by Florent Perek

What is the study of grammar?

The main subject matter of grammar as a field of linguistics (also called “syntax”) is to develop a system of concepts and categories to describe and capture the grammatical knowledge of speakers. The modern study of grammar has its origins and still shares many terms with traditional grammar, which is what is sometimes taught at school in one form or another. However, some of these terms might have a slightly different meaning, and linguists systematically attempt to provide precise definitions and clear-cut criteria for them.

An example: Nouns and verbs

We can illustrate what is meant by categories of grammar, and why they are useful, by drawing on the notions of nouns and verbs. Examples of nouns are bridge, girl, wolf, and smartphone. Examples of verbs include pull, killed, eaten, and going. Nouns and verbs are two word classes: categories that words can be sorted into. Other word classes include adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions, to name but a few.

In traditional grammar, these categories are often defined by referring to semantic properties of these words, that is, what kind of concept they describe. You might have been exposed to such statements as “a noun is a word that names a person, place, or object” and “verbs are action words”. But if you look at lists of nouns and verbs, you will quickly realize that these statements are too broad; at best they are just general tendencies. For instance, honesty, truth, and appointment do not refer to either people, places, or objects. This could be solved by expanding the definition, but it would quickly become devoid of meaning as new cases must be covered. What is more, there is overlap between the two categories of “nouns” and “verbs”: words like destruction and arrival refer to some kind of action, yet they are nouns, not verbs. So what makes words belong to one or the other category, if it is not their meaning?

The main word classes of English
(source: https://mycyberwall.co.za/get-smart/english/grade-5/parts-speech)

The answer is: their grammatical behavior. Nouns on the one hand, and verbs on the other, belong together because they are used in similar contexts, and play similar roles in sentences.

Nouns and verbs in grammar

For instance, nouns are typically preceded by certain kinds of small words called articles, like the and a. For instance, you can say The cat is on a mat but not *Cat is on mat (the star in front of the latter sentence indicates that it is unacceptable; this is a convention commonly used in studies of grammar).

Most nouns can also occur with a final –s to mark plurality, i.e., when more than one entity are referred to, for instance cats, mats, gardens, drivers, ideas, governments. Some nouns seem to resist plural marking, like ?waters, ?rices, ?beefs (in the same fashion as the star, the question mark indicates a questionable form, which might be borderline acceptable or only acceptable in some circumstances), but with a bit of imagination it is possible to find contexts in which these forms could be used, like when referring to different types of the specified entity (for instance if you’re bringing white rice and brown rice to the guest table, you can say that you’re bringing “two rices”). At any rate, verbs (and other word classes, for that matter) cannot occur with plural –s. Many verbs can be ended with an “s”, but only to mark the third person (he, she, it) in the present tense, not plurality: he runs, *he run, *you runs (at least in Standard English; some of these forms are possible in dialects).

The plural of nouns (source: http://www.clipartkid.com/clip-art-proper-nouns-cliparts/)

Nouns can also be followed by possessive ’s, to mark, as the name indicates, that the referent of this noun (i.e., the entity it designates) is in some loose sense the “possessor” of the referent of the noun following it, for instance the President’s budget, a tree’s leaves, virtue’s reward. Verbs are not found in such a position, and among word classes, only nouns can.

Finally, nouns also share the grammatical property of being the central element of a family of larger expressions called noun phrases. Noun phrases contain a noun and other words that are related to it, like articles mentioned above (like the, a), and adjectives (describing, loosely speaking, properties of the noun’s referent: nice, tall, green), and all these words behave as a unit. Examples of noun phrases include a cat, the tall man, a nice healthy green smoothie. Importantly, noun phrases have particular functions in sentences that other kinds of phrases typically cannot fulfill. For instance, they appear before verbs, and in this position (called the subject) they typically refer to the person or thing doing the “action” described by the verb: The cat lies on the mat, The tall man sleeps. This fact and many others are grammatical properties of noun phrases, which, in a way, carry over to their central element: nouns.

