexible and -- some South Koreans
believe -- better able to pronounce such notorious English tongue-teasers as
rice without it sounding like lice. In some cases, it really is essential to
speak English properly, said Nam . ( Los Angeles Times)
[56] The rubbish trucks in the Taiwanese city of Tainan announce their arrival
in every street by playing the message Lets talk in English. Three hundred
separate sentences have been recorded. Most are conversational phrases like
How are you? I am fine thank you, some less common, like How much does
a pound of cabbage cost?. The mayor hopes that after a few months of putting
57
out the rubbish, even Tainan s grandmothers and grandfathers will have a
basic grasp of English. (BBC World News)

[Killer litter!]
Better those trucks should advise the ecologically clueless Taiwanese about how
to keep their trash off the streets and out of the landscape.
II.57 As, teachers, we should strive build our own sound policy upon the realities of
English and of Englishes. We can recognise and justify the preference for regional
terms like African-American English in the US and J amaican English in the
UK over more loaded ethnic terms like black English or more invidious social
terms like upper, middle, and lower class English. We can report regional
varieties and variations for what they are: alternative systems that wont be
frowned out of existence. The apparently unstable areas of grammar, such as
forms of PRO-NOUNS and SUBJ ECT-VERB AGREEMENT, are more precisely
multi-stable, i.e., co-existing in multiple systems, each stable unto itself.
II.58 Again, we confront the logic of presenting Standard English as an alternative
system which runs partly parallel to and partly separate from other varieties (cf.
II.16, 21). So far, the typical samples have been too artificial and banal to
represent the system (cf. II.34). Learners are exposed not so much to bad
English (however construed) as to insufficient English in a range of varieties. My
own recourse has been to provide user-friendly training in how to surf selective
corpora or the Internet and then to turn the learners loose on individual projects in
gathering and interpreting reasonably challenging usages in authentic contexts,
58
such as not altogether +ADJ ECTIVE, for a softening that may come off ironic
[57] or sincere [58]:
[57] Ted was not altogether happy at the prospect of explaining to his mother
how he came to be covered with mud down the front of his suit. (Clubbable
Woman)
[58] I was not altogether unhappy at the Publicity Printers during those early
pioneer days. The hard work was interspersed with moments of amusement.
(Memories of the Gorbals)
Poor Ted in [57] was not at all happy in his muddy clobber; the speaker in
[58] was just less unhappy than might have been expected in such hard work.
II.59 The term nation grammar, though perhaps a neologism,[Note 20] may be
addended here, befitting the term nation language established in pointed
opposition to the language of colonial masters or other once-intrusive ruling
classes. As many sites on the Internet confirm, that term is displacing the term
dialect in the Caribbean, e.g., for the Englishes of J amaica and Barbados; and
the term tribal language for Native American languages like Algonquin, Oneida,
and Cherokee. For example, J amaican English, certainly is the de facto language
of that nation, though emigration and the media have transmitted it far beyond
J amaica, notably in reggae music and dub poetry, so named because it is
composed to be dubbed over music soundtracks and to voice political
consciousness.
[59] Wen mi jus come to Landan town
Mi use to work pa [for] di andahgroun
Yu don't get fi [to] know your way aroun (Linton Kwesi J ohnson, Englan
is a Bitch)
59

As such transcriptions indicate, J amaican speech, like Scots, is likely to sound
unfamiliar at first. Yet its GRAMMAR may seem logical in its own way, e.g.,
mi (me) as the general FIRST PERSON PRO-NOUN.
II.60 If the linguistic side of NATION GRAMMAR is clearly demarked by sounds and
forms, the cognitive and social sides support the knowledge and customs of a
common culture and history. Moreover, the defenders and advocates of NATION
LANGUAGES point to the force and wry humour wherein they can surpass
standard English, e.g., in Nigerian English: [Note 21]
[60] Betta dey for Okra soup =>Good times are coming.
[61] Condition make crayfish bend =>Under very bad conditions, people do
unthinkable things.
[62] Wetin concern agbero with overload?
What-for is-concerned an agbero with an overload? =>Why should a man
care who is already troubled more than enough? [Agbero is a Yoruba word
for a manual carrier of heavy loads, disdained as the lowest type of work.]
West Africans who strain to sound British are talking blow oyinbo in Nigeria
(oyinbo is Yoruba for white man), and booklong in Ghana ; neither term is
altogether flattering. (Also, Im told that in Haitian French, the Phrase fai la
France , i.e., try to talk European French, means talk a lot and say nothing.
Insert your own joke here.)
II.61 To conclude this section, I shall review some uses of the term grammar for
participants. The term grammarians grammar might seem a tautology if it did
not apply to such great diversity of notions, both internal and external, and differ
60
in significant ways from grammar as understood among ordinary language users.
Internally, we may be trained by grammar-books; or follow our intuitions; or
absorb our grammars from extensive reading and noting of respected authors; or
work from large-corpus data; or, like me, we may do all of these. We may be
monolingual native speakers of English, and some indeed of Standard English
only; or may be multilingual speakers who derive from their fluency in other
languages a comparative and contrastive perspective on English grammar.
II.62 Externally, we may be impelled to work at cross-purposes with other fields, such
as literary studies or linguistics. We may endure a hail of hair-splitting cavils from
blinkered language guardians. We may be called to account by irate parents and
opportunist politicians. And outside of native-speaker regions, we may run across
cultural clichs about Britain or the United States , neither of which
countries, as of 2007, is ardently beloved worldwide among other nations or
cultures.
II.63 We would be sanguine indeed to assume that such an array of internal and
external factors would shape all grammarians grammars into a single, uniform
mould. Yet my experience leads me to surmise that some such assumption is
implied in common practice. For example, none of my colleagues in Botswana
addressed the fact that my own grammar must differ signally from those of the
three African teachers on the same team. The students could hardly fail to
notice it, and blamed me with rather more energy than courtesy. Which didnt
prevent the enormous group from devouring my stacks of handouts the way
a Botswana elephant devours a tree -- an unforgettable sight, I can testify.
61

II.64 Since we all had to do follow-up tutorials in the British manner -- wholly
unsuited to the temperament of young Africans -- I sat in on some lectures of
those colleagues, two native to Botswana and one to Ghana. I confess I was
gobsmacked by some of their pronouncements. One gave the class a definition of
the phrase as two words without a verb -- no verb phrases in her grammar,
eh? Another insisted that English grammar has exactly two tenses, past and
present -- the future disqualified, I suppose, for lacking the distinct form of a
single word.
II.65 And so we shall also need the term teachers grammar applying to the notions of
English teachers who are not specifically grammarians, though grammar
routinely appears on their agenda. Despite similar internal and external factors, the
formal training of English teachers in such programmes as Applied Linguistics,
Language Education, and (occasionally) English Departments is substantially
more explicit, systematic, and widespread. Universities such as
Edinburghand Georgetown have created special centres with exemplary results.
The British Council and the United States Information Service have contributed,
though their missions may get admixed with cultural chauvinism when right-wing
governments rule at home. At the other extreme are the bizarre policy shifts which
virtually preclude training, such as occurred in China in the 1950s and Eastern
62
Europe in the 1990s, when hordes of Russian teachers were abruptly
commandeered to be English teachers.
II.66 At any rate, I surmise that the grammars of English teachers of whatever
provenance are less uniform than are their approaches to issues like
pronunciation and orthography. I would cite as evidence the manifest
inconsistencies of marking and correcting, in gory reds, the putative
grammar errors perpetrated by learners. In various countries, I have observed
non-native teachers marking as ungrammatical usages that were in fact
grammatical enough in my English but simply unfamiliar to them. In Singapore , I
was told by my students whose parents were English teachers that the latter were
required by law to correct every error. I doubt many were actually brought to
trial and remanded to teach English to the labour unionists and political dissidents
languishing in Changi Prison; but the orgies of unaccountable correcting I
detected seemed sadly inevitable.
II.67 Youd think the picture would be brighter in English-speaking countries, but actual
studies have given little cause to rejoice. In one large-scale study in Michigan ,
secondary school teachers were given student essays and told to mark and label
all the errors. The judgements of most teachers were in the minority on at least
some examples, and over 35% of the labels given were inaccurate; besides, many
of items marked were not errors at all, e.g., she is arriving tomorrow in
PRESENT TENSE for future time. Evidently, even native speakers in active
practice share a similar insecurity about grammar and usage.[Note 22] Another
project with inexperienced instructors found a yet stronger tendency to mark non-
existent errors.[Note 23]
II.68 Such data suggest that teachers grammar may seem permeated by a pejorative
orientation, as if the real GRAMMAR were an inexorable concordat legislating
what you must not say or write -- an intimidating if not downright paralysing
concept for teaching or learning. The really tough problems in writing do not
involve grammar in a narrow sense, but in a broad sense as a powerful tool for the
organisation of discourse: what you should put where and how you can fit the
pieces and ideas of the discourse together clearly, logically, and forthrightly in
clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. (If there is such a thing as bad English, the it
63
would be the sort of indigestible bafflegab we saw in [22] about the bare
infinitive.)
II.69 As the complementary term, learners grammar is the most problematic of all.
Obviously, it cannot match the teachers grammar, or no further schooling would
be deemed necessary. And, and to judge from my own observations, it shows yet
greater variation. In classrooms where students can choose their own seats, those
whose grammar is closest to the teachers also sit the closest and answer the
quickest; the opposite holds for those who sit furthest away in the back rows, and
answer hesitantly, inaudibly, or not at all. The teacher is essentially teaching
grammar to the front rows (who need it the least), whilst the back rows tune out
or fall asleep -- predestined ciphers in the grim statistics whereby English is,
along with Maths, the school subject with the highest failure rate, even in English-
speaking countries!
II.70 Teachers should be wary of supposing that the term grammar has much the same
meaning for the learners as it does for themselves. One textbook finesses the
complexities of the sentence by opening with the serene pronouncement you
speak in sentences.[Note 24] Another textbook enacts a stealthy shift from we
(teachers) to you (learners):
[63] We are aware of the Noun-like quality of the subjects and the Verb-like
quality of the predicate, whether or not we can explain them. If you are asked
to divide a sentence into two parts, you will invariably divide it between
subject and predicate.[Note 25]
If this optimism were justified, we would not face the problem that learners do not
invariably divide sentences the way their teachers do -- quite apart from
potentially inappropriate divisions that we teachers may make, such as
Subject before Predicate, encouraged by the textbook cited as [24] in II.32.
II.71 Botswana is a country that seemed too barren to be much (ab)used by its British
colonial masters who (unaware of masses of diamonds below
the ground) quietly left in 1966; and retains English as a Second Language for an
urban elite, and as a Foreign Language for most others. Thus, some students
showed near-native fluency in grammar, although the cognitive control was not
always crystal clear:
64
[64] His typewriter has bad intensions: The expression is metaphorical. The
sentence may be interpreted to mean that the typewriter has bad attitude of
making mistakes.
[65] I could see to it how and why teachers are promoted not like today that you
can see just shaking trees with moving leaves thinking that they can do
something when making herbs with them but all in vain after these trees were
promoted.
Other Botswana students managed their grammar less securely, viz.:
[66] I met an envelope written my name.
[67] A minister of education should understand all the wants and unwants.
[68] I then saw a lady at the party. She was fat. I wanted to say You, please try
to take only few food without fatty; or You should eat weightless food.
The teaching of grammar as a subject-matter bred exotic bloomers on exams, viz.:
[69] This sentence can be splilted into various parts of speech that every
sentence belong.
[70] If an utterance breaks down it shows it is an acceptable sentence.
[71] My unmarried sister is married to a bachelor: This sentence may nullify a
marriage.
Such problems may well reflect the stilted quality of the assigned textbooks.
II.72 The United Arab Emirates is another country that seemed too barren to be much
(ab)used by its British colonial masters, who (unaware of the
oceans of oil below the ground) quietly left in 1971. But the presence of English
today is far less stable than in Botswana. Whereas much everyday business is
handled by expatriates, chiefly from India and Egypt , who are quite fluent in
their own Englishes, young Emirati learners fluctuate dizzily due to cultural and
religious factors, such as the familys openness or closedness toward the West.
Local pedagogy, as reported by my students, is sometimes abysmal, as when
learning consists of gollopsin hail paragraphs by heart that are expected on the
exam -- a debilitating extreme of what in educational circles is known as
backwash. So I readily understood when one student wrote: I spent nine years
learning English without learning it. Whilst some students were supported by
outside access to English in mass media or foreign travel, others were blankly
65
unprepared to produce their own discourse, and bravely struggled to invent
English grammar on the spot, viz.:
[72] English teacher must knowing how spokening the English well.
[73] When the teacher was studing she didnt a special courses in teaching which
make her dont know anythings.
[74] If anyone dressed by the name footman he will be shame that they dont
even want to wear their clothes. In the US was not respect and tricker man and
swindle person.
II.73 My attempts to teach grammar, at least the formation of the basic CLAUSE
patterns of ACTIVE, PASSIVE, and MEDIAL (the last of which they couldnt
seem to grasp), eventuated in some stupefying data on exams, such as these
conversions:
[75] My sample: Mr Bingley soon made himself acquainted with all the principal
people. (Pride and Prejudice)
Student response: Acquainted has made soon by Mr Bingley himself.
[76] My sample: Mrs Bennet fidgeted about in her chair, got up, and sat down
again. (same)
Student responses:
The chair was fidgeted up and down by Mrs Bennet.
Getting up and sitting down got fidgeted in her chair.
It was fidgeted about, got up, and sat down on the chair by Mrs Bennet.
Mrs Bennet's chair was fidgeted about, was got up, and was sat down again.
II.74 Although I assiduously read several books on the formidable (not to say
forbidding) grammar of Arabic, I did not succeed in grasping the logic behind
such wondrous student data. What was vitally needed and nowhere supplied was a
data-based comparative and contrastive grammar for standard English and
standard Arabic, which could then be the guide for compiling of a learners
grammar of English for native speakers of Arabic.



