English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
Michael Swan
D1 What is grammar?
Section D Extension
Michael Swan (2005) reprinted from Chapter 1 of Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 4-7.
In this paper Michael Swan attempts to get to the very fundamentals of grammar. He believes that at the deepest level grammar is the same for all languages, with the same function and the same basic options.
Most of the paper consists of a ’thought experiment’ — an exercise designed to get readers thinking about how language evolved. We have no way of knowing if anything like this actually occurred, of course, but it does throw light on what we actually do with language, and what language (and life) would be like without grammar.
What is grammar for?
To understand what grammar is, we really need to know what it is for. Why do we need ’rules for combining words into sentences’ anyway? Couldn’t we manage well enough just by saying the words? This is a perfectly sensible question, and an excellent starting point for our enquiry. The best way to understand what grammar is, what it does, and why it is necessary, is in fact to try to imagine language without it.
Language without grammar
Nobody knows how language originated, but let us carry out a thought experiment. Suppose that you are an intelligent primate that would like to invent a rich communication system. There are various possible ways to signal information, some of which you already use to a limited extent: cries and grunts, facial expressions, gestures. For your new system, you decide that cries and grunts are the most effective option: you can get more variety into vocal signs, and they are not dependent on visibility (so they will work round corners and in the dark).
At first sight, it might look as if the obvious thing to do would be for you and your companions to devise a distinctive vocal sign - let’s call it a ’word’ - for each of the things in your world. (For this to work, you would also need to create a phonological system, but that is not relevant to the present discussion.) So you invent words for your mother, the other mothers in the tribe, the cave mouth, the chief of the tribe, the big tree by the river, the river, the rain that is falling just now, your best stone axe, your second-best stone axe, and so on. However, it quickly becomes clear that this will not work. First of all, there are too many things around for a communication system constructed on this basis to be learnable. And second, the system only enables you to talk about particular things that you have already paid attention to. You cannot talk, for example, about another tree, a new river that you have discovered, a stranger, or the axe you intend to make.
A more promising approach is to use words to designate classes of things instead of individuals, so that your words for ’tree’, ’rain’, ’mother’, ’axe’, ’baby’, ’bear’, and so on can refer to any tree, any instance of rain, etc. (This is anyway an extension of your existing signalling system, which already consists of a few calls indicating recurrent elements in your world like ’danger’, ’panther’, ’food’, ’enemy’.)
And with an important mental leap, you realise that words can refer not only to people and things, but also to their shared characteristics, like ’big’, ’good to eat’, ’red’, or ’cold’; and to the events, situations, and changes that regularly occur in your world, like ’eat’, ’fall’, ’run’, ’die’, ’coming’, ’gone’. (Strictly speaking, it probably does not make sense to separate your consciousness of categories from your labelling of them, as if one came before the other; but it simplifies the discussion to look at things in this way.)
Now you are ready to use your new tool. There are three things you and your companions can do with it. First of all, you can draw each other’s attention to the existence of something in your environment, or to the fact that you want something, by simply using the appropriate class word (’Bear!’, ’Axe!’, ’Eat!’). Second, when necessary, you can combine words to pin down individual members of classes and make it clear which one you are talking about: if you want to ask for a particular axe, you can produce the equivalent of, for instance, ’axe big’. This is an enormously powerful device-think how the four English words ’your’, ’big, ’blue’, and ’mug’, each of which refers to a class with vast numbers of members, can be put together to immediately identify one particular item. And thirdly, you can combine words to indicate events or states of affairs: ’Fall baby’; ’Rain cold’; ’Bear die’; ’Axe big break’; ’Eat baby acorn’.
You have invented language! Up to a point.
Problems
Your language is, however, rather different from the human languages we are familiar with. For one thing, the order of words has no significance: ’Fall baby’ and ’Baby fall’ are alternative forms of the same message. And for another, there is only one kind of word (’bear’, ’die’, and ’cold’ are not respectively a noun, a verb, and an adjective - they are just words).
Does this matter? Well, you can certainly do a lot with the language you have, and it is a remarkable advance on your earlier, very limited communication system. However, it has some limitations. There are three in particular:
1. It can be difficult to specify exact meanings in situations involving more than one element. Putting together your words for ’big’, ’bear’, and ’cave’, for example, will not make it clear whether there is a big bear in the cave or a bear in the big cave. Context will often remove the ambiguity, but this will not always be the case.
