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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents.
Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation.
Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Notation guide
1 Introduction
Grammar and style
American and British English
2 Clauses, sentences, and phrases
Clauses
Sentences
Phrases
Heads and complements
Adjuncts
3 Types of words
Word-forms and lexemes
4 Clause types
Subjects
The four types
Declarative clauses
Interrogative clauses
Exclamative clauses
Imperative clauses
5 Nouns and their phrases
Count nouns
Mass nouns
Abstract nouns
Proper nouns
Noun phrases
Proper names
Plain and genitive NPs
Pronouns
Reflexive pronoun forms
Plural pronoun forms
Two kinds of genitive
Nominative and accusative
The full set of pronoun forms
What pronouns do
Defining pronouns
6 Determinatives
Determinatives going it alone
Pre-determiner
All
and
Both
7 Verbs
Tense
Past participles
Irregular verbs
Gerund-participles
Auxiliary verbs
Auxiliary
Be
What
Be
does
Auxiliary Do
Auxiliary Have
Modal auxiliaries
The core meanings of modals
Referring to the future
8 Adjectives
The chaos of the traditional definition
Inflected forms of adjectives
The rich and the poor
Complements in Adjective Phrases
9 Adverbs
Identifying adverbs
Uses of adverbs
Adverb Phrases
Bare adverbs and informal style
Adverbophobia
10 Prepositions
11 Coordinators, subordinators, and interjections
Coordinators
Subordinators
That
Whether
For
The traditional muddle
Interjections
12 Content clauses
Declarative content clauses
Interrogative content clauses
Exclamative content clauses
13 Tenseless subordinate clauses
Clauses requiring the plain form
Mandative clauses
Infinitival clauses
Infinitival clauses with subjects
Gerund-participial clauses
Past-participial clauses
14 Passive clauses
What are passive clauses?
The long passive
The short passive
Advice for your own writing
15 Relative clauses
Integrated relative clauses
Supplementary relative clauses
Myths about relative clauses
Fused relative clauses
16 Mythical grammar errors
The misnamed “split infinitive”
Subjects with gerund-participles
Forms of coordinate pronouns
The pronoun
Who
and its inflected forms
The
whom
problem
Like
with a clause complement
Less
vs.
fewer
Different
prepositions
Moral panic over modal adjuncts
Clause-initial connective adjuncts
The singular pronoun
They
Mismatched coordinates
Stranding prepositions
17 Spelling and punctuation
The English writing system
American and British spelling
Apostrophes
Hyphens
Novelists’ spellings of casual speech
Punctuation
Sentence-enders: periods, question marks, and exclamation marks
Commas
No comma between subject and verb
The run-on sentence or comma splice
Semicolons
Colons
Dashes
Parentheses
Square brackets
Quotation marks
Capitalization
18 Style
Dangling modifiers
Further reading
Grammar
Usage
Style
Disrecommendations
Glossary
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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The Truth About English Grammar
GEOFFREY K. PULLUM
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Geoffrey K. Pullum 2024
The right of Geoffrey K. Pullum to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6054-7
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024934299
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
If you have ever been led to believe that your grammar is bad, relax a little. This book aims to liberate you, not berate you. Its main aim is to lay out some of the most basic principles of grammar from the ground up, without presupposing any previous acquaintance, and to lay out those principles in a more modern and consistent way. But it also to some extent aims to free you from fears of accidentally violating grammar and being judged for it. Far too many alleged “grammatical errors” aren’t mistakes at all: they presuppose rules that don’t exist and never did.
I have little time for the people who bully others about their conception of “correctness,” while purporting to be the guardians of the wisdom and beauty of the English language, especially when in fact they’re doing little more than peddling traditional dogma and often getting it wrong. Sometimes they’re really just objecting to a variety of English they dislike, or a development that’s recent enough to be not what they’re used to (“The awful way people talk today!”). There’s often more than a hint of ethnic or class prejudice about their nose-wrinkling: they only really like the English used by people who grew up and went to school roughly when and where they did.
But worse, many previous grammar books frame even genuinely important rules in careless, false, or contradictory ways. Fuzzy generalizations and useless definitions are repeated in literally thousands of books. English grammar is too often treated as a body of entrenched dogma that should never be queried or revised. The traditional books tell us that nouns are naming words, verbs are action words, auxiliaries are helping verbs, adjectives are words that describe nouns, adverbs are words that describe verbs, pronouns are words used in place of nouns to avoid repetition, a preposition stands before a noun to relate it to another. . . None of these definitions really work. Anyone who takes them at face value and thinks about them is likely to assume grammar makes no sense.