66
Notes to Part II, Number 1
1. The three terms used here are substantially broader than the orthodox three-fold
partition of linguistics into grammar (or syntax), semantics, and
pragmatics. As for the systems, my earlier work (e.g. Beaugrande 1980, 1984,
1997) used virtual and actual, but had to change the former term to
potential when virtual reality became a marketed commodity.
2. Such is most prominent in my books (all the English ones being posted for free
downloading on this same website): Text, Discourse, and Process: Toward a
Multidisciplinary Science of Texts (1980); Text Production (1984); New
Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse (1997) and A New Introduction
to the Study of Text and Discourse (2004). My resolve was evidently felicitous,
coming at a stage when these disciplines had grown stagnant in their isolation.
3. For a detailed examination of these agendas, see my recent cyberbook New
Introduction on this website.
4. I scoured the Net for a photo of Cox too, but there are none; nor indeed are there
many mentions of him at all, despite his feisty book.
5. H.G. Widdowson told me that the Kingman Committee had in fact produced
classroom materials, which the Tories suppressed at Clarkes instigation, because
he didnt like the look of them, i.e., were not enough like traditional grammar-
books.
6. See Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (London: Longman1994); and Donaldo Macedo, Bessie Dendrinos, and
Panayota Gounari, The Hegemony of English (Boulder CO: Paradigm, 2003).
7. The data were not computerised. The initial target size of sampling was the usual
million of those times, but exact size when these books came out was not
published. Prof. Leech recently told me (November 2005) that the examples cited
in the books were corpus-informed rather than corpus-based.
8. This work is currently offered on Amazon at US $2,475 (!) from a Germanische
Bibliothek, who teutonically listed it as an elementary handbook. Among the
rest of his monumental opus, Essentials of English Grammar was reissued in
paperback by theUniversity Alabama Press in 1964; his Philosophy of Grammar
of 1910 was finally reissued University of Chicago Press in 1992. But his books
67
On Some Disputed Points in English Grammar (1929), The System of Grammar
(1933), Logic & Grammar (1948), and How to Teach a Foreign Language (!!)
(1967) are all bleakly listed out of print. Bloody shame, says I.
9. Cambridge Grammar of English, p. 364.
10. [21] is an fine sample of the almost mystical complexity of medieval grammar
from the Notule auree of Boncompagno of Signa (ca. 1170-1240), who boasted
that my books are exalted like the cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus), which, we recall,
were the trees of the Lord and full of sap (Psalms 104:16). The term
suppositum was expounded by the 14
th
-century scholastic philosopher William
Ockham (or Occam) as a complete being, incommunicable by identity, not apt to
inhere in anything, and not sustained by anything; see his Quodlibeta Septem IV/7,
in the critical edition of J . Wey, Opera Theologica (St. Bonaventure, NY:
Franciscan Institute Press, 1980), vol. 9, pp. 328f . The website for [22] is
contemporary and has been removed from the Internet since I culled it.
11. Among my own books, the most thorough treatment can be found in Linguistic
Theory: The Discourse of Fundamental Works (London: Longman, 1991), also on
this website.
12. From Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966, p. 14), the
English translation by Wade Baskin of Saussures Cours de linguistique gnrale,
posthumously compiled and published in 1916 -- and, as I have shown, riddled
with self-contradictions.
13. From Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965, p 3f.
201) -- as I have shown, riddled with pompous absurdities. See now my case
study Performative speech acts in linguistic theory: The rationality of Noam
Chomsky, in Journal of Pragmatics 29, 1998, 765-803.
14. In Chomskys interview with Gary Olsen and Lester Faigley, Language,
politics, and composition, in Gary Olsen and Irene Gales (eds.), Interviews:
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois UP, 1991), p. 88).
15. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 93; and
Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. 1965), pp. 3ff.
68
16. Quoted in Sidney Greenbaum, Good English, his Inaugural Lecture at
University College London in 1984, p. 14.
17. However, the OED overlooked an earlier use in 1844 in the Proceedings of the
Philological Society.
18. A distinguished pioneer in the direction indicate was my fellow Austrian Hugo
Schuchardt, whose Kreolische Studien (Vienna: C. Geroldssohn, 1882-91) was a
landmark far ahead of its time. For an English edition, see now his Ethnography
of Variation: Selected Writings on Pidgins and Creoles, edited and translated by
T.L. Markey (Ann Arbor : Karoma Publishers, 1979).
19 A good start is www.scots-online.org (Pittin the Mither Tongue on the Wab!),
which leads to 25 graded lessons, English-to-Scots vocabulary list, verb tables,
dialogues, and so on. Similar sites are also appearing for the Englishes of Wales
and Ireland, companion victims of Englands voracious greed and aggression.
About time!
20. I find it on the Internet only applied a few times to Arabic, without explanation,
in the Zeitschrift fr Arabische Linguistik, which we dont get hereabouts. Perhaps
it signifies the diverging varieties of Arabic in many nations.
21. Thanks to the website Babawillys Dictionary of Pidgin English Words and
Phrases.
22. Sidney Greenbaum and J ohn Taylor, The recognition of usage errors by
instructors of freshman composition, in College Composition and
Communication, 1981, 32, p. 173.
23. George Deaux, The writing project for faculty from disciplines other than
English, in Ann Humes, Bruce Cronnell, J oseph Lawlor, and Larry Gentry (eds.),
Moving between Practice and Research in Writing (Los Alamitos: Southwest
Research Laboratory, 1981), pp. 75-79.
24. Helen Mills, Commanding Sentences (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1979), pp. 1f.
See now my paper Sentence first, verdict afterwards: On the long career of the
sentence, WORD 50, 1999, 1-31.
25. Patricia Moody, Writing Today (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981), p. 310.


69
PART TWO Number TWO
II .E A bref historie of English GRAMMAR and grammar
II.75 Since English grammar has had an epochal history, and since many of its issues
and problems are more of historical nature than seems widely understood, I shall
pass a brief retrospect under the suitably archaic title. We dont know how long
English of any kind has been in use, because in early years it was almost
exclusively spoken. English seems to have evolved (saving your reverence) like a
pidgin (Robert McNeills term in the BBCs Story of English). Its basis was a
merger of two similar varieties of Low German (i.e., spoken in the low
northern plains of present-day Germany) imported by invaders in the 5
th
century
-- the Angles (whose name stuck in Eng-land) and the Saxons (whose name
today figures in historical discourse) -- adventurously mixed with the indigenous
Celtic, plus the Latin, Norse (or Norwegian), Danish, and Norman French of
further invaders. Since long-distance communication was sporadic and weak, the
mixing yielded a menagerie of varieties -- e.g., east versus west, and north versus
south, plus the outlying islands -- partly still audible today.
II.76 As an alternative to the German-flavoured term Anglo-Saxon, scholars have
settled upon Old English, which began to leave dim records somewhere around
600 A.D. (The cited dates for the stages of English are all in dispute, because
surviving evidence is sparse or cryptic, and the shifts were ragged and gradual.)
To name the varieties, some settled regions were chosen: Northumbrian and
Mercian in the north, plus Kentish and West Saxon in the south. The last of
these four, the idiom of the wise and scholarly King Alfred, left a substantial
literature and may well rank as the main base for the Old English that was
poised to become a national language.
70

They wrote in a picturesque alphabet known to us as futhark, which you will see
in III.1, and which was displaced by a version of the Roman despite the
ungainly fit.
II.77 Purely for illustration, heres a famous sample , displayed in a Romanised
alphabet, from an epic poem composed perhaps in the 7
th
or 8
th
century by an
unknown poet [Note 26] about the combat between the illustrious warrior
Beowulf and a monster or dragon.

I provide first a piece-by-piece translation between the lines to suggest at least
occasional similarities with modern English, and then an idiomatic translation.
71

[77a] Hatred was aroused, the warder of the [treasure] hoard recognised the
mans speech. There was no time to sue for peace. First came forth the breath
of monster out of the stone cave and hot sweat of battle; the earth resounded.
The text looks strange to us today for potent reasons. (Never mind how you sue
for peace with a mega-lizard snorting smoke and fire into your face.) The vowels
have since been radically shifted, whence the swarm of oddities in the spelling of
Modern English pointed out in Part III. Besides, much Old English vocabulary
was later replaced by items borrowed mainly from French, Latin, and Greek (cf.
II.109). And back then, the GRAMMAR could rely more on the forms of words
and less on their positions than does Modern English.
II.78 This period in history also beheld the first surviving work in England on
grammar, inscribed by an abbot fittingly known to us as lfric the
Grammarian (lived about 955-1020 A.D.) He already personified a forefather of
generations of language guardians (in the sense of II.42) when putting a self-
seeking request for his work into the mouths of ignorant children:
[78] We children beg thee, oh teacher, to teach us to speak because we are
ignorant and speak incorrectly. What do you want to say? What do we care
what we say, provided it is correct speech and not foolish or bad?
Alfies grammar was itself bilingual (Old English Latin), but was composed
only for teaching Latin to tender boys (pueris teneris) as opposed, perhaps, to
futhark hooligans (cf. II.98), and largely adapted from the work of ancient
grammarians like Donatus (4
th
century) and Priscian (5
th
century).
72

Expropriating from predecessors has remained a hallmark of traditional
grammar to this very day and sheds an uncanny light on the very term and on the
resistance to change.
II.79 After about 1150, Middle English was firmly established. It resembled Modern
English far more closely, and was fortunate to find its master user in Geoffrey
Chaucer.

Now I can do without a piece-by-piece translation in [79], and my idiomatic
translation in [79a] looks fairly similar to the original. As you see, the forms of
words have been simplified, and their positions are not so radically different from
Modern English.
[79] Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
73
And palmers for to seeke strange strands,
To ferne hallows couth in sundry lands;
And specially, from every shires end
Of Engleland, to Canterbury they wend,
The holy blissful Martyr for to seek,
That them hath holpen, when that they were sick. (Canterbury Tales, 1386)
[79a] Then folk long to go on pilgrimages,
And pilgrims for to seek strange shores,
To distant holy places known in sundry lands;
And specially, from every shires end
Of England, to Canterbury they wend,
The holy blissful Martyr [St Thomas a Becket] for to seek,
That has helped them when they were sick.
By the 14
th
century, English was ascending the status of a national language,
dominantly used in Parliament and the law courts, though I find no indicators that
it was deemed a worthy subject-matter for grammars.
II.80 From the 14
th
or 15th century onward, we find ample documentation of Early
Modern English. Most of it is not unduly hard to read. e.g. [80], and some
contemporaries were already trying to improve on it [81].
[80] They sell their malte to ale wyffs [wives] at their own price, and causeth all
the towne to be ale-typlers [tipplers] (Richard Layton, 1537)
[81] I, William Caxton, a simple personne, have [] sommewhat chaunged the
rude and old Englisshe that is, to wete [to wit], certain words which in these
days be neither usyd ne [nor] understanden. (1475)
Having himself introduced the printing press to England, Caxton had commercial
as well as scholarly motives for reforming old Englisshe.
74

He did not get the rudeness out -- I doubt anybody could -- though HRH Prince
Charles seems to think it has resulted from a recent decline (II.102).
II.81 Even whilst losing ground to English as a language of power in England for affairs
of state and law, Latin retained a curious grip on language education as long as
grammar meant Latin grammar, which Bishop William Wykeham, in the
charter of his College at Winchester (1378), declared the foundation, gate, and
source of all the other liberal arts. (Stockport Grammar School).
BNC


75
II.82 In line with my opening premise in II.1, this high esteem for Latin should
have its three sides too. On the linguistic side, famous classical works in Latin
and Greek have been judged the very models of refined and elegant usage, notably
in the oratory and poetry already esteemed among ancient authorities like
Aristotle and Demetrius. No doubt English seemed to some more elegant when
translated:
[82] The standard of learning attained was high, as was illustrated when the
pupils [...] translated many English sentences into elegant Latin with great
dexterity. (Ayrshire Heritage)
However, such refinement could profit from the orderly GRAMMARS of Latin
and Greek, where the distinctive forms of words enabled elegant variations in the
order of words.
II.83 On the cognitive side, the classical works convened an imposing treasury of
knowledge: culture, philosophy, history, myth, natural science, astronomy,
mathematics plus geometry, and so on. Long after English had become the
respected national language, some works on such subjects were still written in
Latin, partly to garner prestige, and partly to attract an international readership.
Even in recent times, the study of the classical languages has been thought to
cultivate high mental faculties:
[83] Arts graduates who have risen through the ranks of the meritocracy []
stress the inherent educational value of such subjects as classical languages
(Greek and Latin) [to] encourage the development of sensitivity, subtle and
flexible reasoning, intellectual ingenuity (Study for Survival)
BNC

On the social side, knowledge of Latin has been held essential to the training
of a gentleman:
[84] At Oxford and at Cambridge, the new science degrees (like those in modern
languages and history) led to a BA, and knowledge of Latin and Greek was
essential for would-be students of chemistry or physics. This was because a
degree was part of the training of a gentleman (The Age of Science)
II.84 However, in all my collection of English discourse from Shakespeare to the
present, I find not a single mention of gentlemen actually speaking or
conversing in Latin among themselves. All I found were Barbarians (!) [85],
76
and Dr Samuel Johnson, who at times hardly cared if he seemed a gentleman or
indeed if he was understood [86].
[85] The Barbarians were ambitious of conversing in Latin, the military idiom of
the Eastern empire (Decline and Fall)
[86] While Johnson was in France, he was generally very resolute in speaking
Latin. [] To a Frenchman of great distinction, he would not deign to speak
French, but talked Latin, though his Excellency, a distinguished member of the
Royal Academy, did not understand it, owing, perhaps, to Johnsons English
pronunciation (James Boswell)

(My sandonic transciption follows H. P. Lovecraft, who reported that Dr Johnson
was saying "Vir est acerrimi Ingenii et paucarum literarum"). Too bad loyal
Boswell didnt tell us how Dr J fared speaking Latin to French innkeepers and ale-
wives. But then Boswell probably handled all that.
II.85 The most visible and durable heritage of this long tradition has been the
widespread adoption and retention of Latin-based terms (like subjunctive) in
compiling grammars of English.[Note 27] Some early grammarians
straightfacedly justified this recourse on the grounds that the English language had
no proper GRAMMAR of its own.
II.86 The triumph of English as the language of the nation was probably aided by
several factors. After the laceration during the War of the Roses, the House of
Tudor, under the able administrator Henry VII, founder of the Privy Council and
77
the Star Chamber, re-established England as a formidable powerhouse of rapid
expansion and discovery in government, technology, commerce, and exploration.

