When we speak or
write, or listen or read, we create sentences with words and phrases. Grammar is the system of rules that
guide us as we make and comprehend the sentences of others. All languages have
some kind of grammar.
When we use the
word grammar in the sense discussed
here, that “system of rules” does not necessarily include rules like “Never end
a sentence with a preposition,” or “Don’t dangle your participle around here,
bub.” That kind of rule may often be helpful, but it’s not what this book is
generally about.
So what rules are
we talking about here? To begin with an example, we might say this:
On Tuesday, Devlin caught Alicia
in the wine cellar.
Or I could say this:
On Tuesday, Alicia caught Devlin
in the wine cellar.
(On Tuesday,
Alicia and Devlin had more fun than I’ve had all year.)
But the point is
this: Those two sentences contain exactly the same words. The only difference
is the placement of Devlin and
Alicia, and that difference alters the meaning of the sentence considerably.
Sometimes we can
move words around without changing the meaning at all:
Alicia and Devlin are characters in Hitchcock’s film Notorious.
Devlin and Alicia are characters in Hitchcock’s film Notorious.
If we put some
words in a certain order, it makes one meaning, and we change the meaning when
we rearrange certain words. Other changes don’t alter the meaning at all. Those
are some of the things we mean by the rules of grammar: Certain word orders and
changes are meaningful in certain ways and others aren’t.
Here’s another example. Suppose we alter the
sentence this way:
Tuesday on caught cellar Alicia Devlin wine
the in.
(If you talk like
that, you’re spending too much time in the wine cellar.)
In this example,
we’ve used the same words but arranged them haphazardly, and with that order,
the words make no meaning at all. That’s what happens when you break too many
grammar rules.
There are still other kinds of rules:
He caught her in the wine cellar.
She caught him in the wine cellar.
(Just where is this wine cellar and how do I get there?)
We know, as
speakers of English, that he and him both refer to Devlin, and she and her refer to Alicia. So why do we have to use different words? Why
not use he and she in both sentences, and forget about him and her?
We can’t, because the rules of English say so: We have to use one form—one inflection—of he and she if they appear before caught, and another inflection (him and her) if they appear after caught.
If you’ve spoken
English all your life, you already know that rule, even if no one ever taught
it to you. You learned it intuitively when you were very young—that is, you
learned it simply by listen-ing to other English speakers—and now you seldom
have to stop and think about when to use he
and when to use him.
But a speaker who
is just learning English may have to study and practice rules like that. At
this point, we should stress that, for
beginning students of English as a second language, there are definitely more helpful books than
this one. For you, this book may not be the best starting place.
Here we will
assume that our reader has an intuitive under-standing of many such rules of
English. We’ll often refer to them, because they’re helpful in learning about
other matters of English grammar.
BUT WHY? WHY?
Understanding the
basics of English grammar is helpful when-ever we study language. When we’re
learning to become better writers, for instance, we have to discuss language,
and that re-quires some knowledge of the terms and concepts of sentence
structure—that is, of grammar.
For example, we
may discuss improving something we wrote by rewriting a passive sentence as an
active sentence. But discuss-ing that improvement—and making it—means we need
to recognize a passive verb and know
how to change it into an active verb,
and then make all the related changes in the sentence.
The terms and concepts you learn in English grammar apply to other languages, too. Many of the grammatical concepts of English apply to other European languages, and some apply to non-European languages as well. That means that English speakers can use grammatical terms and concepts they already know to help them learn a new language. For example, it’s easier for English speakers to learn about direct and indirect objects in German if they already understand these concepts in English.
Any time we want
to learn about language or discuss it, basic grammatical terms and concepts are
likely to be useful. We encounter those terms and concepts in dictionaries and
other reference works; we encounter them in books on linguistics and
psychology.
So why study
grammar? To become a better writer? To learn a new language? To study
linguistics? To become an English teacher? To use a dictionary more
effectively? If you want to do any of these things, you’ll find a basic
knowledge of grammar helpful.
SENTENCING
GUIDELINES
The simple declarative sentence is the
usual basis of all grammatical study. Other kinds of sentences are important,
but we begin with declaratives.
A declarative sentence doesn’t ask a
question or give an or-der. It simply makes a statement, an assertion. All of
the following sentences are examples of declarative sentences:
Mr. Morton lives in our neighborhood.
Mr. Morton is a pest.
I like Mr. Morton.
High Street takes you out to the city park.