I’ve been interested in the grammar of English since childhood. In 2002, I co-authored The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (often called CGEL) with Rodney Huddleston. He showed me how much we need to break away from the ossified tradition of earlier centuries, and frame the description of the language in more coherent terms. CGEL does that, but it’s a big fat reference work (1,860 pages) designed for specialists, preferably with some grounding in linguistics. This book is very different: it’s aimed at people who have no prior experience with grammar but would like a modest-sized introduction to it that makes sense.
Leaving much of the traditional dogma behind won’t make me popular with the writers of earlier books. Essentially all popular introductions, textbooks, and syllabi are stuck in the usual time warp, and their authors won’t appreciate my ditching their terms and concepts.
The problem I’m pointing to – the reason I believe English grammar has to be stated in a new way – isn’t that English changes over time. It does change, of course, but very slowly, without causing major problems. Books from a century ago are still fully understandable: young fans of the Twilight vampire stories (2005 onward) can read Bram Stoker’s classic vampire story Dracula even though it was published more than a hundred years before they were born (1897). Even over a century or two, the changes in English grammar are fairly trivial – nearly as trivial as the grouses and grumbles about the way young people talk today.
Rather more serious is the problem of delusions about what the rules are: people simply will not look at what the evidence tells them. Simon Heffer says, “I happen to believe that the ‘evidence’ of how I see English written by others, including some other professional writers, is not something by which I wish to be influenced” (in the preface to Strictly English, 2010). This gives him no basis for his decisions other than personal peeves, reformist yearnings, or what he imagines follows from logic. What he dismisses is the only kind of evidence grammar can ever be based on: the facts of how English is actually spoken and written by the people we regard as competent in it.
I will not be indulging peeves or proposing bans here. I will try to present the truth about the grammar of English in an intelligible way, based on evidence from how real people speak and write – because if the rules of grammar are not ultimately founded on that, they have no rational basis at all.
The really crucial point, though, is not about the evidence. It’s about the whole framework of definitions and assumptions people have been leaning on for 250 years. It needs revision. We need a framework of concepts based on modern thinking about how to describe grammatical systems. This does require the introduction of a bit of unfamiliar terminology, but nothing like what you need in order to master basic anatomy or chemistry. And you may discover that looking closely at the structure of the sentences of English is surprisingly interesting and rewarding.
Knowing something about grammar won’t magically improve the quality of your writing; writing well does not emerge miraculously out of knowing some rules or definitions, but only from hard work and experience with trying to write sentences that will affect people the way you want to affect them. But knowing grammar will dramatically enhance your ability to see what the issues are, and understand the advice (whether good or bad) that more advanced books on grammar and usage and style present.
Many people have influenced this book, some more than they realize. Rodney Huddleston has always felt there should be an elementary book that explained why traditional English grammar needed revision, and I hope this book does some of that work. My friend Brett Reynolds, indispensable co-author of the 2nd edition of A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar, has contributed hugely over the past decade, improving my understanding of grammar in a thousand ways. His matchless ability to spot both big-picture theoretical points and tiny points of detail enabled me to greatly improve an earlier draft. Ian Malcolm, my commissioning editor at Polity Press, caught other slips and made insightful suggestions for improvements.
A special acknowledgment goes to the copy editor who worked with me on the final typescript: Justin Dyer. Working with him was nothing like the usual experience of facing quibbles and objections and changes I didn’t want. It was like working with a brilliant colleague who fully understood the project and helped me smooth out the final version and fix the last infelicities and inconsistencies. Justin doesn’t just correct the misplayed notes, he hears the music in his head. I’m enormously grateful to him for making the completion of the book such a pleasure.
Last but certainly not least, I thank the grammarian I have shared my life with while writing this book: Joan Maling. Her sharp editorial eye has helped me to improve my writing for decades, but she is also a source of real linguistic wisdom, pointers to the literature, and ideas for illustrations. We see eye to eye on syntax as well as on life.
Notation guide
I use italics for example sentences and mentioned words; so I might write:
The word the is called the definite article.
I use bold occasionally for introduced technical terms; so I might write:
The word the is called the definite article.
I use small capitals for emphasized text. (They also appear in some column or row labels in table displays.) So I might write:
This has never been true.
I use bold italics with a Capital Initial to make unique names for dictionary entries (they’re called “lexemes” – I’ll explain that in chapter 3); so I might write:
The lexeme Break has the forms break, broke, broken, and breaking.
The word Thatsbr is a subordinator but the word Thatdet is a determinative.
As a way to signal that some sequence of words contravenes the rules of grammar, I use a strikeout line through the sentence. So I might illustrate a point about where you can put adverbs with these examples:
The police obviously know about it.