Verbs can be similarly associated with a distinct set of grammatical properties, and in this way be distinguished from nouns. As a mental exercise, you can try to identify what these properties are by considering how the examples of verbs provided earlier are used in sentences. In fact, all word classes are characterized by their own set of typical grammatical properties that they don’t share with the other word classes (or at least not fully).

Why word classes?

These observations might seem like trivial facts, but recognizing that words belong to different categories is actually quite useful: simply by knowing that a word belongs to a certain word class, you can predict how it is likely to be used in sentences. This kind of knowledge is very useful to second language learners, given their lower degree of natural exposure to the language they are learning. But it can also be useful for native speakers to refine certain language skills, for instance in academic writing. When looking up vocabulary in a dictionary, grammatical categories offer concise ways to summarize grammatical information. In metalinguistic discourse (i.e., when using language to talk about language), having a system of terms and concepts to describe language even seems to be a requirement to talk about particular aspects of sentences and formulate generalizations.

Moreover, there is evidence that the notion of word classes like noun and verb is in fact very real to lay native speakers, even unconsciously. Consider this extract from a popular sitcom.

(from How I Met Your Mother, Season 1 Episode 7: Matchmaker)

Transcript:

Robin: So, Love Solutions? Did you meet the love of your life?

Ted: She said it'd take three days. It's been five days. Should I be worried?

Lily: Just play cool, don't Ted out about it.

Ted: Did you just use my name as a verb?

Barney: Oh, yeah, we do that behind your back. "Ted out": to overthink. Also see "Ted up". "Ted up": to overthink with disastrous results. Sample sentence: "Billy Tedded up when he tried-"

Ted: Okay... I get it!

What do you think prompts Ted to identify these uses of his name as verbs?

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The first use is in the sentence Don’t Ted out about it, which is an imperative sentence, i.e., making a request or giving advice. Only verbs occur in that context, in particular the environment “Don’t ___” (cf. Don’t run, Don’t eat, but not *Don’t apple, *Don’t arrival). Moreover, Ted is followed by the word out (called a particle), which many other verbs also do to produce meaningful combinations: figure out, find out, freak out, hang out, work out, turn out, etc. Later on, Barney explicitly defines Ted out and Ted up as having verbal meanings, with the verb “to overthink”, and also uses Ted with the –ed ending: Tedded. This ending marks the past tense (i.e., that the action happened prior to the time of utterance) and is only used with verbs: pulled, killed, but such forms as *girled, *catted, or *arrivaled do not exist.

Once it is established that Ted is also a verb (or more specifically Ted out and Ted up), what predictions can you make about how it could be used in sentences? Give examples.

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If Ted is a verb, then we can predict that it can be used with other verbal endings in addition to –ed, for instance –ing and –s: You were Tedding out, He always Teds up. We can also make it follow words like must, can, and should (e.g, You must/can/should Ted out now) and more generally use it in constructions that call for a verb: This made me Ted up, He started to Ted out, I regret Tedding up all these years. These are just a few predictions about the grammatical behavior of the verb Ted, but many more can be made.

Word classes are merely one example of the different systems of categories that are used to describe sentences, and their study is but a small part of the much vaster domain of grammar research. Grammar is also concerned with higher-level aspects of sentence structure, such as how words form phrases, how phrases are related to each other within the sentence, what kind of general sentence patterns there are and how to describe them, and more generally how speakers combine words together to produce complex meanings, to name a few topics. Many of the categories defined at these various levels of description are frequently referred to and used in all fields of linguistic studies, so learning the basics of grammar is also a requirement for approaching the existing literature.

Pushing the limits of grammar

You might wonder at this point about the status of grammar as a field of research, and whether there is anything new to discover about the grammar of English. After all, once a complete system of categories has been devised to describe all sentences of English (or another language), what is there left to do? A cursory look at the grammar books shelf in any bookstore will show you that many such attempts have been brought to fruition, especially in such a prominent and widespread language as English. So what kind of research might a grammarian do?

