(Summary of conference talk)
‘What is grammar?’ is the kind of question that seems easy to answer until somebody asks it. Reference books are not very helpful – dictionaries usually say something like ‘the rules for combining words into sentences’. This is seriously incomplete: grammar does many things besides sentence-building. The definition also says nothing about the reasons why we need such rules – their functions; as if one defined a bus as a ‘large vehicle constructed on one or two levels’, without mentioning its use for public transport.
To understand what grammar is, what it does and why it is necessary, it helps to imagine language without it. Let’s suppose that we are a tribe of intelligent pre-human primates who have decided to devise a rich communication system. We start by inventing distinctive vocal signs – ‘words’ – for the various classes of things in our world (‘tree’, ‘rain’, ‘mother’, ‘axe’, ‘baby’, ‘bear’ and so on); for their shared characteristics (‘big’, ‘good to eat’, ‘red’, ‘cold’); and for processes and situations (‘eat’, ‘fall’, ‘run’ ‘die’, ‘coming’, ‘gone’, ‘tomorrow’). That’s all: no grammar.
What can we do with our new tool? First of all, we can indicate the existence of something, or our need for something, by using the appropriate class word (‘Bear!’, ‘Axe!’, ‘Eat!’). Secondly, by uttering two or more words together we can point to individual members of classes: to ask for a particular axe, we can produce the equivalent of, for instance, axe big. And thirdly, we can put words together to indicate events or states of affairs: ‘Fall baby’;‘Rain cold’; ‘Axe big break’; ‘Eat baby acorn’.
We have invented language!
Up to a point. We soon find, however, that our communication system has three serious limitations:
1. It can’t handle complex situations. Putting together our words for ‘big’, ‘bear’ and ‘cave’, for example, will not make it clear whether there is a big bear in the cave or a bear in the big cave.
2. We can identify and talk about separate things in the world, but we can’t clarify their causal, spatial and other relationships. For instance, if A is doing something to B, we cannot show, just by saying the words, which of the two is the agent that performs the action and which is the patient. ‘Sister bear kill’ doesn’t show who killed and who got killed.
3. We can’t get beyond requests and affirmative statements. ‘Bear cave’ can convey the fact that there is a bear in the cave, but we have no way of asking whether there is a bear in the cave, or suggesting that there may be, or saying that there is not a bear in the cave.
We have discovered the need for grammar.
One solution is to signal the necessary extra meanings by word order. We could decide to juxtapose words for connected ideas, putting the word for a quality, for example, immediately before or immediately after the word for the thing that has the quality: ‘bear big’; ‘cave small’. We could also consistently put the expression for an agent earlier or later than other expressions, so that ‘sister kill bear’ and ‘bear kill sister’ would have distinct meanings. And we could use a different order for statements and questions: ‘sister kill big bear’ versus ‘kill sister big bear?’.
Another strategy would be to alter words to signal their functions. Latin did this: ursus and soror meant ‘bear’ and ‘sister’ as agents; as patients they became ursum and sororem. This trick – inflection – could also show what goes with what: related words could all be changed or extended identically. Changes in pitch, too, too, could indicate the functions of words or utterances – as when English speakers use intonation to distinguish questions and statements.
Yet another possibility would be to invent words whose purpose is to show the function of other words. English may does this: it indicates that a sentence refers not to a definite fact, but to a possibility. Japanese puts small words – particles – after nouns to mean such things as ‘topic‘, agent’, ‘patient’, and ‘possessor’.
These strategies are all variants on three basic options: ordering, inflection, and the use of function words. Once we have selected from these three options the devices we want to use for our language, we have devised a grammar. We now have a human language.
So, to answer the question we started with: grammar is essentially a limited set of devices for expressing a few kinds of necessary meaning that cannot be conveyed by referential vocabulary alone.
If grammar is so simple in principle, then, why is it so complicated in practice? There are several reasons.
- Once the basic structures of language exist, they can easily be combined into higher-level structures of increasing complexity. (Compare the 0 and 1 of computer programming.)
- When a tool is devised for one purpose, it often turns out to be useful for many others. (Computers have long since outgrown their original function as calculating machines.) Time relations, number or social status don’t have to be expressed in the grammar; but many languages find it convenient to grammaticalise these and numerous other meanings.
- Tidy systems can become increasingly distorted by language change, and new structures can come into a language without driving out old ones that have similar functions, so that all languages have a fair amount of muddle in their grammars.
- Linguistic complexity does not hamper children’s learning, and may have value as contributing to social identity: if only the children of your tribe can learn your language perfectly, you know who the outsiders are.
Pedagogic postscript
- Working out what grammar is, and why languages need it (as we have done), may be a very useful preliminary to the study of particular foreign languages, helping learners to understand why the languages do such apparently strange things.
- The topic also has general educational value. The structure of language, the greatest product of human intelligence, surely deserves a place in the curriculum alongside, say, botany or history.
- Since languages are intrinsically complex and rather messy, what we call ‘grammar’ includes elements of very different kinds which may be learnable in very different ways, depending on the nature of the point in question, the equivalent (or lack of it) in the learner’s mother tongue, and the context of learning. So language teachers (and students of linguistics) need to be very wary of generalisations about grammar, its acquisition, and teaching methodology.
Further reading
Michael Swan: ‘Grammar’ (in Oxford Introductions to Language Study), OUP 2005, especially Chapter 1