These two sentences are fine:
- We will go home tomorrow.
- Tomorrow, we will go home.
These two sound wrong to me and, I think, to any native speaker, even though their meaning is perfectly clear:
- We will go tomorrow home.
- Home, we will go tomorrow.
If I heard someone say either of those, I’d assume he was a foreigner not yet fluent in English.
In all the grammar I learned in school, I don’t know of any rules that would allow the first set but not the second, nor do I recall any standardized tests like the SAT having questions that require correcting a sentence from set two into one from set one. This leads to the conclusion that:
- We all know the rule, because sentences from the second set sound wrong.
- We know it well enough that there’s no need to teach it.
- We can’t state it.
My first guess is “place always precedes time”. That may be correct, though there may well be exceptions I’m not thinking of. But it doesn’t really matter: being able to state the rule explicitly is unimportant, because I know it so well implicitly. It would matter for new speakers, though, so I’m left with these questions:
When English is taught as a foreign language, is a rule for ordering these bits taught?
If so, what is it?
I think so. AFAIK, many students especially from chinese speaking families* have an initial difficulty grasping word order among other aspects of grammar. Mandarin and the other chinese dialects have looser word ordering conventions. Teachers sometimes have to spend time with students teaching them proper word order. To be fair this is true among some Indians as well. Tamil has a different word ordering set of conventions and this can confuse some people who are not fsufficiently familiar with english. languag minorities in singapore have a better time grasping english because you are restricted from interacting with the vast majority of the people you will meet if you only know your mother tongue. By contrast, many chinese do not give up that much in terms of social interaction if they do not interact with non-chinese speaking people. In fact, the basilectal creole spoken in singapore (Singlish) has looser grammatical rules regarding word order. For example, you can sometimes hear some people say:
We will tomorrow go home, which if not outright ungrammatical, is at least fairly awkward.
*The parents have limited command of english.
“Will tomorrow go” is a split infinitive. So it actually breaks a rule people have heard of.
Admittedly, the split infinitive prohibition was, like the prohibition against ending sentences with prepositions, invented whole-cloth by 19th century grammarians who wanted English to be more like Latin. So the rule it breaks isn’t one that deserves much respect.
Not quite, since “will go” isn’t an infinitive. (“To go” would be one.) And
“We will all go tomorrow”
sounds entirely idiomatic to me.
Admittedly, the split infinitive prohibition was, like the prohibition against ending sentences with prepositions, invented whole-cloth by 19th century grammarians who wanted English to be more like Latin
That reminds me of this.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8%5D
If I recall my grammar, transitive phrases are to be kept together as much as possible. The base verb phrase is ‘to go home’, you’ve got a subject of ‘we’ and a future tense, so your construction should always have ‘we will go home’ at the core.
English has a lot of random word order possibilities, so in order to keep your listener from being confused, objects ought to immediately follow the verb – only adjectives that modify the sentence’s object should come between them.
IANAGramarian, but I believe ‘tomorrow’ is an adverb in the sentences you constructed. It’s rare(?) (nonexistent?) for an adverb to come right before a noun. (“We will go home well” sounds ok, if a bit cryptic, ‘we will go well home’ does not)
Home is a direct object, and start sentences with direct objects, only 900 year old zen masters in swamps do.
“Home” isn’t an object; it’s also an adverb. Another example of this, which might be clearer, is:
1a: We will sing at the school next week.
1b: Next week, we will sing at the school.
2a: We will sing next week at the school.
2b: At the school, we will sing next week.
1a and 1b are completely idiomatic. 2a is odd, but possible if you’re giving the schedule (“and the week after that, at the mall”). 2b is impossible. And there are clearly no objects here, just prepositional phrases used as adverbs.
“‘Home’ isn’t an object; it’s also an adverb.”
You’re right, but it’s a weird adverb, and is often used as a noun (“home sweet home”). I guess you could say that the noun-“home” and the verb-“home” are actually two different words, but for a reason I don’t think I know how to articulate, I sense on some level that “home” is one word.
Disclosure: I’m no linguist. In fact, what little I’ve studied of linguistics and other languages has only driven home (pun partially intended) to me that I don’t understand linguistics or language as much as I thought I did before I studied them.
English often uses the same word as different parts of speech, e.g. “today” is usually an adverb, but “Today will be no fun.” gives us noun-today.
