Chapter 1: Introduction to the Study of Grammar
Step one in books on this topic is pretty much always to identify exactly what the writer is even talking about in the first place, as “grammar” has meant somewhat different things at different times. In what Disterheft refers to as the “traditional” sense, grammar is “specifically the rules that govern sentence structure (syntax) and the forms of words that appear in any given construction (morphology)” (3). However, in this book, she (like most present-day linguists) uses the word “grammar” more liberally to mean “the system of rules that every speaker formulates through the process of first language acquisition” (3), and therefore the book deals with phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the lexicon.
Phonetics and phonology deal with the speech sounds of a language.
Morphology is the study of how words are formed.
Syntax consists of “the rules that govern the construction of phrase, which in turn form sentences” (7).
Semantics is broad and includes a lot. It focuses on meaning, but that includes logical meaning, word meanings and the relationships between words, and more conceptual aspects of how we determine meaning. Just the little intro section on semantics deals with paraphrase, lexical ambiguity and polysemy, metaphor, presupposition, and more. I expect we’ll come back to syntax a lot as the book goes on.
Pragmatics refers to the way information is presented in normal speech and writing (aka “discourse:).
The lexicon, finally, is “the linguistic term for the type of dictionary that holds all information about words: their pronunciation, meaning, contexts in which they are used, and so on” (13). (This isn’t a reference to a literal book, but rather the accumulation of knowledge you have about your language.)
Some interesting things from the chapter, in no particular order:
“Prefixes and suffixes (which together are called affixes) are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Derivational affixes change the meanings of words… Inflectional suffixes… make paradigms, which are the patterns of words when listed in all their possible forms” (5). So an example of a derivational suffix would be, say, adding under + stand, where adding the affix changes the meaning of the root. An example of an inflectional suffix (might as well specify suffix because these ONLY go on the ends of words) would be when you add s to cat to make cats. Related: We’ve lost a lot of inflectional morphology. Over the last thousand years, English went from having lots of it to having very little.
Lexical ambiguity and polysemy: Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word has more than one meaning. In the case of polysemy, the multiple meanings have all developed from a single original one (whereas in other cases of lexical ambiguity, the ambiguity derives from two different words that just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way). Mostly what interests me here is that we actually have such particular terminology for ambiguities based on how the ambiguity came into being.
Apparently the reason we have phrases like “I hope not” and “I think not,” when—if you think about it—those are kind of archaic-sounding constructions compared to how we otherwise speak/write, is to do with the rule of Negative Insertion, which was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. It called for placing not after the first verb in order to negate, whether it was an auxiliary or a main verb. So you ended up with “I have not hoped” and “I am not hoping,” but also with “I hope not” and “I think not.” Rules have changed over time so that we typically have auxiliaries with negatives (“The fox did not jump over the fence” rather than “The fox jumped not over the fence”)… but apparently some old constructions still linger.
A thing to know: English borrows a TON from French. You might not notice it a lot of the time because we’re borrowing tiny little individual morphemes, and I know I don’t necessarily think of them as French at this point. The Norman invaders brought their dialect of French in 1066, the upper classes in England adopted it for some 200 years, and… well, good luck finding a single sentence without at least one French morpheme showing us as a root or a derivational affix.
Grammaticalization is “the process whereby free morphemes (i.e., words) become bound morphemes (affixes); words belonging to major classes join minor classes; and phrases become words” (18). So for example you’ve got the word “full” and the suffix “-ful,” and the process by which the independent word became a suffix is grammaticalization. This one was interesting to me as someone who’s learned some basic French, because the word “fait” came up a lot: “..-fy, borrowed from the French past participle fait ‘done,’ was once an independent word. Now it’s a derivational suffix that produces verbs from adjectives: sanctify, pacify, solidify, and so on” (18).
There was some interesting basic information about the history of prescriptive grammar in English. I like Disterheft’s articulation of prescriptive grammar: “Rules that have no basis in actual usage are called prescriptive: that is, they are promulgated by decree rather than use” (27). In other words, prescriptive grammar is when someone makes a rule and tells everyone they have to follow it or else they’re not using proper English. The focus on prescriptive grammar rules seems to have really started in the 16th century, before which English was a lot more “freewheeling” in various ways; but starting in the 16th century, various English grammars were written, all based on Latin models. For political/class reasons, some writers began to demand “correctness” in written English--which is particularly funny when you realize that people like Robert Lowth were making up some of these super important rules as they went along. (Lowth, for example, made up the rule about double negatives being improper. Before him, double negatives were standard.)
There were apparently writers in the 19th century who opposed this prescriptivism, but they didn’t win out--and one reason for that that Disterheft notes is the rise of the middle class at that time. “For several generations,” she writes, “there had been a rapid influx of people from rural areas who were eager to establish themselves as city dwellers and to join the expanding middle class. For this, they needed to polish their language, along with newly acquired manners and urban dress. They clamored for standards of linguistic correctness as entrance to polite society…” (28). That matches up with what I’ve seen: Upwardly mobile types are often much more enthusiastic about gatekeeping than those who’ve already “made it,” because the latter don’t need to worry about their status, while the former constantly do. Having “correct language” to know--something you could point to and say, “Aha, he isn’t a member of Our Group because he uses double negatives!”--serves an important function. (And yes, if you’re someone who likes to rip on others for using “ain’t” or saying, “I don’t need no,” and so on--I’m lookin’ at you here, buddy.)
Much of the rest of the chapter dips into some of the most well-known grammar rules and where they came from: “Shall” vs “will,” the banishment of “ain’t” from polite usage, the prohibition against split infinitives, and so on. It really is interesting to know where some of those rules came from, and why. For example, apparently the reason we aren’t supposed to split infinitives in English is that they’re single words in Latin, and we’ve modeled our rules on Latin. Some might say, “Ooh, but that’s a potential strength of English--we can do different things with our infinitives because they’re not single words as in Latin!” The prescriptivists, though, went the “we must make English as Latin as possible” route, instead. Oh, and the rule against double negatives--apparently the guy who came up with that one was actually a mathematician (Lowth again, same guy mentioned above), and he decided that since that’s how two negatives work in math, it’s how they have to work in English. Oh, and that whole thing against ever using the passive voice… but honestly, I should probably stop before I accidentally end up describing every single one of the rules and their origins here. If this kind of thing interests you, though, go read this chapter!
One of my favorite segments in this section of the book refers to using gender-neutral language, but it can apply to so much more, really: “If a person is accustomed to using the older terms, the new ones may seem clumsy at first. However, if you want to avoid antagonizing or slighting other people, the easiest thing to do is switch. Good manners, after all, dictate that you call people by the names they prefer” (37). You are so right, Dorothy Disterheft! Love it.
Final bit of info that interested and amused me:
In Old English, man really was a generic referent for all human beings, parallel to Latin homo ‘human being.’ Waepman and wer referred specifically to adult human males, whereas wifman and wif indicated adult human females…. In later stages of English, this semantic system changed: waepman and wer were dropped from the language, with man assuming their place by shifting its meaning. Wifman was retained in its new pronunciation, woman, while wif (wife) shifted to mean a married woman. (36)
This was followed up by an endnote: “To be precise, wer still survives in one compound noun in English: werewolf” (47). :)
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