The old train station stands on Front Street,
by the river.
In the chapters that follow,
we’ll primarily focus on declarative sentences.
But what is a sentence? One common definition—one you
may have heard before—goes like this:
A sentence is a unit of
language that contains a subject and
a predicate and expresses a complete
idea.
Audiences of
professional linguists, when presented with this definition, hiss, boo, and
throw vine-ripened tomatoes. (They’re an unruly lot.) They raise plenty of
objections about it too, espe-cially concerning the vague notion of “a complete
idea.” But we often encounter this definition in introductory grammar courses
because it doesn’t require students to know many grammatical terms or concepts.
For the time being, we’ll settle for this familiar definition. But hold your
fire; we’ll return to the task of defining the sentence later, after we’ve
learned a bit more. (And we will explain subjects and predicates in the first
chapter.)
WHAT KIND OF
GRAMMAR?
There are various
approaches to grammar. For example, you may have heard of the approach called generative grammar (or sometimes transformational-generative grammar),
associated with the linguist Noam Chomsky. That is an important and influ-ential
approach to language, but not one that we’ll discuss in this course. You may
encounter it, however, in books on linguistics, where you’ll also encounter
many of the terms discussed here.
The approach in
this book is sometimes called traditional
grammar or classroom grammar because it is often used in English and modern language classrooms, where it has long been
taught. (Grammar is always taught long and never short. Suck it up.)
WHAT YOU SHOULD
DO OR WHAT YOU DO DO?
Approaches to grammar can also
be classified as prescriptive or descriptive.
Putting it simply,
prescriptive grammar tells students
how they should speak and write to
communicate in the standard dialect of their language, the variety
of English used by educated speakers.
Descriptive grammar describes the ways language is
actu-ally used, even by speakers of non-standard dialects. Descriptive grammar
seldom makes explicit judgments about what is right or wrong in a sentence.
Like many
approaches to grammar, the approach in the following chapters is to some extent
a combination of the prescriptive and descriptive. This book describes the grammar of Standard
American English—the variety educated Americans usually speak and write in
professional situations—and so this book implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) prescribes standard uses over others.
But much of what we’ll learn here applies to any variety of English.
Every language has
its own internal logic, however inconsistent it may sometimes be. Learn a few
premises, usually simple ones, concerning things like word order, or number, case, and tense, and you’ll understand something of the logic of a language,
even if you don’t yet know all the cases and tenses. You’ll see that many
features of English grammar are clearly and simply logical. And some aren’t.
(And some aren’t even trying.)
HOW MUCH
GRAMMAR?
This is an
introductory book: It gives you the most basic, the most frequently used terms
and concepts of English grammar.
By comparison, A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (by Quirk, Greenbaum, and others) is 1792
pages long. The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language (by Pullum, Huddleston,
and others) is 1860 pages long.
This book is
nowhere near as complete, or as long. (You’re welcome.)
But even a basic
book like this one offers challenges. This book contains roughly 200
grammatical terms, some that you may have encountered before, and others that
may be new to you. The workings of English (or any other language) is a vast
topic. Even an introductory text, if it aims to give you a good start, will
cover a good deal of territory. That’s why it’s important to know about— and
use—the resources available in this book.
USING THIS BOOK
One way to get a
good grasp of what you learn here is to do the exercises at the end of each
chapter and check your work by looking up the answers in the back of this book.
If you make mistakes, reexamine the exercises you missed until you understand
your mistake. Don’t write the answers in your text—that way, you can return to
the chapter and use the exercises again for review and practice.
When you don’t
remember what a particular term means, you can always find out by using the
index or by consulting the glossary in the back of the book, which will also
refer you to the relevant chapter.
As we’ll remind
you again and again, having a dictionary handy is important when you’re
studying English grammar (or any language for that matter). Dictionaries can
help you figure out if a particular word is an adverb or a preposition or a
conjunction, or the right form of a verb or plural noun.
Good online dictionaries make looking up words fast and easy, and they have the kinds of grammatical information you’ll sometimes need. Here are some online dictionaries you could consult:
www.merriam-webster.com
www.dictionary.com
www.ahdictionary.com
(the online American Heritage Dictionary)
The online Oxford English Dictionary, the massive
historical dictionary, is a wonderful resource, but it may overwhelm you with
the sheer quantity and range of its information. We’d recommend that you do not refer to it as you begin to learn
about grammar. (But it’s still fun to browse through.)