True.
Ah yes, that makes sense, thanks.
Language acquisition is a fascinating topic. But I would say that we teach much of this with early children through modeling and, sometimes, explicit correction.
If a child says to me, “I’m going tomorrow home,” I would reply with something like, “Wow, you’re going home tomorrow! What will you do when you go home tomorrow?”
That is teaching, albeit in a different manner than what is referred to here.
I don’t think time has anything to do with it.
Once upon a time, in a little kingdom, . . .
Typical temporal-spatial determination direct from Propp.
I think it’s more about objects.
There are instances where it is more natural for the object to precede the subject.
To place “home” in a prepositional phrase makes it a bit more natural:
To home we will go, tomorrow.
“Go home tomorrow we will” said Master Yoda.
(or, for the second one)
“Tomorrow, go home, we will” said Master Yoda.
Subject and verb at the end, similar to Latin.
It has always been interesting to me that the way that Yoda speaks makes even a simple statement sound wise. Not sure why.
Yoda was modeled on Japanese. ashita wa ienikaeru. The whole concept of going home is carried in the verb, “ienikaeru”.
From what I understand, “going home” is usually one of the oldest phrasings in any given language because it’s one of the carry overs from the language’s ancestors.
We don’t say “going store”, “going church”, “going work”. We don’t even say “going sleep”.
We do say “going home”… from what I (barely) remember, we find that same construction in Ancient Greek.
That’s true. I always think of a Japanese sentence as a Λ , the particle at the top, in this case “wa”. Ashita, tomorrow, nice firm noun, to the left, with the verb to the right, which in this case does all the work. Really, most of the time, I don’t even think about Japanese “verbs” as verbs, they’re almost sentences in their own right. The particle keeps them away from everything else so they can do their jobs.
When Latin collided with the other European languages, creating the Romance languages, we became word-order dependent. We no longer declined nouns, relying on subordinate clauses to do the heavy lifting the Dative and Ablative used to carry. Latin sentences could, and routinely were, rearranged to put the meaningful words first.
Tulit ergo rex anulum quo utebatur de manu sua
So the king took his signet ring from his finger
But literally, that’s “Took then king [the] ring which [he] used/employed/benefited of hand his.”
I decline all nouns. I’m more of a verb man, myself. 🙂
May I interest you in a selection of gerunds, m’sieu’…. recently harvested from the wilds of Sumatra. They are verbs, they are nouns, they are shiny and they are cheapcheap.
Meh, gerunds are too hard to chew. A little while in my mouth, and I forget what I’m eating.
Here’s one that blew my mind:
Big red truck
Red big truck
We know that the first one is right and the second one is wrong.
I asked Maribou if French does something like that, ordering of adjectives, and thought about it for a second and said that it did.
Yeah, I suppose one would say “C’est un grand, joli chat.” but not “C’est un joli, grand chat.” That is, “big, pretty cat” feels better than “pretty, big cat.” (French doesn’t use “joli” as an intensifier like we use “pretty,” by the way.)
But I can’t really think of any other adjectives, French or English, that require an order. It’s more a matter of which adjective is the most identifying for the object being described, so you’ve got something like Blaise’s point about Latin sentences putting the most important word first.
So if you said “the smooth, red car,” you’d be emphasizing smoothness and assuming redness is more essential. But if you said “the red, smooth car” (which I admit sounds a little weird), you’d be taking for granted that the car is smooth and emphasizing the redness. Is it possible this rule accounts for big (and grand) generally coming first? That whatever properties the object has, the bigness is not as essential as any other property?
Does the ordering have to do with the order it would most likely fall into in the “visual/mental identification systems” hierarchy?
I am most likely to notice the “large” elephant in the room, before I notice that he is “red”, and I discover the granular level of “smooth” last of all.
IOW, it seems likely to me that evolutionary forces play a role.
The large sabre-tooth tiger is, on balance, more dangerous to me than the small squirrel (leave aside what we now know about pathogens etc).
Next, the color is important – that snake is poisonous, this one is not.
Then, the texture (because now, it’s close enough to touch) – this fruit is ripe, that one will give me a tummyache.
Is the latter wrong? Or just not the common usage?
I’m not opining on right or wrong itself – just speculating on why it may make evolutionary sense to put them in a particular order.