The so-called English Renaissance vigorousy absorbed the Renaissance on the
continent of Europe, stirring new interest in literature and culture, and translating
into English a flood of works from ancient and modern languages. And the
printing press, introduced by that not-so simple personne William Caxton (
II.80), greatly expanded access to written English. However, these same factors
also helped to intermingle English with foreign languages via translation and
creation of new lexical items.
II.87 The triumph of English also animated a colourful gallery of presumptive
authorities to expound its grammar, often closely linked up with orthography: a
novelist (Daniel Defoe), a mathematician (John Wallis), an essayist (Joseph
Addison), a Hebrew professor turned Bishop (Robert Lowth), a chemist (Joseph
Priestley), a war profiteer (Lindley Murray), a lexicographer (Noah Webster), a
dean of Canterbury (Henry Alford), a Shakespeare editor (Richard Grant White), a
teacher of Sanskrit (Fitzedward Hall), a newspaper editor (William Cullen Bryant),
and of course a brace of schoolmasters (such as Robert Cawdre, Elisha Coles, and
Richard Mulcaster).
II.88 The earliest publication I know of was William Bullokars Booke at large, for the
Amendment of Orthographie for English speech (1580), which also contained the
78
first grammar for Englishe that ever waz, for easie, speedie, and perfect use of
our own language and hence no small commoditie of the English Nation,
which he edified with the homey homily, when truth trieth, error flieth. At any
rate, it was too large and he conceded as much when he published his Bref
grammar for English (1586). The timing was opportune: England was blossoming
as the language of government, scholarship, and literature among a vivacious
circle around Queen Elizabeth I. Rare Ben Jonsons English Grammar followed
in 1640, and John Walliss Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae in 1653 -- this last
written in Latin, no less, but about English for foreigners, and sensibly
questioning the validity of Latin grammar as a model for English.

It was Wallis who enforced the slippery rule dividing shall (FIRST PERSON)
from will (SECOND and THIRD PERSONS) for the FUTURE TENSE and just
the reverse for expressing a determination; this meddling had no basis in general
usage, where shall could signal determination and will either wish or simple
FUTURE:
[87] Tell them there thy fixed foot shall grow till thou have audience. (Twelfth
Night)
[88] If you will be married to-morrow, you shall; and to Rosalind, if you will.
(As You Like It)
79
[89] That quaffing and drinking will undo you (Twelfth Night)
Yet, like many others, this rule has survived from one grammar-book to another
even into my own school days.
II.89 During the span of Later Modern English, dating perhaps from the Elizabethan
era, an English Academy was repeatedly advocated to monitor and manage the
language, by powerful authorities like John Dryden (who banned prepositions at
the end a sentence because Latin disallows them), John Evelyn, Daniel Defoe, and
Jonathan Swift (who nearly succeeded).

Beyond the Atlantic, an American Academy was proposed for the same purpose,
by President John Adams for one.
II.90 No doubt the primary model was the redoubtable Acadmie Franaise, which has
been the inspiration for language academies ever since its founding in 1635. Its
80
declared mission was working with all possible care and diligence to give
certified rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of
treating the arts and sciences (Article XXIV, my translation). Its dictionary was
first published after 59 years in 1694, and now in 2006 is emerging in a massive
ninth edition. It also published its grammar after a mere 298 years in 1932 and
never again; nor, curiously, can I discover any mention of it on the Acadmies
current website, (www.academie-francaise.fr), which waxes eloquent about the
dictionary.
II.91 According to that same website, its 40 members are dubbed immortals and
denominated as
[90] poets, novelists, men of the theatre, philosophers, doctors of medicine, men
of science, ethnologists, art critics, men of the military the state, the church (my
translation)
I see here no grammarians or lexicographers, though mile Littr, whose
dictionary remains a classic, is among the, erm, dead immortals.

The wording as quoted is not entirely felicitous: alongside 35 men, 5 women sit
(sedately, one imagines).
81
II.92 Across the Channel, the essay Of Academies (1697) by Mr Defoe, of Robinson
Crusoe fame, envisioned a Society of allowd Judges of Stile and Language,
whose powers would be
[91] to polish and refine the English Tongue, and advance the so much neglected
Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to
purge it from all the Irregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have
introducd.
The moralising tone was more intrusive yet in Jonathan Swifts immodest
Proposal for Correcting, Improving, and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712):
[92] I am apt to doubt whether the Corruptions in our Language have not at least
equalled the Refinements of it; and these Corruptions very few of the best
Authors in our Age have wholly escaped [due to] the Licentiousness which
entered with the Restoration [i.e., of Charles II in 1660].
Swifts aspirations to fix English unmasked him confusing change with
corruption, as do many language guardians:
[93] what I have most at heart, is that some method should be thought on for
ascertaining and fixing our Language for ever, after such Alterations are made
in it as shall be thought requisite. (his italics)
II.93 Subconsciously, Dean Swift and like-minded language-fixers may have hoped
to smooth away historical memories of English as the idiom of invaders, serfs, and
pirates (in that order); or they may have just wanted to hold English steady
enough that their own works would be readable for ever. Consciously, at any
rate, they were voicing the aspirations of British 18th century, when the Age of
Enlightenment was rife with projects for the perfection of humanity (cf. III.13).
II.94 In the meantime, English had passed from a nation language to an empire
language, as far-flung regions joined the British Empire at gunpoint (or
cannon-point), and, by the time they escaped, much wearier, sadder, and poorer,
were using firmly entrenched varieties of English (cf. I.8). Independence often
meant passage into the British commonwealth -- a truly Orwellian title for the
concentration of wealth in Britain. In parallel, power passed from the colonial
masters to an indigenous English-speaking elite, who have revelled in sending
their children to Britain to attend school (and to buy a car and electric appliances),
82
or at least to local schools with a British teaching staff. They have naturally
esteemed good (i.e. British) English and correct grammar patently distinct
from the local varieties inherited from colonialism.
II.95 As an empire language, that same English formerly disdained for official or
scholarly discourse was now declared the very language of greatness. The 19
th
-
century organisers of the national dictionary mentioned in II.43 (eventually the
OED) vowed to record the race of English words which is to form the dominant
speech of the world. Thomas Babington Macaulay, once appointed to the
Supreme Council of India, went over the top and then some in his Minute on
English Education:
[94] English stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. []
Whoever knows that language has a ready access to all the vast intellectual
wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have hoarded in the course of
ninety generations. [Note 28]

A Chauvinistic MacNugget DeLuxe -- English hasnt even been in existence for
90 generations (more like 30), and has been used by plenty of the dumbest nations
(insert your own joke here) -- but the good Baron had at least one fictitious soul-
mate in a picturesque Dickens character:
83
[95] With an unshaken confidence that the English tongue was somehow the
mother tongue of the whole world, only the people were too stupid to know it,
Mr Meagles harangued [French] innkeepers in the most voluble manner,
entered into loud explanations of the most complicated sort, and utterly
renounced replies in the native language of the respondents, on the ground that
they were all bosh. (Little Dorrit)
This cheerful and fluent Briton looked on the bright side:
[96] Im an old traveler, and all foreign languages and customs are alike to me --
I never understand anything about any of em. Therefore I cant be put to any
inconvenience.
So when he got denounced to the police as a good-for-nothing and a thief,
such opprobrious language he bore with the best temper, having no idea what it
meant.
II.96 Even J.R. Firth, who, as Britains first Professor of General Linguistics at the
University of London, ought to have guarded more academic tact, proclaimed
modern English the most advanced language in the history of mankind, and the
greatest social force in the whole world; for the sake of mankind it is to be
hoped that English will drown the others.[Note 29] A tsunami of tongues?
84

II.97 So grand and effluent a language cried out to be kept in good order, and
guidebooks were happily sold to the self-conscious rising middle classes, e.g.:
[97] The friendly instructer, or, A companion for young masters and misses: in
which [] their carriage to superiors and inferiors, are recommended in plain
and familiar dialogues. (1814)
Some titles patronised the grammar of women, one supposes as marriageable
daughters or as mothers for well-bred children:
[98] The young ladys accidence; or, A short and easy introduction to English
grammar designed, principally, for the use of the fair sex (1799)
[99] The young womans companion & instructor, in grammar, writing,
arithmetic, geography, drawing, book-keeping, chronology, history, letter-
writing, cooking, carving, pickling, preserving, brewing, wine making, &c. &c.
(1806)
85
In [99], grammar ironically came first, far ahead of cooking; yet surely skills
in brewing and wine making should better attract potential husbands. (Well,
me, anyway. I once tried my own hand at brewing beer, and everybody rated it
)
II.98 The most influential work of its kind in the 18
th
century, and fully in the spirit of
the age, was the Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) by Robert Lowth,
a professor of Hebrew at Oxford who had produced a dissertation in Latin on
Hebrew Sacred Poetry, and later rose to be Bishop of London.

Armed with those oblique credentials, Lowth was not at all loath to legislate the
rules of English grammar and to castigate errors in works of the greatest
writers, including Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Dryden, Pope, Addison,
and, dear me, Swift.
[100] It will evidently appear from these Notes, that our best Authors [] have
sometimes fallen into mistakes, and even been guilty of errors in point of
Grammar.
Although surely it was his Notes that were guilty of errors (as
misrepresentations), a wilful covey of his rules have marched through grammar-
teaching ever onward, whether or not English teachers acknowledged His
Holiness as their guiding light. He prescribed It is I (SUBJECT PRONOUN)
over It is me (OBJECT PRONOUN); proscribed double NEGATIVES; and
insisted on distinguishing between who (SUBJECT) versus whom (OBJECT),
86
lie (repose) versus lay (place something flat), or between (for two) versus
among (for more than two). Sound familiar? You bet! Do any good? Not yet!
[101] It is me, after all, who has been subjected to the direct marketing of my
very soul. (My Idea of Fun)
[102] As far as I was concerned they didnt do nothing to help me, says one
former patient. (New Internationalist)
[103] Aha, who did you kill, then? (Flauberts Parrot)
[104] Right. Lie it down. Im happy with that. (British Rail meeting)
BNC

[105] In the garden, never leave tools laying on the ground, particularly rakes or
shears (Ones Company)
[106] The atmosphere between the three personalities was electric (Tillers Girls)
[107] Differences among the two forests were tested by comparing regression
slopes (Nature)
II.99 But somebody who did read His Holiness profited immensely, and was
probably the most diligent in spreading such Words of Wisdom. One Lindley
Murray had amassed a fortune trading on the British side during the American
Revolution, and thereafter had moved to England with the sardonic explanation
that it had a healthier climate. Casting about for another occupation, he seized
upon a fortuitous invitation to write a grammar for girls schools. To offset his
ignorance of the subject-matter, he plagiarised large patches from Lowth and
Priestley, and stirred in a hefty dose of the saccharine piety so dear to schools in
his quondam homeland, which turned his magpie-nest bodge-up into one of the
best-selling grammar books ever.

