[Gllug] Monthly GLLUG grammar report (Seriously OT now!)

[Dylan]

On Friday 29 November 2002 13:27, Gordon Joly wrote:
> >Me too, but if I was going to sue the people who "taught" me grammar
> >would be quite a way down on my lists of complaints.
> >
> >I am not bitter just damaged. :D
> >
> >Peace Jim
>
> I was lucky to be taught some English grammar at school. But most of my
> knowledge of grammar comes from my Latin, German and French lessons.
>
> Nobody learns English grammar at school these days, do they?

That depends on what you mean by 'grammar'. Three things are often confused 
with grammar by polititians, policy-makers and interest groups:

- Spelling;
- Punctuation; 
- 'Proscriptive' style rules.

An individual's ability to spell or punctuate according to the current 
conventions is no more an indicator of their grasp of grammar than is the 
legibility of their handwriting. It is, however, a measure of the 
effectiveness of the methods used in teaching (which at present are flawed 
because they are divorved from the underlying linguistic facts.) The 
proscriptive rules (such as "use X and I"; "never end a sentence with a 
preposition" and "never start a sentence with a conjunction") are just plain 
WRONG. The pseudo-definition of 'sentence' as that which occurs between a 
capital letter and a full stop has no relation to the linguistic structure.

If, on the other hand, you mean the nature of 'parts of speech' and the 
hierarchical constituency of sentences, then it's a completely different 
matter. If linguists cannot agree on the definition of a sentence, or what 
constitutes a noun, or verb, or whatever (or even how many *word-classes* 
[~parts of speech] there are) then how can anyone hope to teach these to 
schoolchildren? When it comes to it, imparting this conscious knowledge has 
absolutely no effect on a person's linguistic ability, and research suggests 
that (particularly for the style rules) it may well even be 
counterproductive.

>
> ***
>
> Now, I am getting warmed up... so take the BBC....
>
> "This report from Claire Brown in Edinburgh"
>
> This is not a sentence. since it has not verb (in the predicate).

This is a perfectly valid elliptical sentence. Modern European languages are 
in the vast minority in having (let alone requiring) an overt copula (BE) in 
this type of sentence. Neither Latin nor Ancient Greek required such a 
construction.

Dylan

-- 
"Sweet moderation
Heart of this nation
Desert us not, we are
Between the wars"

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