English grammar and English literature

Abstract

In the English-speaking countries you can earn a degree in English literature despite knowing almost nothing about the language as such. You scarcely need to know what nouns or verbs are. Worse, although some educated people have a degree of familiarity with English grammar, their acquaintance with it reflects what was understood more than 200 years ago. Hardly anything about the way English grammar is presented to the general public has changed since Lindley Murray’s million-selling grammar of English in 1795. The problem with this is not simply that modes of presentation and terminology are oldfashioned: they are, but that hardly matters. Nor is it crucial that English has changed a little since 1795: the minor changes that have taken place are relatively unimportant. The problem I address is that the content of the descriptions presented is empirically mistaken, in numerous ways and on fundamental points. Over the last two centuries, while biology experienced a complete revolution in its methods and conception of its subject matter, the study of grammatical structure has simply stagnated: it has remained the way it was before Darwin was even born, and its mistaken analyses are still taught all over the world. I select (out of many) just four areas in which traditional presentations of English grammar are hopelessly mistaken: (i) The basic definitions of the lexical (“part-of-speech”) categories like noun, verb, etc., are naive and confused nonsense. (ii) The syntax of infinitival complements has been misunderstood and the form to that marks infinitivals misanalysed. (iii) The traditional conception of prepositions is utterly misguided, and has contributed to a situation where every published dictionary gives the wrong categorization for most prepositions. (iv) A common prejudice leads most usage authorities to make false claims about what sort of antecedent is suitable for the pronoun they. I use literary examples as well as linguistic arguments to support my claims about these matters. I then briefly consider how and why the study of English grammar suffered this fate, and conclude with a few remarks about why and how the situation might be remedied.