87

[No actual portrait of Murray seems to be extant, much less on the Internet. To be
sure, he had reasons enough for not wanting to be recognised...]
Ironically, Murray was later tripped up for his own grammar by the cautionary
tome Modern English Literature: Its Blemishes and Defects by Henry H. Breen
(1857) along with such desultory scribblers as Shakespeare, Milton, and Macaulay
(so there, Babbly!).
II.100 Disturbingly little has changed since then among commonplace captious notions
of what grammar is and how it should be taught. Modern linguistics in the
20
th
century did redefine the term more neutrally, as noted back in II.35ff, but
without serious impact upon the views of petulant parents or harried teachers.
Evidently, notions about good grammar and bad grammar make dandy
stalking-horses for discrimination based on language varieties (II.46).
II.101 Then too, change as such is unwelcome whenever it is misunderstood as
decline. By that strange logic, the passage through Old, Middle, and Modern
English should have long since plunged the language into a void profound of
unessential night. And by the same logic, languages like Italian and French would
be mere detritus from the decline of Latin. I dont hear anyone saying so; but I
also dont hear those who bewail decline explaining how their notions would
not apply to these large-scale, long-term evolutions. In fact, explanations seem
hardly feasible for language systems with complex word-forms evolving into
88
language systems with complex word-positions; somehow, speakers and groups
must have modified or innovated against the currents of prevailing usage,
chipping away at endings, collapsing vowels, relaxing declensions or
conjugations, and so on. But decline is no explanation at all.
II.102 Yet even today, the fate of English is conjured in terms as dismal as any of the
censorious Defoe and Swift (II.92), viz.:
[108] The Prince of Wales [] declared the English language had declined into
a dismal wasteland of banality, clich and casual obscenity. (Guardian, 1989)

Conetmplating the posh circles he moves in, one wonders where HRH can have
reaped this lowlife impression -- from palace domestics perhaps?. Like so many
before and after, he went on to make scapegoats of us English teachers for not
giving our pupils a vision of greatness, which to me recalls the jingoism of
Macaulay and Firth (II.95f)
II.103 Worse, we become the scapegoats for economic stagnation or public violence if
the teaching of grammar gets phased out (cf. II.11, 46):
[109] The Prince of Wales [] deplored the abandonment of learning the rules
of grammar by rote and stressed that higher standards of literacy were needed
89
if Britain was to compete in an increasingly competitive world. (Guardian,
1989)
[110] Norman Tebbit, later Chairman of the Conservative Party, claimed that the
decline in the teaching of grammar had led directly to the rise in football
hooliganism. Correct grammar was seen by him as part of the structures of
authority, such as respect for elders, for standards of cleanliness, for discipline
in schools (Cox on Cox, 1992)
Britain may be going to compete with the world in an Olympic event of
reciting rote rules of grammar. And let Stormin Norman, later Lord Tebbit,
in his natty suit, make a guest appearance before football hooligans to
administer ceremonious lessons on correct grammar.

II.104 As if to stem such darksome tides, the BBC Online announced in June 2000
that a governments standards agency would launch a sprightly-named
Grammar Crammer for a generation of teachers who were not taught grammar
when they were at school and yearn for a chance to catch up. You have to be
impressed by the ambitious scale:
[111] The training programme, which will explain grammar to teachers and then
show what they should be teaching pupils, will be carried out by teams led by
400 consultants. The first wave of training will be for teachers of 10 to 11 year
olds, with spaces on training courses available for every teacher of this year
group in England. (my emphasis)
90
The Beeb didnt say how many such teachers merrie olde England had, but the
proportions assigned to each of those 400 consultants in a single wave would
be staggering (and so would the consultants). As of July 2006, BBC Online has
not published any further reports on the programme, nor could I discover any on
the whole Internet. If anybody knows, put me wise, willya?
II.105 Today, we may be entering the span of Post-Modern English as an international
and multicultural language family. I only wish I could see more evidence for
optimistic visions like this:
[112] At this moment in world history the post-modern project claims the end of
ideology and with it the end of geographic inequalities and or class, race, and
gender struggles. [Note 30]
If so, users of English world-wide should be more flexible regarding their
grammar. By and large, I fancy I sense such a trend in the burgeoning electronic
media: casual English predominates; the varieties of Scotland, Ireland, the
Caribbean, Africa, and Asia have their own websites; and we are gradually
attaining high-quality speech synthesis and voice transmission to hear them and
see them. Personal blogs, interactive chat sites, and interest groups can
disseminate their own versions of English in numberless channels amid a verdant
archipelago of piquant surprises, viz.:
[113] I am a postgraduate majored in Business English in Chongqing University,
China. I would like to extend my sincere thank to you. You have made such
wonderful homepage that I could not love it no more!
As I have heard in South African English (with better logic than the British
Standard): my pleesure!
II.F Lexicon, grammar, lexicogrammar, and usage
II.106 Especially during earlier ages, the uses of the term grammar reviewed in
section II.D overlapped somewhat with the areas also called lexicon (or
vocabulary, which is the more common term but lacks an adjective) as well as
orthography. Yet a contrary tendency to separate grammar from lexicon
may have been correlated with compressing English grammar into a narrowly
linguistic side apart from the cognitive and social sides, and detaching
91
form from function (cf. II.4, 6). Perhaps, too, traditional and modern
studies alike envisioned the lexicon to be a miscellaneous and disordered list of
words with their individual definitions, meriting at most a practical dictionary,
whilst theoretical study remained devoted to a grammar describing the phrase,
sentence and so on, as formal patterns of slots to plug in lexical items strictly
according to word-class.
II.107 To attain a fresh vision, we can do as we did with GRAMMAR versus
grammar (in II.19) by distinguishing between the real LEXICON (in BLOCK
CAPITALS) known to the English-language community, versus any possible
lexicon (in ordinary type) compiled to describe it. By parallel reasoning, the
LEXICON is always far more encompassing and diverse than any version,
whether known to one language user or described in one lexicon. In that sense,
writing a lexicon or a dictionary is a yet more utopian enterprise than writing
a grammar.
II.108 Nonetheless, the doughty compiling of dictionaries for English has a longer
history than is generally remembered. Unlike the early grammars, they were
less devoted to stating rules and safeguarding correctness than to corralling
and explaining a vocabulary that was assiduously blossoming in the wake of the
national triumph of English (cf. II.86ff).
II.109 The earlier stages were fraught with disputes about whether the vocabulary
should be retained as pure English [114] or augmented by borrowing [115].
[114] our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangled
with borowing of other tunges; [] Then doth our tung naturallie and
praisablie utter her meaning, whan she boroweth no conterfeitness of other
tunges (John Cheke, 1557)
[115] whan we be driven to speake of thynges that lacke the names in oure tonge,
we be also driven to borowe the wordes that we have not, sometyme out of
Latin, sometyme out of Greke; [] though now at fyrst hearyng this word
stondeth straungelye with you, yet by use it shall waxe familiar (Thomas
Lupset, 1533)
Borrowing won out, and its products must seem virtually indispensable to us:
from the 16th century, abrupt, accurate, aggravate, catastrophe, dictionary, futile,
92
negotiate, species, thesis; from the 17th century, acclaim, apparatus, atrocious,
diploma, dogma, elastic, fluctuate, graphic, hesitate, miscellaneous, phenomenon,
tendency. And so on, in luxuriant profusion (cf. III.5).
II.110 English seems to have acquired the full status of a national language only
gradually and in hectoring competition with Latin and Norman French, as I have
recalled. Its own history was not so level and continuous that usages from Old or
Middle English would seem transparent and congenial to the general population,
such as wanion (or wannion) for vengeance or plague; and eanling (or
yeanling) for a newborn lamb.[Note 31] Besides, the cognitive function of
developing new knowledge through language whereby men shulde expresse
more abundantly the thynge that they conceyved in theyr harts (Thomas Elyot,
1531), may well have conflicted with the social function of people who
noweadayes, more sekynge their owne glorye then the profite of the readers, writ
so French Englishe and so Latine (William Turner, 1543).
II.111 Fittingly, the first recorded dictionary of English, published in 1604 by Robert
Cawdrey, bore a title signalling its purpose: A table alphabeticall of hard usual
[unusual!?] words. In 1616, John Bullokar, the son of our first grammarian
William (cf. II.83), issued his Compleat dictionary, with the further title An
English expositour. Thereafter followed, in measured procession, such tomes as
Henry Cockerams The English dictionarie (1623); Edward Cockers English
dictionary, containing, an explanation of the most refined and difficult words and
terms and the derivation of them (1704); and Nathan Baileys Dictionarium
britannicum: or, A more compleat universal etymological dictionary than any
extant (1730).[Note 32] The latter was cheerfully user-friendly, proffering
Entertainment of the Curious, Information of the Ignorant and Benefit of
young Students, Artificers, Tradesmen and Foreigners. It was the first -- and for
many years, the last -- to include not just hard and technical words from many
fields, but also dialect, slang, and dirty words.
II.112 The most famous work of all, often mistaken for the first though in fact partly
inspired by Baileys, was of course Dr Samuel Johnsons A dictionary of the
English language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and
illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers
93
(1755-56). As the title suggests, it was extensively data-driven, with some
114,000 illustrative quotations from those writers. He ruefully abandoned the
hustings set up by the likes of Defoe and Swift, who had campaigned for an
English Academy (cf. II.89):
[116] Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design will require
that I should fix our language, and put a stop to those alterations of time and
chance; [...] I flattered myself for a while, but now begin to fear that I have
indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.
And, as we shall see directly, some of his definitions were rather more suited to
airing his unabashed self-indulgences [117].
II.113 Whatever Johnsons ultimate merits, his only serious challenger during the next
hundred years was Noah Webster. In 1806, this industrious New Englander
brought forth his Compendious dictionary of the English language, whose title at
once informed the user that five thousand words are added to the number found
in the best English compends; the orthography is corrected; and the definitions of
many words amended and improved. After the fashion of an almanac, it
miscellaneously appended tables of moneys (currencies); of weights and
measures, ancient and modern; of remarkable events and discoveries; of
divisions of time among the Jews, Greeks and Romans; and even of the post-
offices and the number of inhabitants in the United States. In 1828, his
American dictionary of the English language (which is posted on the
Internet),[Note 33] bore a title proposing to expound accurate and discriminating
definitions, with numerous authorities and illustrations; the origin, affinities and
primary signification of English words; and genuine orthography and
pronunciation of words, according to general usage or to just principles of
analogy. As if to outdo his previous book, this time he appended an introductory
dissertation on the origin, history, and connection of the languages of western
Asia and of Europe; and a concise grammar of the English language! Two
blockbusters by any measure, whose dog-eared descendants have stood on my
desk this many a year.
94
II.114 In their characters, the two greatest pioneering lexicographers of English were
strikingly disparate: the one argumentative if not choleric, the other gentlemanly if
not saintly.

The contrast sometimes leaps out of the respective definitions of Johnson [117]
versus Webster [118], viz.:
[117] DISTILLER: One who makes and sells pernicious and inflammatory spirits.
EXCISE: A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the
common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise
is paid.
TORY: One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the
apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig.
WHIG: The name of a faction.
[118] DISTILLER, n. One who distills; one whose occupation is to extract spirit
by evaporation and condensation.
EXCISE: An inland duty or impost, laid on commodities consumed, or on the
retail, which is the last state before consumption.
TORY, The name given to an adherent to the ancient constitution of England
and to the apostolical hierarchy. The tories form a party which are
charged with supporting more arbitrary principles in government than the
whigs, their opponents.
95
WHIG, One of a political party which had its origin [...] when great contests
existed respecting the royal prerogatives and the rights of the people.
Those who supported the king in his high claims, were called tories,
and the advocates of popular rights were called whigs.
It feels quaint to recall that Johnsons instant response to the Yankees
Declaration of Independence was to publish A short appeal to the people of
Great-Britain upon the unavoidable necessity of the present war with our
disaffected colonies (1776). Fortunately, he did not live to see his world turned
upside down; the imagination quails at the inkhorn vituperations he might have
unleashed to define America and Yankee in the next edition.
II.115 If any English dictionary aspired to be definitive, then surely the one planned in
the 19th century by The Philosophical Society to cover, as far as possible, every
word ever recorded. Volunteers were invited to write each one on a slip of paper,
along with date, book title, page number, and a full sentence using it. Whereas
100,000 slips were expected, nearly six million poured in, creating the first truly
large corpus. Sorting and organizing this multitude of slips into a compendium
took some seventy years, chiefly under the sharp eye of J.A.H. (James Augustus
Henry) Murray.