For one thing, grammarians frequently discover quirks of usage that require existing categories of grammar to be revised, if ever so slightly. Furthermore, language is in constant change, and speakers frequently innovate by creating new structures that do not necessarily fit the description; over time, grammatical description must be amended to capture newer patterns as well. Finally, another aspect of grammar that is still not fully understood and therefore is the topic of much research is that of variation: the factors that governs the choice between different but seemingly equivalent forms of the grammar (such as give someone a book vs. give a book to someone), like age and gender of the speaker, linguistic and extra-linguistic context, text type, degree of formality, politeness, etc. There is a growing realization in grammatical studies that a proper description of grammar should include information about how particular forms are distributed across contexts of use.

We can illustrate the first of these points with an example using word classes. The main grammatical properties of adjectives can be illustrated by the following sentences, using the adjectives nice, small, intelligent, and tired; can you identify and describe them?

The nice/small/intelligent/tired child

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Adjectives occur before nouns (here, child) and after articles (if there is one, here the). In that position (called the attributive position), the adjective modifies the meaning of the noun by specifying properties of its referent.

The child is nice/small/intelligent/tired

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Adjectives occur after a noun phrase and a form of the verb be (here, is). This is called the predicative position, in which the adjective also modifies the noun.

very nice/small/intelligent/tired

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An adjective can be modified by the word very directly preceding it. Very is an example of a wider class of words called intensifiers, like extremely, absolutely, and completely, which, as the name indicates, strengthen the meaning of the adjective they modify.

This child is nicer/smaller than that one.
This child is more intelligent/tired than that one.

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Many adjectives can occur with an –er ending (or –r if it already ends with an “e”). In this form, the adjective is used to situate the referent of the modified noun with respect to another entity, following some scale of property indicated by the adjectives; such a construction is called a comparative. Those adjectives that cannot occur with –er can instead be preceded by the word more, to obtain the same comparative meaning. In both cases the word than is often added after the adjective and followed by the reference for comparison. Some adjectives (like true and red) seem to resist comparative formation (?more true, ?more red). However, just like with nouns and plurals, such restrictions are not always absolute, and comparatives with these adjectives may occur in certain contexts.

Now consider the word utter as in the utter destruction of the city. From its occurrence before a noun, we can reasonably assume that utter is an adjective. This is further in line with the fact that it modifies the meaning of the following noun, like adjectives usually do (here, making the sense of destruction stronger). However, you can’t say *The destruction of the city was utter, neither is the comparative construction *more utter possible, much less the form *utterer. Yet, there isn’t any obvious reason for these restrictions, as all of these forms could actually make sense if they were possible. In sum, utter is a very untypical adjective that appears not to fit well the word class approach, since there does not seem to be a general category that could be used to predict its peculiar grammatical behavior. Rather, the only information that native speakers seem to have about utter is that there is a construction “utter + Noun”.

This is an example of the sometimes unpredictable nature of grammar, which has prompted researchers to devise descriptive models that rely less (or at least, not exclusively) on sweeping generalizations of the kind represented by word classes. Such a way to look at grammar, famously pioneered by linguists at Birmingham (for instance John Sinclair and Susan Hunston) and other universities, is gaining popularity in the field, and consists in describing grammar in terms of a collection of patterns, or constructions (like here “utter + Noun”), of varying degrees of complexity, instead of a limited set of categories and rules using them. Another example of the adequacy of patterns for grammatical description is provided by the use of the word because below.

(7)	We had no HF radio [because it had been under water].
(8)	We always knew that she was safe [because Ralph drove here anywhere she wanted to go].
(9)	[Because potatoes are heavy feeders], fertilizer can be applied to the soil.

