What is Grammar, How Does It Change . . . ?

This is a lightly edited repeat of a contribution I have made to a discussion elsewhere.

Grammar is the set of rules that tells us how morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, may be combined to form words (morphology) and how words may be combined to form sentences (syntax). One rule of English grammar, for example, tells us that regular verbs form their past tense and past participle by the addition of -ed. We have to say, in modern Standard English, he walked and not *he wolk. Another tells us that determiners precede nouns. We have to say my house and not *house my. If you want something a little less obvious, then consider the fact that in English an anaphor may not both precede and command its antecedent.

These are real rules, which no normal adult native speaker of English will break. That’s why grammar is a matter of fact. It contrasts with style, which is a matter of opinion. There is no rule of English grammar that prohibits what is known inaccurately to most people as a split infinitive. It follows that whether a writer chooses to write ‘to suddenly realise’ or ‘to realise suddenly’ is a matter of style, of opinion. Nor is there any rule of English grammar that requires ‘that’ to introduce a restrictive relative clause. So an American president may choose to say ‘a day which will live in infamy’ or ‘a day that will live in infamy’ (and we know what he did choose). Both choices in each case are grammatical.

The rules of Standard English are codified in scholarly works of grammar. The early ones were little more than a reflection of the writer’s own preferences, but the past 30 years have seen the publication of grammars that go far beyond that approach, and they have been enormously improved by the availability of the evidence found in vast electronic corpora. The three monumental works during this period are ‘A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language’ by Quirk and others, ‘The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ by Biber and others and ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’ by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum. They are based on a thorough examination of the way modern English is actually used, for, as Henry Sweet wrote in 1891:

In considering the use of grammar as a corrective of what are called ‘ungrammatical’ expressions, it must be borne in mind that the rules of grammar have no value except as statements of facts: whatever is in general use in a language is for that very reason grammatically correct.

The same thought has been expressed in our own day by the authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’:

Grammar rules must ultimately be based on facts about how people speak and write. If they don’t have that basis, they have no basis at all.

As long ago as the early sixteenth century, John Colet saw that this was also true of Latin, as indeed it is of any language:

In the beginning men spake not Latin because such rules were made, but, contrariwise, because men spake Latin the rules were made. That is to say, Latin speech was before the rules, and not the rules before the Latin speech.

It would take a major piece of research to compare these three very long (and expensive) books, although all three have shortened versions.  The authors of the ‘Cambridge Grammar’, at least, do have a different approach to some topics. They use the terms ‘integrated’ and ‘supplementary’, where others use ‘restrictive’ (or ‘defining’) and ‘non-restrictive’ (or ‘non-defining’) to describe the two types of relative clause. They do not consider what most others call the ‘were-subjunctive’ to be subjunctive at all, giving it instead the term ‘irrealis were’. Where most other linguists recognise only two English tenses, present and past, they speak of the perfect as ‘a past tense that is marked by means of an auxiliary verb rather than by inflection’. They class as prepositions words that other grammars class as adverbs or subordinating conjunctions.

The ‘Longman Grammar’ draws heavily on evidence from the Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus, and concentrates particularly on the grammatical differences between the four registers of Conversation, Fiction, News and Academic Prose. The stripped-down version, the ‘Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English’ is one of the best general introductions to English grammar.

I suspect that there is much more agreement than disagreement in all three. They are concerned only with Standard English, and, as Huddleston and Pullum have written:

[There is] remarkably widespread agreement about how sentences should be constructed for such purposes as publication, political communication, or government broadcasting. This widespread agreement defines what we are calling Standard English.

So much for the rules of grammar themselves. The answer to the question ‘How are they changed?’ the answer is that, unlike style, they generally change very slowly. The erosion of inflections, for example, has been going on for centuries, and it continues. Our pronouns are pale shadows of their former selves, and it looks as if the remaining inflections will reduce further, with the growing merging of I and me, for example, and the loss of  whom in all but the most formal contexts. The subjunctive, too, at least in British English, is all but extinct. These changes are not to be regretted. They are part of the very essence of language, and they occur because the needs of a language’s speakers change. Like the Sabbath, language was made for man, and not man for language. As Michael Halliday, the linguist most closely associated with Systemic Functional Linguistics, has written, ‘Language is as it is because of what it has to do’.

There is no single Standard English, but each major English-speaking state has its own standard. Any changes to those standards following the technological developments of the past few decades are likely to be in vocabulary rather than in grammatical structures. At the same time, the English used in computer mediated communication is developing its own grammatical forms. John McWhorter describes one aspect here. I would say that the most likely outcome is that the language of the web and texting, where it has its own identity, will grow alongside other varieties, rather than replace them.

The Negative Canon: ‘Who’ and ‘Whom’

This post is one in a series about The Negative Canon.

Relative clauses modify noun phrases. They can be introduced by the relative pronouns who, whom, which, whose and by the subordinator that. In some cases, the introductory word may be omitted altogether.

The relative pronoun used as the subject of a relative clause and referring to a person is who, as in:

(1) That’s the journalist who interviewed me last week. (This is a defining relative clause, and in such cases that may be used instead of who.)