96
The eventual work was completely published by 1928 as A New English
Dictionary on Historical Principles (a title later saluted by Jespersens Grammar,
II.27), better known to us as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), of which we
are currently being favoured with a second edition in just 20 volumes.
II.116 Even so heroic an effort cannot endow security or finality upon the problems
involved in the lexicography of English. In striving for inclusion, the first OED
scooped in some words that had appeared in a book and passed onto a slip without
gaining much currency. For example, twank was listed for making a clanking
noise, but I can find in all my data but a single use:
[119] A Freeman of London has the Privilege of disturbing a whole Street for an
Hour together, with the Twanking of a Kettle or a Frying-Pan. (Spectator,
1711)
Besides, an isolated sentence may not at all suffice to elucidate the meaning of
rare items, e.g.:
[120] O fine villain! A silken doublet, a velvet hose, a scarlet cloak, and a
copatain hat! (Taming Of The Shrew) [tall conical hat]
[121] Troth, I think your other rebato were better. (Much Ado) [starched lace
collar]
Nor can I find in my data any other sentence that would do so for these two.
II.117 Further problems lie in the divergences among the versions of the LEXICON
known to conspicuous language users, which can be far more incisive than those
between their versions of the GRAMMAR. At the top end, we stand in awe of
Will Shakespeare, whose prodigious vocabulary -- according to the BBC Story
of English series, over 30,000 words and the largest on record -- enabled him not
only to enunciate such an enumeration as [122], but to implement it all in his
works.
97

Yet he could just as easily mingle the bluntest annad homiest words into the
speech of kings [123-24].
[122] Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, three-pil'd hyperboles, spruce
affectation, figures pedantical... (Love's Labour's Lost)
[123] we have done but greenly [foolishly] in hugger-mugger [in secret] to inter
him (Hamlet)
[124] other devils that suggest by treasons do botch [stitch clumsily] and bungle
up damnation with patches [motley pieces of cloth] (Henry V)
At the bottom end, we all too readily notice a US President whose vocabulary
seems to have been, erm, privatised:
[125] I want to thank you for strategizing our discussions.
[126] I also read three Shakespeares. I've got a ecalectic reading list.
[127] When I first got going, the pundits said: You know, this issue doesn't
seem to resignate with people.
If the OED really records all words, the gormless dyslexia of Dumbya Bush shall
endow the English lexicon with such innovations as nucular, malfeance,
misunderestimated, incarcinated, and uninalienable rights.
98

II.119 The problems are similar on a larger scale for regional variations, which weigh
more heavily in lexicon than in grammar. Here too, the obsession with standard
versus non-standard has fomented a fussy over-avoidance of regional usages (cf.
), viz.:
[128] No one who has any regard for purity of diction and the proprieties of
cultivated society will be guilty of the use of such expressions teeny, feller,
yaller, taters, cowcumbers, sparrowgrass, sot for sat, fooling
you for deceiving you, lots of books for many books [etc etc] (Slips of
Speech)
Bryants roster of forbidden lexical items for the New York Evening Post,
mentioned back in II.48, banned ones he apparently thought too informal, like
pants, bogus, or humbug; or too formal, like inaugurate, jeopardize,
and leniency; or again too, erm, feminine, like artiste, authoress, and
poetess. Humbug at any price.
II.120 Regional usage can evidently put lexicography at loggerheads with language
guardians. I can see no rational reason for excluding an item like feller or
fella from a dictionary; they are attested lexical items of English, whether or not
they find favour with some starchy blowhard who hopes to shine by dithering
about the proprieties of cultivated society. Yet the 1963 edition of Websters
Collegiate Dictionary, with its easy-going acceptance of such regional usages
(marked a bit inaccurately as informal) once stirred up a hailstorm of abuse for
99
sabotaging the language. The storm has passed away without a tremor;[Note 34]
yet language guardians will never lay to rest their lances and halberds as long as
the crusade for good English can be brandished for a public spotlight and
private profit.
II.121 Still more problems of variation arise when specialisation engenders truly rare
and erudite items of great longevity. The progressive Websters Collegiate also
lists monopsony for one buyer and many sellers, and borborygmus for
intestinal rumbling caused by gas. Ironically, those definitions do not fit the sole
occurrences in the BNC:
[129] Many bureaus are to some extent in the position of monopsony. They are
the sole buyers of some types of labour and materials for the goods and
services that only they produce. (Bureaucracy and Political Power)
[130] Most of these blooms are carnivores. [] The borborygmus of a dove
calls from the belly of a bush. (Arcadia)
The actual state of the bureaus in [129] is surely one buyer and one seller; and
a dove cannot call out rumbling gas in [130].
II.122 This same Websters illustrates the perils of seeking control through specialist
consultants and getting back definitions that are practically meaningless to non-
specialists, e.g.:
[131] gyroscope: a wheel or disc mounted to spin rapidly about an axis and also
free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular to each other and to
the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually perpendicular axes
results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is spinning and
so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the
angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of
spin
By contrast, a recent corpus-based dictionary is refreshingly user-friendly:
[132] A gyroscope is a device that contains a disc rotating on an axis that can
turn freely in any direction, so that the disc maintains the same position,
whatever the position or movement of the surrounding structure. (COBUILD)
II.123 Such dictionaries have spearheaded the rising popularity of corpus-based
approaches to the lexicon, notably to support the teaching and learning of English
100
as a Foreign Language. There, we might take the opportunity to reconsider some
of the relevant linguistic, cognitive and social issues.
II.124 Fortunately perhaps, the size of the LEXICON is a rather irrelevant issue. I have
read that an average native speaker may be exposed to one million words per
month" (Norbert Schmitt, Vocabulary in Language Teaching), which seems not
merely way too high if different words is meant, but irretrievably speculative,
the more so as the question of whether two items count as the same or
different WORDS cannot be resolved in any general way, but only from
specific comparisons of multiple contexts.
II.125 In October 2006, the Collins Word Web was lauded on the Net as an unrivalled
and constantly updated 2.5 billion-word database of today's English, which the
BBC News (but not the Collins website) goes on to say is monitoring sources
and expanding at a rate of 30m words per month". But have confidence, o ye
people: with companys new Dictionary and Thesaurus, you can discover all the
very latest words as they appear in the language with grammar, usage, and writing
tips (Word Power). Thats right -- all.
II.126 The Collins Websters at understandably didnt venture to say how many are
different words, nor whether the expansion rate is engendering words different
from any in the Web so far, though such seems slyly implied. I would not deny
the rate because I have no evidence; yet I doubt they have either. One cannot
run 30 million searches on items suspected of being new. And the Internet is
totally unmanageable for such a purpose; even if we had some programs to
calculate how many words it sustains in one month -- scarcely imaginable in itself
-- still harder would be to determine how much of the increase in the next month
counts as new words.
II.127 The issue of currency holds more relevance for deciding whether lexical items
are being used enough to warrant attention. Here I would single out the clear
advantages in consulting multiple corpora: at least one for older usages that may
still be more or less current (such as my EPC); and one for current usages that
may be more or less common (such as the BNC). The EPC contains nearly all the
classic works assigned or recommended by English Departments; the BNC
contains a wealth of sources mostly not held in such high regard.
101
II.128 Together, these corpora can pinpoint older usages now lost from currency, such
as belted for a person ennobled by the sovereign with a ceremonial sword
plus a belt around the waist to hold it [133]. The usage fell prey to mockery in
the early 20th century, displaced by hit in a whimsical sense [134], which is
current now [135]; and seat belts are advised (if not mandated) in a literal sense
[136].
[133] And they themselves were belted knights, experienced soldiers, of the best
blood of France. (Jeanne dArc, 1896)
[134] We are a proud family. [...] My father is a lineal descendant of belted
earls. I belted one of em once in the Duquesne Hotel. []. He was there
dividing his attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he
got fresh. (Options, 1909)
[135] Mr Gillis had belted fourteen of us for setting off towards the door when
the bell rang rather than waiting for his instruction. (Truth of Stone, 1991)
[136] Safety Experts Say School Bus Passengers Should Be Belted (Miami
Herald, 1988)

More persistence may be noted for the argot VERB peach, i.e., report to the
police, attested since the 15th century. It has done service for such famed
reprobates as Falstaff [137], Macheath [138], and Fagin [139]; and still popped up
as an, erm, childrens pastime the during the nefarious Stalinist purges [140].
102
[137] If I be taen, Ill peach for this. An [If] I have not ballads made on you all,
and sung to filthy tunes, let a cup of sack be my poison. (Henry IV)
[138] The Sheriffs Officers, I believe, are now at the Door. That Jemmy
Twitcher should peach me, I own, surprisd me! (Beggars Opera)
[139] Suppose that lad was to peach -- to blow upon us all, [...] stealing out at
nights to find those most interested against us, and peaching to them. (Oliver
Twist)

[140] Last week by the Soviet Court tried the murderers of Russia's famed good
children who peached on their father and had him banished for the crime of
obstructing collectivization. (TIME, 5/12/1932)
Neither item need concern teachers or learners these days, but if encountered, the
context should work them out, as we can see from these data.
II.129 In lucky cases, corpus data furnish clues about diminishing currency:
[141] Well, heavens to Betsy, said Camille, coldly, using one of her
grandmothers expressions. How perfectly marvellous. (Pillars of Gold)
[142] She was the sort of Granny who ate bayonets. I aint lost nuffink. You a
rozzer? Rozzer? Did people in sarf London still use words like that? Do I
look like Old Bill, lady? I put on the cockney something rotten. (Just Another
Angel)
Yes, some people still do say rozzer for police in my data, but far more often
Old Bill, which, like the humanoids so designated, circulates a whacking great
deal.
103
II.130 Currency may be indicated by frequencies in corpus data, but by no means
reliably. Topics may quickly call the attention of a society through public
discourse and quickly lose it too. When I queried the COBUILD corpus in 1994,
the most common expression occurring with revolution was Ethiopian; and
with sex, it was Pistols. Today, I doubt such frequencies carry so much
significance.


II.131 The issue of distribution is also of interest, and confronts us with a paradox. On
the one hand, regional and social distributions are being reshuffled or dissolved by
mass media, global migration, and the downward mobility as middle rungs in
the social ladder are cracked away by massive layoffs, which in turn infest
public discourse with disingenuous mayfly euphemisms: schedule adjustments
(Stouffer Foods), career-change opportunity (Clifford of Vermont), a career
transition program (General Motors), management initiated attrition (IBM),
negative hiring (Peoria, Arizona Police Dept.), and even decruiting (Council
of Residential Specialists).[Note 35]
II.132 On the other hand, specific groups keep emerging and affirming their identity
with distinctive versions of English, e.g., in search outlets for partners like Sky
[143] as compared to Meeting Point [144].
104
[143] Four fanciable females seek four fun-loving, friendly fellas for frolicking
and freaking out. Interested? If so, and youre reasonably good-looking and
15+ get scribbling to Laura, Julie, Debbie and Kirstie.
[144] SCOTTISH LADY. Solvent, genuine, loyal. Would like to meet gentleman,
genuine and loyal, for long term relationship. Non-smoker over 5'8", 45-55.
Interests: countryside, travel, music, animals.
Interpreting such discourse requires appropriate cognitive and social backgrounds.
Those females in [143] were probably around 15 years old, proud of their looks,
fans of hip-hop, and experienced with, erm, stimulants; they did not want to
freak out by getting upset or angry or confused (a COBUILD definition). The
lady in [144] was probably around 45 years, proud of her intellect, a fan of
symphonies, and experienced with, erm, ungentlemanly, disingenuine, and
disloyal males; she did not want a gentleman who runs a travelling circus,
which, by a droll coincidence, would unify all her interests. All mere inferences
based on group images, of course, but plausible enough.
II.133 University students have long rejoiced in creating a group image of solidarity by
their usages:
[145] Research by Tony McEnery [at the University of Lancaster], in
conjunction with the website Student World, found UK campuses [coining]
words for getting drunk, [like] trollied, bladdered, klangered, bazeracked,
wombled; [] and for sex, like lancing, jousting, getting jiggy with it,
parking your bus, having a boff. (BBC World News)
105

These data not only mystify the harried parents but also tend to elude data sleuths
like me. Among the terms listed here for drunk, I could find only trollied and
bladdered on the Internet [146-47], other than in citations of the same BBC
report.
[146] Being so trollied on his birthday in Copenhagen , Axel asked folks how
to get to Amsterdam Centraal (not only wrong city, wrong country!!!) (Team
Plastique)
WWW

[147] Young men, instead of getting bladdered on pints of lager with whisky
chasers, will magically turn into sophisticated persons (Simon Hoggart in the
Guardian)
II.134 Corpus data excel in tossing up lexical items that are not single words, and are
commonly called idioms. The usually cited examples are fully fixed and allow no
changes without ceasing to be an idiom, e.g., out of the blue for quite
unexpectedly in [148] versus [149].
[148] Claires father married a farmers daughter. Right out of the blue; ran
away and married her in England . (No Enemy But Time)
[149] There was a soul subtly akin to her own gazing at her out of the very dark
blue eyes that were watching her so intently. (Avonlea)
106
Yet authentic data show idiomatic usages that are not so fixed, e.g., threats of
punishment for some mistake or neglect expressed as whimsically
misappropriating some piece of the hearers anatomy:
[150] By the third day I expect third-years to work alone, and if you slip up, gal,
Ill have your guts for garters! (Hospital Circlers)
[151] Thats a nice bit of double-barrelled lying. Quick. Out with it, or Ill have
your skin for a cigar case. (First of Midnight)
[152] A secretary whips away the remote. Keep that handy, I warn him, or
Ill have your head for a hat-rack. (The Dyke & the Dybbuk)
[153] Matt put in a warning. Just let Bill hear you say youre the hostess and
hell have your ears for horse blinkers. (Wilders Wilderness)
II.135 Perhaps the most contentious challenge of real data is to apply a consensual
definition of the English word. More detailed exploration will follow in Part IV;
here, I shall just touch on one spiky illustration, namely, the same form foot in
multiple functions:
[154] Gary Lineker swung a foot, but missed. England then funnelled back
and the match died. (Independent)
[155] You can also cross-venture into Switzerland at the foot of the
famous Matterhorn . (Citalia Italy )
[156] I was wallowing in the luxury of the Savoy , being waited on hand and
foot. (Seasons of my Life)
[157] Many customers will have to foot the bill for water meters, which most
companies will eventually install. (Economist)
You might pin your hopes on literal meaning of foot as the human or animal
appendage for walking and running, of which the one affixed to Tottenham
Hotspur legend Gary Lineker (which usually doesnt miss) [154] marches
among Englands glories in the football world. A bit less literally, many visibly
tall things such as the famous Matterhorn [155] could be said to possess a
foot at the bottom.
107

But a literal meaning for waited on hand and foot [156] might be getting
manicured and pedicured on just one side (unthinkable at the Savoy!). And the
most literal way to foot the bill [157] is to dismiss the bill collector with a
precise kick in the rear end -- which may force you to foot the bill again in a
pricey lawsuit for violating a statute with some ironclad title like demissio
arsepropulsa debitionis exactorum. Pleading to the magistrate you were
innocently being literal wont get you off the hook.
II.136 Perhaps the problems and issues raised in this section would become more
tractable by building upon the systemic and functional conception of the
interactive LEXICOGRAMMAR (Part V). It balances along a cline of
DELICACY indicating the range and precision of the limits on plausible choices,
with a more delicate lexical region and a less delicate grammatical region.