The obviously police know about it.
The idea is to make it unmissable that the second one is not what anyone would normally write. The strikeout means that the second sentence has something seriously wrong with it in grammatical terms.
I will sometimes use one or two raised question marks to signal that a sentence sounds odd, or deeply weird:
??Verdi was a composer and many operas were written by him.
That’s not completely ungrammatical, but hardly anyone would write like that (instead of saying and he wrote many operas). The weirdness really needs an explanation (and it gets it, in chapter 16).
Underlining is sometimes used simply to draw attention to part of a sentence: notice the interpolated phrase in He must, for heaven’s sake, have known.
I try to avoid abbreviations, but for a few high-frequency terms they are very useful. The most important are these:
I write
NP
for Noun Phrase (a phrase like
the quick brown
fox
with a noun as its head or principal word).
VP
stands for Verb Phrase (a phrase like
jumps
over the lazy dog
with a verb as its head).
PP
means Preposition Phrase (a phrase like
over
the lazy dog
with a preposition as its head).
AdjP
means Adjective Phrase (a phrase like
too
lazy
with an adjective as its head).
AdvP
means Adverb Phrase (a phrase like
so very
quickly
with an adverb as its head).
1Introduction
Most people seem to think that using a language is all about choosing words. It isn’t. You could know every word in the dictionary and still not be able to say anything. You need to be able to form sentences. That means following grammatical rules. The grammar of a language is simply the system governing the way in which its sentences are put together. And different languages do it in different ways.
This book concentrates on how sentences are put together, not on words or their meanings and uses. It’s not my job to tell you whether or not you should use the noun impact as a verb. My job is to make sure you know exactly what that means: what nouns and verbs are, and what roles they can (or cannot) play in sentences. Then you can decide whether to write This could impact your life (with impact as a verb) or This could have an impact on your life (with impact as a noun). Journalistic prose seems to use will have an impact on the three or four times as often as will impact the, but clearly both are in use by professional writers. It’s your decision.
I find it really sad that so many well-educated English speakers are unable to trust their own judgment; they fear that their knowledge of grammar will betray them – that some ill-placed adverb or preposition or participle will expose them to ridicule. They imagine that rules of grammar are laid down in authoritative grammar books somewhere with the sole purpose of catching you out, and you have to obey them.
Sadder still, many such fears are mostly groundless. Certainly there are rules of English grammar – thousands of them, often highly tricky and complex to state – but users of English already obey most of the rules unconsciously. They draw on their tacit, internalized knowledge of English grammar every day whenever they speak, write, or understand anything. They couldn’t say what the rules are explicitly, of course, any more than they could name all the bones in their hands, but their grasp of the rules is unconscious, almost like an instinct. We all make occasional slips of the tongue or the keyboard that we didn’t intend, but mostly we know how to say things in English without much prompting.
Yet many people believe total falsehoods about grammar. They trust in rules they think they recall from some high school English class but couldn’t state with any clarity now. What drives this strange phenomenon? Why should lifelong English speakers be afflicted by fear of nonexistent rules? It’s mainly due to the existence of thousands of over-conservative usage books, how-to-write websites, and grammar-checking apps. Plenty of the material repeated in works by purported English grammar experts is just wrong. Their descriptions are clumsy, if not false, and the edicts and prohibitions they dispense are sometimes fictional.
I’m not saying there aren’t any rules, and I’m not saying you can ignore the rules. There may be some creative writing teachers who are so liberally inclined that they say there are no rules at all about writing, but I don’t think they can possibly mean it. Of course there are rules. Loads of rules. If I didn’t follow the usual rules of English word order, then figure almost find I saying it out to impossible totally was what would you.
Let me repeat that last bit, this time obeying the rules of English: If I didn’t follow the usual rules of English word order, then you would find it almost totally impossible to figure out what I was saying.
Those last fourteen words could be arranged in any of 87,178,291,200 different orders, hardly any of which are grammatically permitted. As far as I can see, only one correctly expresses the meaning I intended. Choosing any of the other 87,178,291,199 creates either some sort of error or else (in most cases) complete gibberish that no one could understand. So do not imagine I’m saying we can lighten up and ignore the rules. I’m saying we have to get straight on what the rules are.
Grammar and style
Knowing something about the grammar of the world’s most important language (that’s undeniably the status of English) can be useful for anyone. First, it’s interesting to see something of the complexity of a system you have already largely mastered, but second, understanding grammar is fundamental for understanding advice about writing style. Style is a matter of making effective use of the possibilities that the grammar makes available. And you simply cannot talk about style, or set about criticizing it or improving it, without employing basic grammatical concepts. Grammar underlies style in the way that anatomy underlies fashion design: you couldn’t become an expert at designing clothes without knowing that a typical human has arms, legs, elbows, knees, and feet.
