Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

3.4 Extending the notion of grammar
Unit 3 Analysing units of structure
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

Our suggestion so far is that the grammar underlying a text governs how it is constructed. We have also suggested that a text’s grammatical organization constrains and guides how it will be interpreted. If both of these claims are sound, then notions of grammar are essential in bringing to conscious attention organizing principles that, in our everyday practice of reading texts, may be simply acted on spontaneously and taken for granted.

In addition to being useful in analysing written texts, a grammatical approach can be applied quite generally to systems of signs. Think of any grammatical sequence as a series of slots that can be filled by different items; we can then extend the notion of grammar to domains besides language, for instance by viewing how we dress as possible combinations of what might be thought of as clothing units. If we extend the notion of grammar in this way, the body is divided into zones, each of which is thought of as a ’slot’ within the clothing system: head, upper torso, legs, feet, etc. Each of these areas may be covered with an item of clothing, chosen from a set of available alternatives. The ’fillers’ for the slots are individual items of clothing (e.g. for the feet: boots, shoes, sandals, nothing at all). Specific fillers can be used in some slots but not others; and predictable effects are generated by patterns of their combination. By examining combinations of selected items, specific styles can be described in terms of their consistency in selection. Deviations from conventional clothing ’statements’ can also be described (e.g. wearing Wellington boots and a headscarf with a suit), in ways that parallel the treatment of the e e cummings poem above.

Consider the same general approach applied to narrative film. The film as a whole has a number of slots: its credit sequence (and possibly pre-credit sequence); the main body of its narrative (including sub-units such as establishing shots, dialogue, car chase sequence, etc.); and end credits. Each of these slots can be handled in different ways by a director, by selecting different options or by omitting optional elements. Car chases, for instance (where they are included in a film ’statement’), can end in the death of the person chased, loss of the person being followed, collision involving the car chasing, etc. An overall filmic style is produced by manipulating possibilities within each slot -

and so also implicitly alluding to how slots are typically filled and combined in other texts (See Unit 13, Intertextuality and allusion).

Study of the units of structure (slots and fillers) of a wide range of cultural texts, institutions and ideas (from literature and photography through to what people eat) forms a central part of the theoretical movement known as structuralism, which developed in the late 1950s (see Culler, 2002). The grammar of narrative, which allows us to describe the range of possible slots and fillers for any narrative, has received particular attention (see Unit 20, Narrative).