An instance at high DELICACY is wont/wouldnt hear of it meaning that
somebody with social power wants somebody else to refrain from a recently
mentioned ACTION [158-59]. You can hardly substitute other words anywhere,
e.g.
?
I wouldnt listen to it.
108
[158] I feel the time has come for me to have a change of hairstyle. But he won't
hear of it. He's even accused me of not loving him! ( Liverpool Echo)
[159] Would you like me to drive you, Aunt Goldie? What a nice offer. But
only if you let me pay, dear. I wouldnt hear of it. (The Dyke & the Dybbuk)
If the speaker is the one proposing to refrain, VERBS like think and dream
can substituted under less powerful social constraints, e.g.:
[160] Antonia talked and thought of nothing but the tent. [...] Stop going to the
tent? she panted. I wouldnt think of it for a minute! (My Antonia)
[161] Are you being cheeky, by any chance? I wouldnt dream of it, she said
demurely. Ill be good as gold, I promise. (Out of the Storm)
II.137 To place your hearer under especially powerful constraints to refrain, you can
use the NEGATIVE IMPERATIVE of the VERBS think of or think about,
e.g.:
[162] But dont think of climbing that tree, John; it is a great deal too dangerous.
(Doone)
[163] Would you like to tell me where you went last night? [...] And dont even
think about lying to me, Katherine whispered, her voice sending a chill
through him. (Another Time)
II.138 An instance at moderately lower DELICACY, brought to my notice by John
Sinclair, is the VERB brook: it prefers a NEGATIVE, an AUXILIARY like
will or would, a human or institution of power as SUBJECT, and a
disapproved activity as OBJECT:
[164] Billy Windsor is indeed the boss. A man of intensely masterful character,
he will brook no opposition. (Psmith)
[165] These doctrines the patriots of 1776 sealed with their blood. They would
not brook even the menace of oppression. (Executive Committee of the
American Anti-Slavery Society)
Conversely, I found no contrary data like these:
[166]
??
Oh heck, I reckon as Ill just brook this ere blimmin mouthwash.
[167]
??
See here, laddie, me mum dont brook no belchin at supper.
[166-167] are not so much ungrammatical as peculiar and improbable, though
strategic perhaps for sarcasm; and, at all events, not attested.
109
II.139 An instance at genuinely low delicacy is the pattern of PASSIVE with the
AUXILIARY get rather than be, preferred for something PEJORATIVE done
to a person:
[168] Unluckily, he got pitched into a quagmire in Read Park. (Lancashire
Witches)
[169] He got runned over, up the street; one wheel went right across his back
(Canadian Elocutionist)
[170] Guns N Roses have scrapped three shows on their current world tour after
their support acts singer James Hetfield got badly burned. (Daily Mirror)

I found no AMELIORATIVE PASSIVES so cheery as [171].
[171]
??
She got welcomed, embraced, and cordially presented to the
distinguished guests.
which might suggest she was a bit overwhelmed by the effusion.
II.140 As with the other PASSIVE examined in II.8f, this cognitive and social loading
is a puzzle. It too plausibly crystallized into custom from consistent usage, but
more recently than the other, which I had found firmly established during the 18th
century. I ran leaky searches of my EPC on he got and she got (searches with
NOUN SUBJECTS would be impossibly leaky) and my total of authentic
examples, discounting engaged and married, which are not officially deemed
calamities (I know, I know), had only 17 hes and 9 shes. The hes
suffered agonies: besides those in [168-70], they got shot, heavily bruised,
and fatally busted over the head, whereas the shes got served little worse
110
than frightened or roused, excepting a hapless nanny who got run over.
On the brighter side, if we are to credit General William Booth, a veritable army
of indigent scruffs got saved by the Lord from drunkenness and all manner
of moral and physical uncleanness plus the foulest language (Darkest England).
II.141 Such issues of currency, distribution and idiomaticity might thus be grasped from
the lexicogrammatical regularities of attested data. Words most occur when and
where they suit their mutual combinations, and may not be current elsewhere. You
can put the mockers on something to stop or spoil it, but you cannot drop
them on it, much less take them off. You can run or go like the clappers in a
desperate hurry, but not amble or wander, much less loiter. Nor again can
you put on just one mocker or run like just one clapper.
[172] Ipswich Town simply refuse to take their allotted place at the foothills of
the Premiership table. Midfielder Jim Magilton didn't want to say much about
his club's lofty sixth position in case he put the mockers on it. (Soccer
Net)
WWW

[173] Mansell was going like the clappers, setting the fastest lap of the race and
unlapping himself. (Road and Track)
WWW


II.142 A worthwhile metaphor for the LEXICOGRAMMAR might be a universal
tool-kit holding a clever battery of partly or fully automatic tools which sustain all
sorts of operations without intense labour. If you need, say, an ADJECTIVE for
garden, you can paste up your own on the spot, like gardeny [1741] or (more
refined?) gardenesque [175].
[174] A gardeny mixture of seasonal flowers will brighten the
dreariest Oregon day (Garden Path Flowers)
www

111
[175] finance became available to complete the park in a traditional gardenesque
manner (New Scientist)
So the kit must come with a communal users handbook which gets read
with more or less attention while the language is learned and developed.
II.143 As a matter of practical convenience, terms like lexicogrammatical item or
pattern are perhaps too unwieldy to seem user-friendly. So I shall generally
continue with the handier term usage, and point out specific grammatical or
lexical aspects when the data call for it.
II.G Six criteria for a friendly grammar
II.144 On the south portal of the renowned Cathedral at Chartres are allegorical figures
representing the Seven Liberal Arts. Whereas Music is a woman beatifically
performing on instruments, Grammar is a gorgon-faced teacher holding open a
book and brandishing a birch rod over two frightened boys, one of whom is either
shielding the other or assisting the punishment in desperate hopes of escaping it
himself.

There it has stood for almost a thousand years, the stony monument to the
unfriendliness of dinning into distressful children what would scarcely seem to
merit being called either liberal or art.
II.145 Yet the title of my cyber-book boldly asserts that grammar can become
friendly if we can meet certain criteria, which I shall try to expound. First and
foremost, our grammar should be supported by authentic and attested data
112
(I.8).These will display the real GRAMMAR within the LEXICOGRAMMAR
constituting a system of guidelines and strategies that speakers and writers of
English actually know and use for managing its forms, patterns, and positions (cf.
II.19). Large and diverse data sets in corpora can help us to partly surmount our
individual personal limitations.
II.146 Second, our grammar should be flexible, following the drifts of real data and not
just the accumulated preconceptions of the centuries. For example, we may gain
in realism by venturing beyond the tidy world of complete and regular CLAUSES
and SENTENCES, to describe NON-FINITE CLAUSES and NON-CLAUSES
just as we find them.
II.147 Third, our grammar should be teachable, which has by no means been
adequately respected in the past. The breathy promises of grammar-books (like
Grammar Crammer, II.33) about writing perfect sentences and revealing
secrets for great essays (while you fix your lawnmower) can lull teachers into
premature complacency about the clarity and coherence of the subject-matter.

We would fare better with a critical sensitivity to immunize us against such vague,
arcane, or wrong disquisitions as were cited back in II.30-32.
II.148 Fourth, our grammar should be learnable, which need not necessary follow
after making it teachable. The manifest lack of a reliable causality between
teaching and learning cannot be so glibly blamed on the learners being
113
unintelligent, lazy, undisciplined, etc (II.16). One can readily observe
disparities when didactic language which is meaningful to grammar teachers is
much less so for learners, such as the noun names an object of thought, whereas
the verb makes a statement about something else [20] (II.30). A cyber-
grammar like this one can be tuned or rewritten at any time to alleviate
communicative obstacles.
II.149 Fifth, my personal criterion for a friendly grammar is to be lively and
interesting, and perhaps even entertaining, in its choice and presentation of data.
Suppose I am choosing among these examples of the PASSIVE:
[176] Smith claimed he was hit by a bottle thrown from the crowd as Liverpools
European Cup Winners Cup hopes were ebbing away (Guardian)
[177] Mr Major was hit by an egg thrown from close range by a young man
shouting about unemployment (Daily Telegraph)
[178] A cow plummeted ten feet on to a car bonnet yesterday after leaping a
guard rail while escaping from an auction. Shocked driver Shaun Robinson
crashed into a fence writing off his Capri, but escaped injury. [] He said:
My insurance company will never believe I was hit by a flying cow. (Today)
A Mr Smith getting hit by a bottle is hardly earthshaking newsat British
football matches, where booze flows like a cistern in reverse and the etiquette of
angry fans gets, erm, lively.

114
A master architect of unemployment like John Major getting hit by an egg is
more interesting though still not unexpected, even if its not the animal product I
would have thrown.

But a Mr Robinson getting hit by a flying cow, in defiance of the laws of both
physics and biology, is the kind of startling data that are most likely to be
remembered.

115
II.150 Or again, suppose I am choosing between these examples of bodily
ENACTMENTS , which have a curious GRAMMAR (cf. V.23-25):
[179] Laurence Evenden belched. I beg your pardon, he said. (End of the
Morning)
[180] Sir Priest, I think you have drunk enough! The priest just stared back,
open-mouthed, and belched like a thunderclap. (Poisoned Chalice)
Laurence Evenden is a dullard mentioned in the novel just 8 times, and in 3 of
those all he did was belch, as if thats his mission in life -- except
when, during a funeral service, perhaps to frankincense the solemnity of the ritual,
he released the excess gas pressure in his duodenum (i.e. farted). In contrast, a
man of the cloth who can belch like a thunderclap is an
awesome Jove of eructations,[Note 36] outbelching the stoutest revellers I met in
the taverns of Northern Germany, whose most explosive discharges barely
rivalled an average pistol shot.

Memorable too, this ENACTMENT.
II.151 Sixth and last, a friendly grammar should develop the three-sided linguistic
cognitive, and social perspectives, as set forth at the outset, (II.1). These three
sides do not impose rules (a term with ominous overtones of constraint and
116
coercion) but interact in guidelines indicating what is normally preferred in
English grammar; and in strategies supporting what language actually sets about
to do (II.19, 137).
II.152 These, then, are six criteria I would advocate for a friendly grammar. I am only
too well aware that they pose substantial challenges, pressures, and risks, and that
the result certainly cannot remotely hope to be complete or definitive. But it can
hope to contribute a frank, relaxed, entertaining open-house or pot-luck
atmosphere for making friends with real GRAMMAR.
II.152 These, then, are six criteria I would advocate for a friendly grammar. I am only
too well aware that they pose substantial challenges, pressures, and risks, and that
the result certainly cannot remotely hope to be complete or definitive. But it can
hope to contribute a frank, relaxed, entertaining open-house or pot-luck
atmosphere for making friends with real GRAMMAR.
117

