grumbling about grammar

USAGE

Grumbling about grammar

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A matter of identity

Than fly to others that we knownot of.'

It's the criticisms which are recent, notthe usage.

For native speakers, all of these issuesraise the question of social identity. Tospeak or write according to the rules ofthe traditional grammar books is con-sidered to be a mark of educatedness bymost influential people in society. Ifwe do not follow those rules, we run ther'isk of being thought uneducated. Ineveryday conversation, it is rarely a bigissue; but in formal contexts (such asbeing interviewed for a job, or making aradio announcement), and in thewritten language, the issue is real indeed.There have been cases of people losingtheir jobs because they have notobserved grammatical distinctions ofthis kind.

And foreign learners? Knowing aboutthese issues is, I would suggest, animportant par-t of a developed lingusiticawareness. Learning a language is morethan just knowing about structures anduses; it is knowing about the attitudespeople hold to their language, and aboutthe identities such attitudes convey.Native speakers take sides on thesematters. The nearer learners come to

native-like fluency, the more they willneed to take sides too.

David Crystal recently moved from theUniversity of Reading where he wasProfessor of Linguistic Science, todevote himself to full-time writing andbroadcasting. His many publicationsinclude Who Cares About EnglishUsage? He also broadcasts frequentlywith the BBC on language.

PRACTICAL ENGLISH TEACHING JUNE 1987 59

Mythical change

now) is increasingly to be heard inBritain, instead of the constructionusing the indicative (... that he goes) oran auxiliary verb (... that he should go).Quite a number of British people dis-like the grammatical patterns of USEnglish, and say so loudly, wheneverthey get the chance.

But not all changes are due toAmerican English, of course. Some takeplace because a grammatical contrast isnot supported by a clear difference ofmeaning. One instance is the 'rule'wh ich tells you to use less/least beforenon-count nouns (less cake) and fewer/fewest before count nouns (fewer cakes).This has been breaking down for a longtime, with less/least coming to be usedfor both types: There are less apples onthe tree this year. He's made the leastmistakes. There's no clear meaningdifference, so people have graduallybegun to lose their sense of what thesource of the contrast is. Left to itself,the language would stop using the con-trast, after a while. But, of course,people are very reluctant to leave lang-uage to itself. They feel it needs caringfor. So they complain about the change,in the hope of reversing the trend.

There are several other contrasts keptartificially alive by grammar books andstylistic manuals - such as the diffel'-ence between due to and owing to, likeand as (like/as I was saying ... ), or willand shall. But at least in these cases, thelanguage has been changing in recentdecades - and is still changing.

By contrast, there are a number ofcases where people condemn a usage asa 'recent change' in the grammar ofEnglish, when in fact the usage has beenarou nd for centuries. There are two

famous examples here. One is the use ofsplit infinitives - putting an adverbbetween to and the verb, as in Theywish to medically examine the child.The other is the placing of a prepositionat the end of a sentence, as in Who is hetalking to. Both are regularly con-demned as examples of the way the useof grammar is deteriorating in the 20thcentury.

But neither of these usages is a recenthappening in English. The OxfordEnglish Dictionary shows that we havebeen splitting infinitives happily sinceat least the 14th century. And we onlyhave to look a few lines down Hamlet's

speech 'To be or not to be ... ' to see asentence ending with a preposition:

' ... and makes us rather bear thoseills we have

Grammatical change

'Hopefully', said the politician beinginterviewed on the radio recently, 'thetrains will be running again soon'. Andin the follow-up programme, wherelisteners write in and give their pointsof view, they rounded on the poorpolitician - not for what he was saying,but for the way he was saying it. He hadbegun his sentence with hopefully, and- according to those who wrote in - heshould have known better.

What are the listeners objecting to?They want the word to be used literally,instead of idiomatically. 'Trains can'thope', they say, so the sentence shou Idbe recast as 'I hope that ... ' or 'It is tobe hoped that ... '. What is not clear, ofcourse, is why th is particu lar adverb hasbeen singled out for attention. There aremany other adverbs which can be usedin the same way, to reflect the attitudeof the speaker, but no one ever objectsto them. If the politician had said'Surprisingly, the train was on time',there would have been no letters.

Why hate hopefully? The mostwidely-cited theory is that this wordstood out in American English when itbecame widely used as a translation ofhoffentlich by German-speaking Jewishimmigrants, following World War 11.The usage caught on, bu t many peoplenonetheless felt it to be alien, andsingled it out for criticism. It's a plaus-ible view - though I'd like to see somehistorical evidence before accepting it.

Grammar moves at a snail's pace, andonly a tiny number of words or con-structions is affected at anyone time.There are only a few dozen cases likehopefully in the entire language. Themajority of grammatical patterns are thesame from one generation to the next -and most of the grammar of modernEngl ish has been the same for centuries.What is sur'prising is the amount ofemotional heat which can still begenerated by these few cases ofgrammatical change.

Where do the changes come from?Several in current British English aredue to transatlantic influence. If youhear people saying things like This is adifferent hotel than the one I stayed inlast year, they are following theAmerican trend to use than afterdifferent, instead of from or to. If youhear them answer the question 'Do youhave a car?' with I don't instead of

haven't, then again they are following- 125 trend. And likewise, the use of the

- -::ive (as in I insist that he go