If I fail to notice (or communicate) the most important survival-salient aspects, then I or my interlocutor get stepped on by the elephant, or poisoned by the snake.
Sorry, I meant this as a reply to JB’s initial comment.
Threading is hard.
I think that the official rules for English include “if nobody uses it this way, then it’s wrong”.
Does anybody use “red big truck”?
That’s true of all natural languages: If A seems perfectly logical but no one actually says A, it’s wrong. To use H. W. Fowler’s terminology: idiom trumps analogy.
Children will say that until corrected. The question is, should we be correcting them?
“should we be correcting them?”
Without veering off into politics, I’d say that it depends on our goals.
Now you sound like me!
I guess I worry that we are getting into circular logic.
It is wrong because no one says it that way. And no one says it that way because we tell them they are wrong when they do.
And, mind you, I’m not arguing that it ISN’T wrong… just wondering what makes it wrong if it is indeed wrong.
It’s wrong because it breaks a basic rule of how sentences are constructed in English. The fact that none of us are currently able to articulate that rule is really interesting, but ultimately beside the point.
It’s wrong because it breaks a basic rule …The fact that none of us are currently able to articulate that rule is really interesting, but ultimately beside the point.
No politics. 🙂
But maybe there (gasp!) is no rule! And we’ve all just been duped!
Wouldn’t the French say “un grand chat joli,” or is “joli” one of those adjectives that precede the noun (I’m rusty)?
To my (non-mother-tongue-be-French-ears), “un beau grand chat” sounds better than “un grand beau chat.” But again, I’m not a native speaker and can’t even claim to be fluent.
“Joli” typically precedes its noun, but as Blaise says below, stringing adjectives together like this is not frequently done in spoken French.
I agree that “un beau grand chat” does sound better than the other way ’round. Not sure why.
I have a theory on the order of adjectives: they work from general to specific. The Big Red Dog. Many dogs are big, fewer are red. Though many cats are pretty, fewer are big. In French, where the verb reigns supreme, often the most important adjectives follow the noun, especially if they are chained, almost as epithet: Au calme clair de lune triste et beau or la seule table libre.
French is so particular about this stuff, the only table [which is] free. Often, adjectives are rejected outright, made into nouns and exiled behind a d’ as in tableau d’amortissement
In the conversational French I’ve heard and used, I have seldom heard multiple adjectives in a row. Quel beau chat, très grand, plein de malice, t’es meurtrière, n’est-ce pas? Et ces griffes. Effroyable!… and so on.
Thus do I talk to kitties.
My first attempt to respond was going to be that I didn’t think there was any particular order in French. Then I challenged myself and thought of a construction that felt distinctly wrong in one order and not the other.
All that said, it is true that conversational French will usually not have multiple adjectives in a row. When two adjectives are used, often one will be of the type that can go comfortably before the noun and the other after. If a noun needs two adjectives to come after, et is often used: “Je voudrais encore une de ces pommes rouges et douces.”
Just to be clear, I don’t think myself more expert than you, a native speaker. Just offering the observations of someone who has reasonably carefully studied French for years as an amateur.
I remember my high school French teacher repeating to us, “la seule table libre! la seule table libre!” just in case we were ever in a restaurant and there was only one table free and we needed to tell someone about that fact. (It’s funny the things one remembers from high school.)
To me, the interesting thing about your examples is that you didn’t notice you omitted the commas. And that’s because there’s a rule about that. Adjectives of size and color don’t require commas because we’re very unlikely to misunderstand them.
And that brings up the general comma rule, which is that you put commas in to separate coordinate adjectives, but not cumulative adjectives. So, size and color are always treated as cumulative, which means you never use a comma when they pop up. They glue themselves to whatever comes after them and form a single unit. This solves one problem:
“Smooth red car” – the smoothness modifies the red car. That’s possible.
“Red smooth car” – the redness would have to modify the smoothness… and that doesn’t make any sense!
Therefore, it’s always “Smooth red car”.
(And still, none of this explains why we want to say the size before the color…)
I hit Submit and then immediately thought of an answer.
Big red car: If big attaches to red, it’s somewhat easy to think of redness having the quality of being big.
Red big car: Red now tries to attach to big, and it’s harder to imagine bigness having a color.