Notes to Part II, Number 2
1. The three terms used here are substantially broader than the orthodox three-fold partition of
linguistics into grammar (or syntax), semantics, and pragmatics. As for the
systems, my earlier work (e.g. Beaugrande 1980, 1984, 1997) used virtual and actual,
but had to change the former term to potential when virtual reality became a marketed
commodity.
2. Such is most prominent in my books (all the English ones being posted for free downloading
on this same website): Text, Discourse, and Process: Toward a Multidisciplinary Science of
Texts (1980); Text Production (1984); New Foundations for a Science of Text and Discourse
(1997) and A New Introduction to the Study of Text and Discourse (2004). My resolve was
evidently felicitous, coming at a stage when these disciplines had grown stagnant in their
isolation.
3. For a detailed examination of these agendas, see my recent cyberbook New Introduction
on this website.
4. I scoured the Net for a photo of Cox too, but there are none; nor indeed are there many
mentions of him at all, despite his feisty book.
5. H.G. Widdowson told me that the Kingman Committee had in fact produced classroom
materials, which the Tories suppressed at Clarkes instigation, because he didnt like the look
of them, i.e., were not enough like traditional grammar-books.
6. See Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language
(London: Longman1994); and Donaldo Macedo, Bessie Dendrinos, and Panayota Gounari,
The Hegemony of English (Boulder CO: Paradigm, 2003).
7. The data were not computerised. The initial target size of sampling was the usual million of
those times, but exact size when these books came out was not published. Prof. Leech
recently told me (November 2005) that the examples cited in the books were corpus-
informed rather than corpus-based.
8. This work is currently offered on Amazon at US $2,475 (!) from a Germanische Bibliothek,
who teutonically listed it as an elementary handbook. Among the rest of his monumental
opus, Essentials of English Grammar was reissued in paperback by the University Alabama
Press in 1964; his Philosophy of Grammar of 1910 was finally reissued University of Chicago
Press in 1992. But his books On Some Disputed Points in English Grammar (1929), The
System of Grammar (1933), Logic & Grammar (1948), and How to Teach a Foreign
Language (!!) (1967) are all bleakly listed out of print. Bloody shame, says I.
9. Cambridge Grammar of English, p. 364.
118
10. [21] is an fine sample of the almost mystical complexity of medieval grammar from the
Notule auree of Boncompagno of Signa (ca. 1170-1240), who boasted that my books are
exalted like the cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus), which, we recall, were the trees of the Lord
and full of sap (Psalms 104:16). The term suppositum was expounded by the 14
th
-century
scholastic philosopher William Ockham (or Occam) as a complete being, incommunicable by
identity, not apt to inhere in anything, and not sustained by anything; see his Quodlibeta
Septem IV/7, in the critical edition of J. Wey, Opera Theologica (St. Bonaventure, NY:
Franciscan Institute Press, 1980), vol. 9, pp. 328f . The website for [22] is contemporary and
has been removed from the Internet since I culled it.
11. Among my own books, the most thorough treatment can be found in Linguistic Theory: The
Discourse of Fundamental Works (London: Longman, 1991), also on this website.
12. From Course in General Linguistics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966, p. 14), the English
translation by Wade Baskin of Saussures Cours de linguistique gnrale, posthumously
compiled and published in 1916 -- and, as I have shown, riddled with self-contradictions.
13. From Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965, p 3f. 201) -- as I
have shown, riddled with pompous absurdities. See now my case study Performative speech
acts in linguistic theory: The rationality of Noam Chomsky, in Journal of Pragmatics 29,
1998, 765-803.
14. In Chomskys interview with Gary Olsen and Lester Faigley, Language, politics, and
composition, in Gary Olsen and Irene Gales (eds.), Interviews: Cross-Disciplinary
Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991), p. 88).
15. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 93; and Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. 1965), pp. 3ff.
16. Quoted in Sidney Greenbaum, Good English, his Inaugural Lecture at University College
London in 1984, p. 14.
17. However, the OED overlooked an earlier use in 1844 in the Proceedings of the Philological
Society.
18. A distinguished pioneer in the direction indicate was my fellow Austrian Hugo Schuchardt,
whose Kreolische Studien (Vienna: C. Geroldssohn, 1882-91) was a landmark far ahead of its
time. For an English edition, see now his Ethnography of Variation: Selected Writings on
Pidgins and Creoles, edited and translated by T.L. Markey (Ann Arbor : Karoma Publishers,
1979).
19 A good start is www.scots-online.org (Pittin the Mither Tongue on the Wab!), which leads
to 25 graded lessons, English-to-Scots vocabulary list, verb tables, dialogues, and so on.
Similar sites are also appearing for the Englishes of Wales and Ireland, companion victims of
Englands voracious greed and aggression. About time!
119
20. I find it on the Internet only applied a few times to Arabic, without explanation, in the
Zeitschrift fr Arabische Linguistik, which we dont get hereabouts. Perhaps it signifies the
diverging varieties of Arabic in many nations.
21. Thanks to the website Babawillys Dictionary of Pidgin English Words and Phrases.
22. Sidney Greenbaum and John Taylor, The recognition of usage errors by instructors of
freshman composition, in College Composition and Communication, 1981, 32, p. 173.
23. George Deaux, The writing project for faculty from disciplines other than English, in Ann
Humes, Bruce Cronnell, Joseph Lawlor, and Larry Gentry (eds.), Moving between Practice
and Research in Writing (Los Alamitos: Southwest Research Laboratory, 1981), pp. 75-79.
24. Helen Mills, Commanding Sentences (Glenview: Scott, Foresman, 1979), pp. 1f . See now
my paper Sentence first, verdict afterwards: On the long career of the sentence, WORD 50,
1999, 1-31.
25. Patricia Moody, Writing Today (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981), p. 310.
26. Its composition date is also unknown: perhaps in the 7
th
or 8
th
centuries, though the sole
manuscript dates from around 1000.
27. See above all Robert H. Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory in Europe ,
With Special Reference to Modern Linguistic Doctrines (London: Bell, 1951).
28. Reprinted in G.O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans Green,
1884), p. 290.
29. John Rupert Firth, Tongues of Men (London: Watts, 1937), pp. 137f, 209, 54.
30. Macedo, Dendrinos, and Gounari (Note 6), p. 89.
31. These relics may hearken back to Old English wanian, PRESENT PARTICIPLE
waniand, for wane, perhaps from the superstition that the waning of the moon was a time of
evils; and anian PAST PARTICIPLE geanian, for bring forth offspring.
32. The sanguine title also promises Etymologies from the Antient British [Gaelic?], Teutonick
[German?], Low and High Dutch, Saxon, Danish, Norman and Modern French, Italian,
Spanish, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee.
33. At www.cbtministries.org/resources/webster1828.htm
34. The once much-reprinted invective Sabotage in Springfield of Wilson Follett (Atlantic
Monthly, Jan. 1962, 73-77) brings not a single hit on todays Internet; nor does the same
pundits book-length threnody Grammar is Obsolete.
35. I thank Jim Hightower in Theres Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and
Dead Armadillos (NY: Harper, 1997), p. 78, for these examples.
36. A whole gallery of refined words for unrefined bodily events is cited in IV.19.


120
Part III. ORTHOGRAPHY and PRONUNCIATION
III.1 The oldest writing system used for English and its ancestors was the runic
alphabet called FUTHARK from its first seven letters, of which the Elder
FUTHARK had 24:

It was probably brought from the European continent around the fifth century
and represented the sounds of the speech of those times quite well. As
pronunciation continued to change , it was expanded until Younger
FUTHARK (or FUTHORC) had 33 letters. But the encroachment of Latin
promoted the emergence of an Old English Alphabet around the ninth century,
which looked rather like our modern one:

Here, j and v were missing, but even in later English, we find i and u as
substitutes, perhaps imitating the Romans who simplified the chiselling of
inscriptions in stone. The forms of s varied according to position. And the old
runic thorn was retained for the th- sound.
121
III.2 Ever since then, writers, scribes and copyists have been puzzling over how to fit
the cycle of sounds in evolving English to the Roman alphabet. One might
feel a bit like slapping bangers and mash, with bubble and squeak, on top of a
pizza romana.

Even the categories of sounds come from Latin. The VOWELS are named after
vocal, and are the very cores of English SYLLABLES; and the
CONSONANTS are named after with + sounding, and are expected to
accompany VOWELS in SYLLABLES (though they may be less mannerly).
But at greater detail, labels go astray, even for Standard English. The LONG
VOWELS, which generally do take longer to say than SHORT VOWELS,
evince no chivalrous loyalty to their nominal letters. The sound of long a
shows up not just as a (potato), but as ai (main), ay (may), ea
(great) or eigh (weigh); long e not just as e (she), but as ea
(sea), ee (see), ei (seize), or ie (siege); long i not just as i
(hi), but as ie (lie), igh (high), uy (buy) or y (by); long o
not just as o (so), but as oa (boat) or ow (bow); long u not just as
u (impromptu), but as ue (sue) ew (new) or oo (noon), or ou
(you) -- on and on. Further merriment is contributed by regional variation, for
example:
122
[3] In the south of England the vowel in bath will rhyme with art and
harp, but in the north [...] bath, giraffe, path and laugh will rhyme
with hat, fat, sat, cat. (Hearing Loss)
III.3 The histories of English orthography and pronunciation have run partly
parallel with those of grammar and lexicon. All these domains have
weathered spirited interventions by aspiring reformers and language guardians,
including an assortment of amateurs (cf. II.87). And, hardly by coincidence, all
domains have at times been wilfully misunderstood as indicators of linguistic,
cognitive, and social capacities such as intelligence that account for and
justify inequalities in human rights (cf. II.16, 54).
III.4 Yet these several histories have diverged in their eventual outcomes. Grammar
remains an arena of unresolved skirmishes among alternative language varieties,
often staged within a dissonant hodgepodge of petulant or jargonised grammar-
books. The lexicon has been tamed by dictionaries that evolved from one-
man shows to expanding teamwork that generated stilted and ponderous listings,
featuring erudite or antiquarian vocabulary, and avoiding the improper, yet
recently turning into user-friendly data-based accounts of current attested
vocabulary (cf. II.122). Dictionaries have succeeded far beyond grammars in
standardizing, though many people dont use them, and many who do are
motivated precisely by the harrowing unpredictability or inconsistency of
English orthography and pronunciation, which, to a foreign learner of English,
might well appear like a droll alphabet soup well and truly spoiled by too many
cooks.
III.5 The appearance of disorder can be attributed to two principal factors also
looming in the histories of GRAMMAR and LEXICON reviewed so far. The
shallower source has been the fondness for borrowing from other languages,
which often preserves the loan words with some mild if not pungent flavour of
the country of origin: from France, artisan, bourgeois, faade,
moustache, omelette, rendezvous, vogue; from Spain, armada,
banana, barbecue, bravado, potato, vanilla; from Italian, canto,
incognito, gondola, macaroni, madrigal, motto, virtuoso; from the
Netherlands, brandy, cambric, knapsack, landscape, muff, smuggle,
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yacht; from Germany, hamster, flak, Nazi, plunder, sauerkraut,
waltz; from India, bungalow, chintz, chutney, juggernaut, pundit,
bugaboo, and many other entres from foreign word-kitchens.
III.6 The deeper source has been the radical sound changes that the language
underwent during the periods when it was spoken and not commonly written.
The Old English scribes had to apply the intrusive alphabet to differing sounds
in the respective varieties; for example, the Angles got world and heven,
whilst the West Saxons got weorld and heofon. In the 13
th
century, an
industrious Augustine canon named Orm devised a whole consistent quasi-
phonic spelling system to edify the pious with a 20,000-line poem called The
Ormulum, a collection of homilies in wooden, mind-numbingly dull verse (and
horrid penmanship).

For example, he introduced the convention of double CONSONANT after
SHORT VOWEL, and single CONSONANT after LONG VOWEL. Apparently,
the work was not widely circulated; the only surviving copy looks like a
cheaply-made draft.
III.7 After the invasion of the rumbustious Normans, the writing of English fell
into neglect and so went on changing largely without a consensual orthography
to stabilise it, up into Early Modern English. Thomas Elyots counsel to speke
none englisshe but that whiche is cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately
pronounced, omittinge no lettre or sillable (The Gouernor, 1531) was a gem of
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unintended irony. In the late 15
th
century Will Caxton of printing-press fame
was moved to cry out in despair, loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now
wryte? (cf. II.80, 86).
III.8 Today, children still sweat over such quiddities and pedantries as silent -e in
schoolrooms at every shires end, whilst the business world exploits the same
relic for social snobbery. The Internet surfed with AltaVista in mid-2005
showed me 896,000 hits for ye olde, ranging from the banal, e.g., Ye Olde
Gift Shoppe and Ye Olde Starre Inne to the wacky, e.g., Ye Olde Infocomme
Shoppe and Ye Olde Paintmashe Pubbe.[Note 1] The y in ye is a
confusion of the Futhark (thorn) letter, yet Ive mostly heard ye rather than
the historical the.
III.9 The introduction of the printing press by simple Will Caxton meant that
sooner or later projects would emerge to fit orthography to pronunciation. In
1569, J ohn Hart took the lead among English orthographers and its reformers
with his buoyantly titled Orthographie, conteyning the due order and reason,
howe to write or paint thimage of mannes voice, most like to life or nature. He
lamented the present unfit manner of writing [1] and proffered his own
delectable new manner [2].
[1] In the moderne & present manner of writing there is such confusion and
disorder as it may be accounted rather a kinde of cyphring, [...] unfit and
wrong shapen for the proportion of the voice.
[2] The new manner, thoughe it seeme at the first very straunge, hard and
unprofitable, will prove it selfe fit, easie, and delectable.
The new manner sought a one-to-one correspondence between spoken sounds
and written letters. Here is a sample of his work:

125
There soon followed Bullokars Booke at large, for the Amendment of
Orthographie (1580) whose brash promise of perfect use (II.88) was soon
matched by works with gung-ho titles like this:
[3] An English orthographie, wherin by rules lately prescribed is taught a
method to enable both a childe to reade perfectly within one moneth, & also
the vnperfect to write English aright (Francis Clement, 1587)
III.10 The elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English
tung by Richard Mulcaster (the presumed model for Shakespeares Holofernes)
made even brasher though less tangible promises: to make the childe most
capable of most commendable qualities, to season the young mindes with the
verie best, and swetest liquor, to rid the course of the after learning from all
difficultie and hardnesse, and to avoid ignorance and all misliking. The
book opens with lengthy theoretical arguments, e.g., why having the sound
alone rule the pen allows diuerse and great corruptions to encroche against
both reason and custom. There follows an alphabetical list of undefined words
ostensibly spelled by the right writing, including such delightful ones as
akecorn, bumbuste, caffaie, disperple, entermedle, fafle, gnible,
huklebone
III.11 Genuine phonetics had to wait until Alexander Melville Bell published A new
elucidation of the principles of speech and elocution (1849); and until his
famously inventive son Alexander Graham Bell published Visible Speech: The
Science of Universal Alphabetics (1867).
126

III.12 Long deprived of phonetics, the orthography and pronunciation of English
drifted along as restive if not swashbuckling enterprises. Even the prodigiously
erudite J ohn Milton, richly steeped in Latin, seems to have followed his instincts,
e.g.:
[4] nor dislikd by themselves, were they managd to the intire advantages of
thir own Faction; not considering the while that he toward whom they
boasted thir new fidelitie, counted them accessory; and [] by those Statutes
and Lawes which they so impotently brandish against others, would have
doomd them to a Traytors death for what they have don alreadie. (Tenure of
Kings and Magistrates, 1650)

127
Perhaps individual variations in spelling attracted little more notice in those
times than in pronunciation. Precise uniformity was not expected, and hardly
practicable anyway.
III.13 Fatefully, it was the 18th century, with its Age of Enlightenment, that proved so
eager to standardise orthography and pronunciation (cf. II.93). Alongside the
emerging gallery of dictionaries (II.108ff), guides for elocution went public.
Shortly after Dr J ohnsons renowned work appeared, Thomas Sheridan, an Irish
actor the godson of J onathan Swift, published British Education: Or, The Source
of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756), whose remarkable subtitle read:
[5] An Essay towards proving that the Immorality, Ignorance, and false Taste,
which so generally prevail, are the natural and necessary Consequences of the
present defective System of Education; [and that] a revival of the Art of
Speaking [] might contribute, in a great measure, to the Cure of those Evils.

