1. What is grammar?
2. What is Standard English?
3. What is correct English?
4. What’s the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’?
5. What’s the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’?
6. ‘They’, ‘them’, ‘their’ and ‘theirs’ can’t refer to one person, can they?
7. What is a split infinitive and what’s wrong with it?
8. What is a word?
9. Can you end a sentence with a preposition?
10. As long as you get your meaning across, it doesn’t matter how you do it, does it?
11. Hasn’t texting ruined the language?
12. Why, oh why, do people have to turn nouns into verbs?
13. You can’t say ‘between you and I’ or ‘They wanted my wife and I to go to the party’, can you?
14. What’s the difference between ‘like’ and ‘as’?
15. Double negatives aren’t English, are they?
16. Why can't people use some words properly?
1. What is grammar?
A question perhaps not asked as frequently as it should be. Grammar is all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but if you don’t define it before you start discussing it, then you can expect trouble. Linguists use it to describe how a language allows smaller units of meaning to make words (morphology) and how it allows words to make sentences (syntax). Adult native speakers use their language grammatically most of the time. Many people think that a sentence such as ‘We was robbed’ is ungrammatical because, they say (if they know the relevant grammatical terms), the first person plural of the past tense of ‘be’ is ‘were’. They’re right, but only up to a point. That is certainly the case in the variety of the language called Standard English. It is not the case in some non-standard dialects where we find that ‘was’ is used for all persons and numbers.
2. What is Standard English?
Standard English is the variety of the language generally used in published writing, and typically in areas of life such as education, courts of law, public service broadcasting and government. For this reason it is most important that children are taught this variety in school. It is not, however, the variety of the language spoken by most people. As the linguist Peter Trudgill has said ‘Standard English is thus not the English language.’
3. What is correct English?
Correct English is the language as used by normal adult native speakers. Incorrect English is found in the speech and writing of foreign learners of the language and in the speech of infants. Foreign learners will, for example, allow the structures of their first language to interfere with the way in which they form English sentences, and if their own language doesn’t have articles they will use the English ones inappropriately. Infants will produce forms such as *’goed’, rather than ‘went’.
Incorrect English is often confused with the forms found in non-standard varieties of the language. Standard English, for example, conjugates the verb ‘be’ irregularly in the present tense (‘am’, ‘are’, ‘is’) and past tense (‘was’, ‘were’). Some non-standard varieties, by contrast, use ‘be’ or ‘is’ in the present tense for all persons and numbers. Some others use ‘was’ for all persons and numbers in the past tense, while still others use ‘were’. It is important to understand that such dialects use these forms consistently and that they have a grammar every bit as systematic as the grammar of the standard dialect. Emphatically, the non-standard forms are not mistakes.
Incorrect English is also confused with informal Standard English. We use informal language a lot of the time. In most contexts, the informal ‘Who did you give it to?’ is a more natural expression than ‘To whom did you give it?’ Both sentences are grammatical. It is not the case that one is correct and the other isn’t.
The failure to appreciate that English comes in so many varieties, and can be used for so many different purposes, is at the heart of much unnecessary argument about the language. We should extol, and not malign, its diversity.
4. What’s the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’?
‘Who’ is the form of the relative pronoun used in informal contexts to refer to a person. In formal contexts, ‘whom’ is used instead when it is the object of a clause or when it follows a preposition. Compare ‘To whom shall we give the money?’ with the much less formal ‘Who shall we give the money to?’
5. What’s the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’?
Both words are used to describe smaller quantities, where English has only one word, ‘more’, to refer to greater quantities. ‘Fewer’ is never used to describe smaller quantities of things that can’t be counted. No-one says *‘We’ve had fewer rain recently’ instead of ‘We’ve had less rain recently’ (*indicates an ungrammatical form). ‘Less’, however, is often found describing things that can be counted, as in supermarket signs that have a fast check-out for ‘Five items or less’. This is not, as is often thought, ungrammatical and it isn’t a new construction. It was first used by King Alfred in the ninth century. As ‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’ makes clear, deciding which to use ‘is essentially a stylistic choice, between the more formal “fewer” and the more spontaneous “less”. “Fewer” draws attention to itself, whereas “less” shifts the focus on to its more significant neighbours.’
6. ‘They’, ‘them’, ‘their’ and ‘theirs’ can’t refer to one person, can they?
Oh yes they can. As the Oxford English Dictionary says, these are ‘often used in reference to a singular noun made universal by “every”, “any”, “no”, etc., or applicable to one of either sex’. They have been used in this way for centuries. For evidence, see here.