Sentences (7) and (8) show unremarkable uses of because: in each case, because is followed by a “sentence”. The scare quotes are intended; more exactly, this kind of sentence within a sentence should be called a clause. The because-clauses (delimited by square brackets in the sentences above) specify the reason why the event described in the first part of each sentence occurs: they therefore “complete” the meaning of the sentence. They can also be moved to the front of the sentence, like in (9), to accomplish the same function.

With respect to the grammatical properties just mentioned, because pattern like other words such as since, as, although, and until; such words are called subordinating conjunctions. However, only because can occur in the quite distinctive structure exemplified by sentences (10) and (11):

(10)	But just [because he’s simple] doesn’t mean he’s a killer.
(11)	Just [because a treatment is “alternative”] doesn’t mean it is necessarily safe.

In these sentences, the word just precedes because, and the because-clause is followed by doesn’t mean. In this regard, these sentences parallel formulations like Heavy rain doesn’t mean that the ground is waterlogged, or That doesn’t mean that I agree with you. At any rate, this is very unusual behavior for a subordinating conjunction, as the rest of the sentence is not really what the because-clause provides a reason for, and does not even constitute a complete sentence as in the examples (7) to (9). In terms of meaning, sentences (10) and (11) involve a form of concession or contrast rather than purely a cause-effect relation; for instance, sentence (10) could be paraphrased as He might be simple but he is not a killer.

These facts suggest that it is preferable, if not necessary, to consider the pattern “just because … doesn’t mean …” as an independent construction: a generalization in its own right that is not reducible to independent properties of its constituent parts. Along these lines, the whole pattern conveys a complex meaning that is not directly derived from the individual parts of the expression, namely that the because-clause describes a fact despite which some other fact (provided by the that-clause following doesn’t mean) is said to be the case. This example (along with countless others) shows that an analysis of grammar focusing on individual words and their combination fails to account for a large part of the grammatical knowledge of speakers, and as such illustrates one of the core tenets of a relatively recent but prominent theory of grammatical representation called construction grammar.

FURTHER READING

Linguist Steven Pinker wrote a piece in The Guardian entitled "10 grammar rules it's OK to break". The article gives a more sensible and linguistically informed take on several famous prescriptive rules, which provides a nice illustration of the difference between what speakers are commanded to do by prescriptivists, and what they actually do or should do. The article is available online at this address:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/15/steven-pinker-10-grammar-rules-break

The British Council offers some pages with basic descriptions of some concepts of English Grammar. They can be found at this address:

http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar

If you want to learn more about Construction Grammar, you can read this short introductory paper by Adele Goldberg, published in the journal TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences. The PDF can be downloaded here. It is academic writing and might contain some terms you're not used too, but it should give you the general idea.

The rest of the recommended reading consists of academic books. It might be hard for you to get access to them until you arrive at Birmingham (all of them are available from the university library, some as ebooks). If you are interested, don't forget to check them out when you get here!

Huddleston and Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, Berry's English Grammar: A Resource Book for Students, and Verspoor and Sauter's English Sentence Analysis: An introductory course are good undergraduate-level introductions to grammatical analysis.

To give more substance to the idea that grammar varies according to the context of use, the grammar book Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English is one of the first of its kind to provide detailed information about how certain grammatical forms are distributed across speech and different types of written texts. There is an abridged version by Conrad, Biber, and Leech called Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (left), targeted at undergraduates.

Martin Hilpert's Construction Grammar and its Application to English is an excellent introduction to the basic tenets of Construction Grammar that is also accessible to undergraduates.

Finally, to get an idea of the kind of research that is conducted at Birmingham in the field of English Grammar from different perspectives, you can have a look at the following books by three of our collaborators: Susan Hunston's Pattern Grammar: a corpus-driven lexical grammar of English (with Gill Francis), Florent Perek's Argument Structure in Usage-Based Construction Grammar: Experimental and corpus-based perspectives, and Amanda Patten's The English It-Cleft: A Constructional Account and a Diachronic Investigation.