Though Sheridan was bursting with advice and lectures for important people,
ordinary citizens could hardly be trained after the manner of stage actors. At any
rate, they seem to have resisted such Cures and kept on wallowing in those
Evils to this very day; at least Prince Charles seems to think so (II.102).
III.14 In 1890, Henry Sweet published his seminal A Primer of Phonetics. His own
pupil Daniel J ones, the first professor of phonetics in the UK, played a
128
grandstand one-two with his English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917) and An
Outline of English Phonetics (1918).

The standard described by J ones was first vaguely named Public School
Pronunciation, but in the 1926 edition of the dictionary he used Received
Pronunciation, precisely (if quaintly) defined as the everyday speech of
families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the
great public boarding schools and thus, one assumes, fit to be received even
in the snootiest drawing-rooms. Its most grateful and influential users have been
the British Broadcasting Corporation -- whence the less loaded name BBC
Pronunciation -- and Tory politicos who see it as a magic cloak to wrap their
insidious inanities. Perhaps their favour has helped to spread the more recent
name of Upperclass Twit, publicised by the awards once issued by Monty
Pythons Flying Circus and variously acted by its members.
129

However, as Professor of English and presumed model, I occasionally feel some
duty to adopt a mild version of RP or BBC on the lecture platform -- stiff upper
lip and all that -- where I hope I dont come across as a twit. Anyhow, I doubt
that academics are generally counted upperclass these days by the real aristos
and money-mongers swimming in the glitz.
III.15 Many Internet sources tell me that this elitist pronunciation has declined in
popularity, whilst fortune smiles on Estuary English,[Note 2] so called for
being widely spoken in London and, more generally, in the southeast of
England -- around the river Thames and its estuary (Wikipedia). It is seen by
significant numbers of young people as modern, up-front, high on street
cred and ideal for image-conscious trendsetters (Paul Coggle, 1993, in Do you
speak Estuary?).
III.16 Standardising orthography has not been such an iffy affair. Dictionaries were
probably less influential than the spread of skilful, cultivated prose in such
popular outlets as literary novels and periodicals like The Spectator of J oseph
Addison and The Tatler of the his collaborator, Richard Steele.
130

In the bulk of this, printed English came to look much as it does now, apart from
the capitalisation of presumably important words, viz.:
[6] It is a great Imperfection in our London Cries, that there is no just Time nor
Measure observed in them. Our News should indeed be published in a very
quick Time but not cried with the same Precipitation as Fire. [] A Bloody
Battle alarms the Town from one End to another in an Instant. Every Motion
of the French is Published in so great a Hurry, that one would think the
Enemy were at our Gates. (Spectator)
III.17 In 1870, the crusade for public literacy led to public education being
mandated by law in England (centuries after it became common in Scotland);
and English was introduced as a subject matter for students to read at
university. In the 20th century, university English Departments became
enormous wherever the entire student body -- which might equal the
population of a whole town -- was required to pass through basic courses
strictly demanding adherence to standard orthography, along with correct
131
grammar and formal vocabulary, however conceived. Pronunciation was
mostly left to smaller and less common Departments of Speech.
III.18 Yet for the 21st century, a rise in illiteracy is generally predicted, now that
public schooling is pushed toward the brink of collapse as public funding is
ravaged by tax cuts and tax havens, and now that books are losing ground to
videos and video games. Yet in exchange, computer literacy opens up access
to unlimited stores of written English via the Internet. Word-processors will
check your spelling and even anticipate specific errors, though the design
betrays no high regard for the literacy of users: Microsoft WORD foresees
clueless US typists knocking out speach, writting, reconize, windoes,
sercumstances, and even dollers, defiling the National Word if such a title
existed. Also beware of the gratuitous if not scurrilous corrections suggested
by spellcheckers at a loss. For example, FrameMaker suggested changing
cdrom to cauldron or cutworm, filesystem to fleshiest or filthiest,
and pathname to python or playthings.
III.19 In Britain, the chirpy National Curriculum for English mandates confidence
in using orthographic features of standard English (cf. II.12, 46f). Perhaps
such good cheer would pall had that committee subscribed to the New Scientist,
which reported that there are more than 260 ways to spell 18 to 20 basic
English vowel sounds, and there are another 226 forms for the 23 consonants.
Such great inconsistency should call for a thorough reform. Yet all attempts
have all foundered on reefs like these:
Accurate reproduction of sounds would either presuppose a single variety,
such as Received Pronunciation (III.14), or else destabilise the unity of
printing for wide distribution by adapting to multiple varieties.
The stony Roman alphabet of 28 letters would yield to a larger system. The
modest COBUILD dictionary annotations use a phonetic alphabet of 22
letters or letter-clusters for VOWELS, and 26 for CONSONANTS -- rather a
lot for societies fumbling and stumbling over 28.
132
The familiar literacy of books, magazines, film subtitles, and so on would
grow estranged, perhaps the way older Englisshe strikes us now (cf. II.80;
III.7f).
Elite groups would cling to their established spellings and hector the
reformists with pungent taunts.
Gazillions of keyboards of typewriters and computers would need to be
retooled and their typists and users retrained. On the way, we might do well to
junk our preposterous QWERTY keyboard designed by C.L. Sholes in 1878
to slow typists down and prevent the mechanism jamming up in quick
successions -- as occurred on his first model with the keys arranged
alphabetically in two rows -- by consigning common letters like a, e, and
s to the clumsier fingers. Touch typing is a burdensome sleight-of hand or
handcuffed prestidigitation imposed by this bad joke of industrial history,
which I at least have refused to master. (Instead, I fill Autocorrect with
simple codes that type out the whole words for me, e.g. laaa =>language,
or ppzzz =>PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE.)
III.20 The history of past reforms has been correspondingly spotty. Papa Websters
Compendious Dictionary (quoted in II.109) managed to slip minor changes into
US English, turning -our and -ick into -or and -ic, but fell flat with his
ake, crum, ile, and spunge. Even the Rough Riding Teddy Roosevelt
found his Big Stick gone limp in 1906 when Congress killed his order for
government printing offices to follow 300 reforms set down by a Simplified
Spelling Board".
133

III.21 A more workable solution would be not a linguistic spelling reform, but a social
attitude reform. If we cannot change our orthography much, we can and ought to
change how we treat people who use it in their own ways. Unless we are
composing a serious document for publication, an irregular spelling should
count as a natural event like discretely coughing or clearing your throat while
speaking (or at the worst a sneeze or a belch discreet enough not to blow the
mouse off the desk). Some of these are reasonable adaptations to common
pronunciations, viz.:
[7] Traditional pollution control in the UK has been fragmented with air, water
and wastes regulated by diffrent agencies (Guardian)
[8] A very intresting read. I think the books are great and very intresting, it is
like having a good gossip about someone you shouldnt (Ali McConnell)
WWW

[9] Lou Macari came to Swindon in 1984. He [was] sacked and then reinstated
within two extrordinary days at the club. (Central TV news script)
BNC

134

These alternative spellings may be encouraged by the resistance of English
PROSODY to accumulating lengthy rows of unstressed syllables (cf. VI.15).
III.22 Others serve to capture the sounds of regional speech:
[10] I wanner be me if you wanner know, an woss so wrong wiv vat. [...] I
wanner go up in a pile a smoke an flames an eye shadder an levver shoes
an dancin. [from Nigel Williams, Sugar and Spice]. This speech in the
cockney vernacular [] has a well defined construction and rhythm.
(Authors)
III.23 Still others proliferate on the Internet as a playful or defiant rejection of
conventions:
[11] yeh im good wat bout u? i havnt been doin much just skool work and
parties nuthin to special. (MySpace)
WWW

[12] yu kin kli'k on stuff an yu'll get tayken tu straynge an wundruhrus
playcez, bu mosly jus tu stuhriez an pitchuhz (MadMadMax)
WWW

[13] hEy WeLcOmE t0 mY xAnGa! I h0pE yOu LyKe It! WuTs Up H
D? (Pearl Soup)
WWW

[14] im too lazy to capitalise things. (Star Wars Message Boards)
WWW

I doubt laziness [14] is the main motive. Fancified texts like [11-13] are if
anything strenuous.
135
III.24 The irregularities to really guard against are ones with unintentional and
ludicrous results. Schoolchildren may inscribe gems of purest ray serene when
they hear a word they cant spell and substitute one they can, never mind the
meanings:[Note 3]
[15] In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, and hurled biscuits
[discus]

[16] Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in
hydraulics. [hieroglyphics]

136
[17] King Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
[concubines]

The most public perils lie in wait for newspapers:
[18] Named Great Adventure, the amusement complex is expected to attack
two million visitors during the first year. (Trenton Times) [attract]

[19] Freshwater Pond Associates could begin construction of housing units
within 45 days; [] if local approval is given, the hovels can go in the
ground. (Daily News) [shovels]

137
[20] Students must sin in assigned seats, as they appear on the Seating Charts.
(Morning Herald) [sit]

III.25 The history of English litterature, erm, literature is pocked with droll misprints:
[21] the fathers of the Church, saints, and martyrs, awaited the general
insurrection (Areopagitica) [resurrection]
[22] What beast was't then, that made you break this enterprise to me?
(Macbeth) [boast]
[23] Now he goes, with no less presence, but with much more love, than young
Alcides when he did redeem the virgin tribute paid by howling Tory to the
sea-monster. (Merchant of Venice) [Troy]

[24] There is no form of faith in existence more effectually tenacious than the
Afghan form, which asserts the full catholicity of that branch church whose
charter is the English Church Prayer Book. (W.E. Gladstone) [Anglican]
138

[25] A land that rides at anchor, and is moored, in which they doe not live, but
cows abound. (Samuel Butler, Description of Holland) [go aboard]

[26] All the low actions of the just swell out and blow Sam in the dust. (J ames
Shirley, Contention of Ajax and Ulysses for the armour of Achilles) [smell
sweet and blossom]
139

III.26 However vulnerable orthography may be, its standard version of English can
support the GRAMMAR more ably than would a phonetic alternative. Thus, the
ENDINGS for the POSSESSIVE and the PLURAL of NOUNS and the THIRD
PERSON SINGULAR of VERBS are still spelled with -s or -es, even when
the spoken SOUNDS are more like -z, -iz or -uhz, viz. bets vs. beds,
J acks vs. J ohns, snoots vs. snoozes, notes vs. noses, and so on.
III.27 Moreover, orthography can preserve grammatical relations better than sounds,
e.g., between NOUN and NOUN, like thief theft or sign signature;
between VERB and VERB, like rise risen or dream dreamt; or again
between VERB and NOUN like lose loss or breathe breath; and so on.
III.28 On the whole, well have to make the best of English orthography, provided we
do not treat it as a pedantic obsession or an invidious measuring-stick for
intelligence, education, or moral rectitude. By those ominous measures, the
cumulative output of my own lousy typ(o)ing over a quarter of a century might
rank me among the dumbest and most illiterate miscreants of our times, who
should only be strapped to a rocket and shot to Saturn, the furthest reach of our
present spacecraft. To my knowledge, no such interplanetary heave-ho has yet
been proposed -- it might after all be doing me a favour, since Saturn has, since
the Renaissance, been reputed the planet of melancholics like me --
meditative, brooding, solitary, creative (Art Criticism). Instead, the general
message from cyberspace from a galaxy of chat-sites and blogs seems to
confirm the relaxation of social attitudes proposed in III.21.
140
Notes to Part III
1. According to Wikipedia, Paintmash refers either to the feeble program Microsoft Paint
(sometimes called Paintbrush), or to images created with it, which may be intentionally
badly drawn, either quickly or ironically.
2. Term coined by David Rosewarne in Estuary English: Tomorrows RP? in English Today,
37/10, 1994 pp 3-9.
3. Posted on many websites with varying sources.