Grammatically, either are possible, since it could go big->red car or red->big car, neither of which have any logical hiccups. But since we instinctively attach the size or color to the very next word, we tend to put them in a more “logical” order.
Therefore, it’s always “size color noun”!
I thought of this later, but if you add a number, the number comes first:
two big red trucks
big red two trucks
I still wonder if this has something to do with evolutionary threat/reward priority assessment. Is it different in other languages, in terms of which is the primary, then secondary and tertiary descriptors (even if due to the grammar or syntax of those languages, the word order is different)?
In general, if something (or someone) means me harm (or can benefit me), the primary things I want to know are: 1.) how many am I dealing with, and 2.) how big are they. Color and other identifying characteristics are important, but secondary.
Two big black bears are headed your way.
Five small squirrels will make a family-sized stew.
Interesting assessment.
In Spanish, the “little” is part of the word itself toward the end, while “big” follows immediately after.
E.g. conejito; conejo grande.
The number still comes first; e.g. cinco conejitos.
Well, hell. There goes that theory.
Want to know something weird though? In spanish, “big black bear” would be “gran oso negro” (so this one fits my theory, communicating the animal’s size first as the most salient feature).
But swap out the animal only, to “big black dog”, and it is “perro negro grande” (which obviously blows my theory out of the water, since I don’t learn Cujo is very large until it’s too late and he has already eaten me).
When I attended school in France, I helped some friends study for the TOEFL. I recall that I was fascinated that there were English usage rules (not exactly grammar, but still required for passing the test) that I used fluently but was unaware of. I can’t remember them all, but one that I do distinctly remember is that there is an order for adverbial phrases when they are grouped two or more together, and that any adverbial phrase indicating time must be either first, if the grouping precedes the core of the sentence, or last, if the grouping comes after the core.
So, yes, it’s definitely the fact that “tomorrow” indicates time that makes the wrong-sounding sentences actually wrong.
That’s exactly what fascinates me, too.
There are three or more rules regarding this ordering. The most important is time, I remember that, but I couldn’t recall the others. So, I went a-googling and found this abstract by someone who (a) reminded me of the rule “Manner-Place-Time” and (b) argues that this rule is not the correct one to describe standard English usage. So, the rule may not be absolute.
But anyway, I think “Manner-Place-Time” is more often than not the correct order.
“Come to my party in a costume at the Hilton at 7 o’clock Saturday night.” is a well-constructed sentence.
“Come to my party at the Hilton in a costume at 7 o’clock Saturday night.” is OK only if the person was speaking and inserted “in a costume” as an afterthought.
“Come to my party at 7 o’clock Saturday night in a costume at the Hilton.” just seems wrong (though not as wrong as your simpler examples).
But no one says “Professor Plum, with the revolver, in the ballroom”!
In practice, I suspect they do. Even though in conversation the Suspect-Room-Weapon order is more natural, the game itself uses Suspect-Weapon-Room order (or at least it did in the versions I’ve played). So when we’re reading off our little pad of paper, that’s the order we use.
Funny. I’ve always said (and heard), person, room, weapon.
We’ve said that. Also,
In the ballroom, Professor Plum, with the revolver
(understanding the implicit (shot mr. body) before the second comma.
However, I don’t think anyone has ever said:
In the ballroom, with the revolver, Professor Plum
Actually, instead of “revolver”, we always said “walla-walla”. And the Monopoly property that goes with Atlantic and Ventnor was “Modern Garbage”.
That’s because it was Miss Scarlet, with the wrench, in the conservatory!
I know in German the order is Time-Manner-Place and makes for interesting translation to English for students when working with a long, complicated sentence as they end up as your third example.
There are poetic exceptions all over: my favourite bit of Victor Hugo.
Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,
Je partirai. Vois-tu, je sais que tu m’attends
Since poetry almost by definition stretches language to try to get more meaning out of it, you’ll always find exceptions there.
But that’s not an exception, since all three deal with time.
However, I should also have said: Yes, in poetry these rules do get broken. Sometimes they’re even broken well.
To answer the original question: it’s a sentence pattern thing. I would call “go home” a phrasal intransitive verb. “Tomorrow” is an optional adverbial that can come after the verb (however, adverbials are mobile things and can show up in other places–like the beginning). The “wrong” sentences are braking up the phrasal verb and sound wrong.