What a grammar describes is not the qualities that define literary style. This book does not talk much about avoidable clichés, deprecated words, informal expressions, or weakness of rhetoric. That sort of thing, though appealing to many, is often highly subjective and influenced by passing fashions. Grammar is about the principles that determine whether some sequence of words is a sentence at all. The reason I’ve written this book is that for two or three centuries writers on the topic have analyzed grammar badly and explained it in antiquated, clunky, or totally mistaken ways. Confused dogma has been handed down from teacher to teacher since the 18th century, and repeated in books that often shamelessly plagiarize each other and repeat each other’s mistakes.
It’s an oft-repeated maxim that a truly experienced writer who understands style can risk breaking the rules. But I’m not talking about breaking rules. I’m interested in what the rules should say, and I’m warning you that most of the books on how to write English are loaded with supposed rules or prohibitions obeyed by nobody, whether expert or not. Take the case of the ridiculous advice, found in numerous books on how to write well, that you should avoid adjectives and adverbs. My point is not that when you’re an established writer you can occasionally be allowed to risk the occasional adjective or adverb. I’m saying that the people who tell you not to use adjectives or adverbs in your writing are time-wasters and they don’t know what they’re talking about.
My plan is not to waste your time (which is why I’ve kept this book as short as I could). I will assume that you’re serious about writing material in English that other people will read (that’s obvious: if you’re writing just for yourself, it simply won’t matter how you write); that you haven’t studied grammar in any depth before, so you aren’t necessarily acquainted with all the technical terms grammarians use (I’ll explain the ones I need simply, as and when they come up); and that you don’t have endless hours to spend on the topic so you don’t want arcane details, historical digressions, cutesy jokes, or childish cartoons.
What style you should adopt in your writing depends on who your intended readers might be. That I cannot know. You might be writing for an audience of one, like the teacher or professor who’s going to grade your next term paper, or the editor of a magazine in which you’re hoping to be published, or the boss for whom you have to write reports and memos. Or you might be writing for a small circle of fans on social media, or a few hundred readers of a blog, or the thousands of customers to whom you have to send business communications, or the millions of readers in the great wide world of literature who purchase your breakthrough debut novel. I won’t make any assumptions about such things.
My task in this book is to tell you the truth about contemporary English grammar, rather than pass along the familiar old views of it that most grammar books repeat as if they were scripture.
Did you ever see the 1992 film A Few Good Men? There’s a classic scene where the brutal Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson) has been ranting about what it takes to keep America safe, and is being needled under cross-examination by a prosecuting attorney (Tom Cruise) who demands that he should tell the court martial the truth. Jessep loses his temper and yells: “You can’t handle the truth!” Well, I’m going to assume you can handle the truth.
Too much of what has been written about English is false, or at least two hundred years past its use-by date. For a long time the unreliability of the published literature on English grammar has needed a positive alternative that makes better sense. It horrifies me to see how bad most grammar books are. I feel like a biologist marooned in a world where most medical science books make no reference to the circulation of the blood, and show no awareness of bacteria or viruses. Because, make no mistake about it, if physicians were typically as incompetent in anatomy and biology as how-to-write books are in grammar, you’d probably be dead.
I mean that literally. The germ theory of disease hadn’t even begun to take hold in 1800. People thought epidemics were caused by foul-smelling mists. The state of the art in grammar at that time was a million-selling book on English grammar by Lindley Murray (1795, heavily influenced by and sometimes plagiarized from Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 1762). During the 1800s, microbiological theories of what cause diseases emerged, thanks to heroes of science and medicine like Bassi, Koch, Lister, Pasteur, Schwann, and Semmelweis. Meanwhile in biology the theory of evolution by natural selection due to Darwin and Wallace began to make scientific sense of biology more generally. By 1900, biology and medicine were much more integrated, and both had changed beyond recognition. Yet grammar had made almost no progress. The same old stuff was still being parroted by schoolteachers everywhere – formulations dating from before Darwin was even born (1809).
It stops here. I won’t be repeating any dogma from earlier centuries unless it is solidly confirmed as true and still holds today. Trust me.