7. What is a split infinitive and what’s wrong with it?
The infinitive is the base form of the verb, for example ‘walk’. It is often, but not always, preceded by the particle ‘to’, as in ‘I like to walk whenever I can’. This makes some people think that ‘to’ is an essential part of the verb and that nothing should come between it and the verb. When it does, they call it a ‘split infinitive’. There is no justification for this view. That the particle ‘to’ is not an essential part of the verb can be clearly seen in a sentence such as ‘I should walk more often’. We don’t say *‘I should to walk more often’.
8. What is a word?
People sometimes claim that words they don’t like aren’t words, without telling us what they think a word is. Can it exist only if it is found in a dictionary? If so, which dictionary? Is it always a word even if it does? What about words so new that there’s been no time to get them into a dictionary? The way round such difficulties is to consider think of a word in terms of its grammatical role rather than its semantic role, that is to say, in terms of what it does rather than what it means. On that basis, a word is a string of sounds or letters which can be identified as a grammatical unit, larger than a morpheme, but shorter than a phrase playing a structural role in a sentence.
9. Can you end a sentence with a preposition?
Yes. Why not?
10. As long as you get your meaning across, it doesn’t matter how you do it, does it?
Well, yes, it does. You need to do it in a way that achieves your purpose according to who you’re addressing, what the subject is and the context in which you’re speaking or writing.
11. Hasn’t texting ruined the lnguage?
No. If it had, I wouldn’t be able to write this, would I? C? For a professional view, see here.
12. Why, oh why, do people have to turn nouns into verbs?
Because that’s one of the ways in which English has long created new words. Think of the verbs ‘bottle’, ‘catalogue’, ‘oil’, ‘brake’, ‘referee’ and ‘bicycle’.
13. You can’t say ‘between you and I’ or ‘They wanted my wife and I to go to the party’, can you?
Those who say you can’t do so assume that the way in which the first person singular pronoun behaves when it’s on its own must determine the way in which it behaves when it’s coordinated with a noun or with another pronoun. You can’t say ‘They invited my wife and I’, so the argument runs, because you wouldn’t say *’They invited I’. The fact is that many speakers of Standard English say just that sort of thing. The authors of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’ regard the construction as a variant Standard English form.
14. What’s the difference between ‘like’ and ‘as’?
In traditional grammar, ‘like’ is a preposition, as in the first line of Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’. ‘As’ is a conjunction, as it is in this sentence. However, there are numerous instances of the use of ‘like’ as a conjunction by respected writers. Words such as ‘before’, ‘since’ and ‘than’ can be both conjunctions and prepositions, so why not ‘like’? As Pam Peters writes in ‘The Cambridge Guide to English Usage’, ‘There never was a general principle as to why ‘like’ could not be use conjunctively, and it is now strongly supported by corpus data from around the English-speaking world.’
15. Double negatives aren’t English, are they?
Multiple negation as in, for example, ‘I didn’t have no money’ has long been present in English. The greater the number of negatives, the greater the force of the negation. Today, although a feature of the standard varieties of other languages, it is one which Standard English lacks. No choice is available between ‘I didn’t have no money’ and ‘I didn’t have any money’. We must say the latter. In other varieties of the language, however, multiple negation is widespread and used in the same way as it has been for centuries.
For a detailed examination of the question, see Richard Ingham’s ‘The negation cycle and multiple negation’ here.
16. Why can't people use some words properly?
This is not really a grammar question, but it comes up so often that it may be helpful if I deal with it. Those who insist that a word must be used only in its original sense have fallen prey to the etymological fallacy. Whatever a word may once have meant is not necessarily a guide to what it means now. Here are two to begin with.
Decimate
In modern English, ‘decimate’ means to ‘to destroy or remove a large proportion of’. I lay down two challenges to those who claim otherwise. Firstly, when did you last need a word to mean to select by lot and put to death one in every ten? Secondly, when did you last use the word ‘maid’ to mean a virgin?
Disinterested
When it was first used in around 1631 ‘disinterested’ meant ‘without interest or concern’. That predates its use to mean ‘impartial, unbiased, unprejudiced’ by nearly 30 years. There has thus been uncertainty over the use of the word since the seventeenth century. That uncertainty may arise from the ambiguity that already exists in the word ‘interest’, but context will usually make the meaning of 'interest' clear. Why do those who attack the use of ‘disinterested’ to mean ‘uninterested’ not also attack the use of ‘interested’ when it is used to mean ‘curious’, ‘fascinated’, ‘stimulated’? The answer is that ‘disinterested’ has become yet another shibboleth. From a pragmatic point of view, it is best avoided.