2. Your language will enable you to identify and talk about things in the world as separate elements, but not to clarify the causal, spatial, and other relationships
between them, and these may need to be spelt out. For instance, in a situation where A is doing something to B, you cannot easily make it clear, just by saying the words, who or what is the ’doer’ (or ’agent’), and who or what is the ’doee’ (or ’patient’). Again, context or common sense will often make this clear (’Eat baby acorn’ can only be sensibly understood in one way), but confusion can easily arise, as in ’Kill brother bear’ (remember that as things stand the order of words communicates nothing).
3. And finally, with this system you cannot get beyond requests and affirmative statements - ’Bear cave’ can convey the fact that there is a bear in the cave, but you have no way of asking whether there is a bear in the cave, or suggesting that there may be, or saying that there is not a bear in the cave.
So you need:
(i) a way of saying what word goes with what - of indicating how general concepts need to be grouped in order to represent particular elements in the world
(ii) a way of expressing agency and other relationships
(iii) a way of indicating the communicative status of your utterances - statement, question, suggestion, negation, or whatever.
You have discovered the need for grammar.
Solving the problems
There are quite a number of ways in which you might meet this need. One approach would be to signal the necessary extra meanings by the way you arrange words. To show what goes with what, for example, you could have a rule that you always put words for connected ideas together, perhaps with pauses between phrases: ’bear big - small cave’. You could refine this - and avoid the need for pauses - by always putting the word for a quality immediately before or immediately after the word for the thing that has the quality: ’bear big’; ’cave small’. Another way of using word order would be to consistently put the expression for an agent or ’doer’ earlier or later than other expressions, so that ’brother kill bear’ and ’bear kill brother’ would have distinct meanings. And again, you could use a different order of phrases for statements and questions: ’Brother kill big bear’ versus ’Kill brother big bear?’
A second strategy would be to alter words in some way to signal their functions. Latin did this: ursus and frater meant ’bear’ and ’brother’ as agents; as patients they became ursum and fratrem. Russian does much the same. This trick - inflection - could also be exploited to show what goes with what: related words could all be changed or extended identically. In Latin you could talk about a big bear without needing to put the two words next to each other: if ’bear’ was ursus, ’big’ was magnus; if it was ursum, ’big’ was magnum, so the relationship was clear. Pronunciation, too, could indicate the functions of words. To show that a word referred to an agent, for example, you could pronounce the first sound differently; or you could say the word more slowly, or on a higher pitch: Kill bear brother. You could also use intonation to mark the status of a whole utterance, as we often do in English to indicate that we are asking questions.
Yet another possibility would be to invent new non-referential words that do not label anything in the world, but that are used to show the function of other words. English ’may’ is a word of this kind: it indicates that your sentence refers not to a definite fact, but to a possibility. Japanese puts small words - particles - after nouns to mean such things as ’topic’, ’agent’, ’patient’, and ’possessor’.
These strategies are all variants on three basic options: ordering, inflection, and the use of function words. Once you have selected from these three options the devices you want to use for your language, you have devised a grammar. You now have a human language.
So, to answer the question we started with: grammar is essentially a limited set of devices for expressing certain kinds of necessary meaning that cannot be conveyed by referential vocabulary alone.
Questions, suggestions and issues to consider
1. Compare Swan’s ’thought experiment’ with the illustration in A1 (where we imagined a learner memorising all the words of a language and then trying to communicate). Are they similar?
2. Compare Swan’s definition of grammar in the final paragraph with the three in A1. How are they similar/different?
3. Consider the three strategies mentioned above by Swan. English makes use of all three to some extent, for example:
□ arranging words (word order): adjectives generally come before the noun they modify, for example blue cheese
□ altering the shape of words (’inflections’ and ’derivations’): for example, the plural and genitive endings for nouns (dog, dogs, dog’s, dogs’)
□ using little function words such as of (see B1)
Think of other examples in English.
4. Think of another language you know well and compare it with English according to these three strategies. (For example, most European languages make much more use of inflections.)