It's all grammar, redux
Why do many people hate grammar so much? Possibly because (as I
noted
back
in 2004) they think "grammar" embraces everything to do with
language, so long as it's regulated, and that's an awful lot of
stuff. Back then it was punctuation that was at issue. This
time it's naming conventions, in a 2/25/06 entry "Grammar question I
should know the answer to" (marked as "OT", that is, off-topic) on a
message
board devoted to baby care:
I am addressing envelopes. My mom's
best friend is married; it is her second marriage and after divorcing
her first husband, she went back to using her maiden name and kept it
after marrying her current husband. So, I know her husband is "Mr. John
Smith" but should she be "Mrs. Jane Jones" or "Ms. Jane Jones"? She is
married, but is not really "Mrs. Jones" since her husband is "Mr.
Smith", so should I use "Ms."?
I'm inviting them to a formal event, so I would really like to use
salutations, not just their first and last names. TIA!
(My thanks to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky for pointing me to this
site. People who replied recommended "Ms. Jane Jones and Mr. John
Smith", by the way.)
Back in 2004, I reported:
To PITS, People In The Street,
"grammar" embraces pretty much everything having to do with language,
spoken or written, so long as it's regulated in some way: syntax,
morphology, word choice, pronunciation, politeness, discourse
organization, clarity and effectiveness, spelling, punctuation,
capitalization, bibliographic style, whatever.
I suppose choosing the correct name form comes in the "whatever"
category. In any case, you'd expect to find the answer to the
poster's question in an etiquette book, not a grammar book.
For a while, I entertained the idea that what the ordinary-language
non-technical word "grammar" means to PITS is 'everything you were
taught about in English class, minus the literature', but I see now
that even this broad characterization is insufficient.
In a somewhat different context, it's too broad. What I have in
mind here are the many multiple-choice quizzes on grammar that you can
find in magazines and on websites, for instance the
"How
grammatically sound are you?" on-line quiz, which I took a couple
of years ago in preparation for teaching a sophomore seminar on
prescriptivism, and which Bill Poser has reported on
here.
I got a perfect score -- like Bill, I am, ahem, a Grammar God -- but
then I did a lot of second-guessing of the test designers.
About half of the test items have nothing to do with syntax; they're
about spelling, punctuation, choosing the right variant for an
inflectional form of a verb (
lie
vs.
lay), or choosing the
right word (
bring vs.
take,
shall vs.
will). The other half concern
word choices that have something to do with syntax (relative
who vs.
that), government of case forms of
pronouns, subject-verb agreement, and modifier placement (
only, split infinitives). So,
on the one hand, "grammar" takes in lots of things that have little to
do with the system or structure of the language, while, on the other,
it's remarkably constrained. In fact, this quiz pretty much
reproduces the form and content of the "grammar" sections of
multiple-choice standardized tests.
So what
DO we call the domain that takes in spelling,
punctuation, choice of inflectional form, word choice, syntactic usage,
and actual grammar? "Usage" is a bit too broad; in fact, usage
dictionaries are reluctant to discuss more than a few common
misspellings, since there are just too many of them. "Usage and
style" takes in even more. (Some day I'm going to have to post
about the very many senses of "style" that make it so hard to figure
out what a book that claims to be about style in language is going to
be about.)
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at February 26, 2006 02:35 PM