Occasionally you may find yourself in the position of having to write for people who believe what they’ve read in those old grammar books, and perhaps have strong feelings about it. I argue in this book (with supporting evidence) that in many cases they are wrong. But you may need to be diplomatic, and phrase things the way somebody else wants them phrased. If your boss, teacher, professor, editor, or publisher insists that some form of words is wrong or ugly or illicit, you may have to write it their way. But I hope in such a circumstance you’ll feel a lot better if you know both sides of the story. That is, it’ll be easier to tolerate a boss who insists you mustn’t ever write a passive clause if you know exactly what passives are. And it should give you a tiny bit of deep-down satisfaction to know that the boss is wrong about what constitutes bad writing – that you know more grammar than the boss does.
American and British English
I should make a brief remark, before we get down to the nitty-gritty, about the supposedly yawning chasm between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE). I’ve had decades of teaching experience in both America and Britain, and I’d say that few contrasts have been so grossly exaggerated. There are plenty of pronunciation differences, of course, and there are many words that are used one side of the Atlantic but not the other (BrE lorry for AmE truck, AmE pitcher for BrE jug, etc.). And spelling was long ago standardized in very slightly different ways. (I’ve decided to use AmE spelling in this book: see chapter 17.) But when it comes to grammar, the important thing to notice is how utterly trivial the differences are.
You’ll occasionally notice a few contrasts in AmE and BrE speech. An AmE speaker is more likely to say I did that already, with the simple past did, in contexts where a BrE speaker would say I’ve already done that; but both understand what the other version means. A BrE speaker will sometimes answer a question with She may do where an AmE speaker would leave off the do; but intelligibility is not threatened. An AmE speaker will call 7:45 a quarter of eight while in BrE it’s a quarter to eight, but they can still manage to meet for breakfast. For the most part, there weren’t any AmE/BrE decisions to make when I was deciding how to frame the sentences in this book.
The idea that a few tiny differences in grammar and a sprinkling of different word choices could form a mighty barrier between cultures and worldviews is utterly ridiculous. Yes, Oscar Wilde said (in his 1887 short story “The Canterville Ghost”) that “we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language”; but he was joking! And yes, George Bernard Shaw said in various different ways that Britain and America were two nations separated by a common language, but that’s nothing like a serious account of the facts.
The astonishing truth is that more than a billion people who use Standard English every day pretty much agree on sentence construction, down to fine details. British conservatives do grumble about “Americanisms” immigrating into BrE, but it’s mostly down at the level of individual words. (The commerce goes two ways, incidentally: my friend Ben Yagoda runs a blog called Not One-Off Britishisms, devoted to curating a collection of BrE expressions that have crept into AmE.) The garments called pants in America are called trousers in Britain. But significant differences in the actual rules of grammar are as rare as hen’s teeth. So let’s start looking at grammar.
2Clauses, sentences, and phrases
We start with the big units of language that can actually convey thoughts: clauses, which are the most important, then sentences, and then phrases.
Clauses
The primary concept in grammar is the clause. A clause is the smallest unit in any language that can express a complete thought or conversational contribution: a claim about what’s true, or a description of some situation, or a question that seeks an answer, or an instruction that could be followed, or anything of that sort. A few examples of typical clauses will help to make this clear.
This stinks.
Sperm whales feed almost exclusively on squid.
What is cheese made from?
Cheese is made from milk.
What an idiot he was!
Get your hand off my leg.
whose body was never found
which he was looking at
whether she was aware of it or not
that he was cheating on her
Clauses in English can contain other clauses. Take the last two clauses above. You can tuck one inside the other, replacing of it by that he was cheating on her:
whether she was aware [that he was cheating on her] or not
That’s a clause about his cheating tucked inside a larger clause about her awareness. And the whole thing could be put inside an even larger clause: you could put I wonder at the beginning, for example.
Sentences
Sentences are larger units that can be uttered on their own to make complete conversational or narrative contributions. They are generally made up of clauses, either by tucking one clause inside another or by linking two or more clauses with a word like and.
Some teachers insist that a sentence must have the form of a clause, but if you read any literature at all you’ll see that isn’t true; but we can come back to that point.
Here’s a fairly complex four-clause sentence, made up from the clauses listed above, which illustrates both embedding one clause inside another and linking two clauses together with and:
I doubt whether Moby-Dick would have liked cheese, because he was a sperm whale, and they feed almost exclusively on squid.
This has a main clause (the one that isn’t enclosed within any larger one) making a statement about my doubts. Within it is a clause raising a question for consideration: would Moby-Dick have liked cheese? After the word because comes a third clause, a statement about Moby-Dick being a sperm whale. And after the word and comes yet another clause, an assertion about sperm whale food preferences. Here’s the sentence again, this time with square brackets round each clause:
[ [I doubt [whether Moby-Dick would have liked cheese] ], because [he was a sperm whale], and [they feed almost exclusively on squid] ].