When the relative pronoun is the object of the relative clause, defenders of the negative canon will insist that it should be whom, so they would have us write, or even say:

(2) That’s the journalist whom I met last week.

Similarly, they claim that whom is also required after a preposition, so it has to be:

(3) That’s the journalist to whom I gave an interview last week.

In ‘Mind the Gaffe’ (2001) R L Trask writes that ‘the word whom is all but dead in English, even in formal English’, but the OED might be more accurate in saying that it is ‘no longer current in natural colloquial speech’. Both seem closer to the truth than Harry Blamires in ‘The Penguin Guide to Plain English’ (2000), where he gives the examples:

There’s a new couple down the road who I’d love to meet.
There’s a man at work who I fantasize about.
You need to know who to contact.

‘In each of these three sentences,’ he writes, ‘who should be whom, for in each case the pronoun is the object of a verb: whom I’d love to meet; whom I fantasize about; whom to contact. Who is appropriate only where the pronoun is the subject of the verb.’

That’s as bad as Nevile Gwynne, who wants us to say Do you see whom I see? 

This approach ignores how people actually use the language. In the case of (1), the relative pronoun would probably be omitted in most contexts altogether to produce:

(4) That’s the journalist I met last week.

and (3) would occur most naturally as:  

(5) That’s the journalist I gave an interview to last week.

Only in the most formal contexts would (2) and (3) be required.

Whom still has, for the time being, a place in formal contexts (and for the difference between formal and informal contexts, and the kind of language appropriate to each, see Geoffrey Pullum’s article in Lingua Franca). As Trask concedes:

‘there is just one circumstance in which whom is usual in formal writing, and that is as the object of a preposition which immediately precedes it.’

Similar considerations arise in the case of interrogative pronouns.

(6) Whom do you mean?

is laughable. The normal form of the question is:

(7) Who do you mean?

There is a particular case in which the choice between who and whom, for those who insist on using the latter at all, is not obvious. That’s where the relative pronoun seems to hover between being subject and object, as in the sentence:

(8a) That journalist, who(m) some people think is arrogant, was really rather nice.

The sentence brings together two clauses. One occurs as the main clause:

(8b) That journalist was really rather nice.

If the relative clause is seen as a transformation of:

(8c) Some people think him arrogant

then whom is required.

If it’s seen as a transformation of:

(8d) Some people think he is arrogant

then who is required, because when it occurs in (6a) some people think can be considered as being in parenthesis.

Geoffrey Pullum considers the matter here, and concludes that both who and whom are possible.

I’d use who myself simply on the grounds that the less we use whom the sooner we will get rid of it. Its decreasing use is no more than a continuation of the erosion of inflections that began hundreds of years ago. Those who would mourn its loss should bear in mind that it has its origin in Old English hwæm, the dative, singular and plural, of hwa, which meant who? and anyone or someone (and wasn’t actually used as a relative pronoun at all in Old English). So on etymological grounds it might be justifiable to use whom after a preposition. But the accusative singular, masculine and feminine, of hwa was hwone, so perhaps, in the interest of preserving what the negative canon warriors see as the purity of the language, they should think of saying and writing:

(9) That’s the journalist whon I met last week.

A final thought:

The word ‘whom’ was invented to make us all sound like butlers.

Even More on Grammar

In a previous post I suggested it might be helpful to distinguish between grammar and style. Grammar, to recapitulate, is concerned with the ways in which a dialect allows words and sentences to be constructed. It provides us with rules like that which tells us that the past tense of regular verbs is formed by the addition of‘-(e)d’ to the plain form: walked from walk. Grammarians may disagree on various points, but, on the whole, the grammar of any particular dialect is non-negotiable.

Everything else concerns style. Style considers the type of language that might or might not be suitable for use in a particular place at a particular time for a particular purpose. About that there can a wide range of opinions. Long may the discussion of such views continue, so long as it is clear that any such discussion isn’t about grammar.

Relative clauses might serve as an example of what I mean. Integrated[1] relative clauses in which the antecedent is an inanimate object can be introduced by which, that or by nothing. Thus, we can say:

That’s the tree which the storm blew down.
That’s the tree that the storm blew down.
That’s the tree the storm blew down.

What we can’t say is

*That’s the tree who(m) the storm blew down.

It’s ungrammatical. No one would say it. That’s a matter of fact.

Now, there is some dispute, particularly in the United States, over whether an integrated relative clause can be introduced by which rather than that. There is plenty of evidence to show that it can be. For example, Franklin D Roosevelt spoke of ‘a date which will live in infamy’. The King James Bible uses both which and that in a single sentence: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’ Whether or not a writer introduces an integrated relative clause with which is up to the writer. Those who don’t like it don’t have to use it, but what they cannot do is say that it is ungrammatical. Grammar describes features of a dialect which no one of us individually can change. What we do within its constraints is a matter of choice and debate.

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[1] ‘Integrated’ is the term used by the authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’. Others use ‘defining’ or ‘restrictive’.