I’m not totally sure about “go home” as a phrasal verb, but I think it must be. “Go” is an intransitive verb, albeit one that takes an adverbial more times than not. Remember, the phrases that come after “go” answer the questions “where” or “when” which makes them adverbial.
While not a linguist, I have taught a syntax class a few times. My two cents (long time lurker, first comment).
Welcome.
Thanks.
Yes, dude, welcome.
thanks!
I’ve never taught any syntax classes, but I am pretty sure you guys are getting this exchange backwards 😉
Please?
The difficulty prime of reading today Shakespeare instead of his time you’ve clearly defined.
I found Shakespeare was a lot easier after I’d done three semesters of German in college. It’s been too long now, so I don’t remember if it was due to similarities in sentence structure, or simply a matter of being easy in comparison to parsing those long, winding German sentences, where someone is doing something to somebody using some object, and you are desperately waiting for the verb to arrive.
While I only two quarters of it, I exactly what you mean know took.
Mark Twain said it far better than you or I.
Here’s hard one for you: find something Mark Twain didn’t say better than anyone else could.
Mike: The benefits of nuclear fusion!
I suspect that pragmatics, rather than grammar per se, is doing the bulk of the work here.
Or several generations of readers/speakers/talkers grown up accustomed to The Chicago Style Manual.
This is, for writing, like having a Nebraska accent.
I suspect that pragmatics, rather than grammar per se, is doing the bulk of the work here.
Agreed. Tho I’d say convention more than pragmatics.
Forget syntax, what’s the deal with the font sizing on conclusion option #1?
There’s something interesting there? Rats, missed something else due to my stubborn insistence on setting my browser options so that stuff is rendered in my choice of fonts and sizes.
It’s fixed now. Either that or the LSD the CIA surreptitiously dosed me with has worn off.
I undid all the helpful things that WordPress had done for me. (“Hmm, a list of three items? Surely the first should have an absolute font size, the second a logical font size, and the third the default font size.”)
I suppose that the Web is a more interesting — for certain values of interesting — place for people who don’t set their browser preferences to “My fonts, my size range, always.” Every time someone recommends that I should use a different browser, my first test is always to go to the preferences and see if I can mandate, “My fonts, my size range, always.” Myself, on this machine and screen, happen to like Georgia in 13-point or larger. If you’ve created a stunning masterpiece of layout that has to use one of the more obscure Microsoft fonts, in a division exactly 473 pixels wide, take a picture of it and embed it. Cause my browser is going to ignore a whole bunch of that style stuff.
I find myself asking, regularly, in other settings mostly, “How hard would it be to run the damned thing through a script that enforces the default layout rules?” You know they didn’t intend to have three fonts in four different sizes, some of it flashing and some not. For a default that would meet the needs of 99% of the postings here, it seems likely that you could knock out the necessary script in Perl or Python in an afternoon. And at the same time, you could have a script for comments that makes sure the <i> and <b> tags have matching closing tags.
The last is the one whose absence I don’t get, especially given how badly unclosed tags can break a page. You could knock that script out in, what, 10 minutes?
Or the version that just slaps a couple each of close-italic, close-bold, and close-anchor tags at the end and fixes 99.9% of the problems? Maybe 30 seconds?
moderation does not make an evening happy nor a comment shared
Thank you, whomever, for happy sharing.
I don’t think English has a syntax, all of Chomsky’s efforts to provide one notwithstanding. Convention determines what constitutes “correct grammar” – the “ear” test – given the flexibility of word meanings and arguments they can take. You can butter your toast, but can you jelly it? Can you meat it? Of course, a lot depends on what a person thinks of as syntax and the degree to which they think it can be conceptually distinguished from the semantics of words and sentences.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
The text I use when I teach syntax describes its discussion of grammar as “conventional.” Linguists can determine basic rules (things like there are ten sentence patterns and the order of modifiers in noun phrases), but there are always exceptions and things change. If enough people used it as a verb “jelly” would be accepted as a verb, as is “google.”
The author makes a point of separating the book’s treatment of grammar and the notions of “correct grammar.” If something doesn’t match a convention, it’s wrong. Unless everyone starts doing it.
If something doesn’t match a convention, it’s wrong. Unless everyone starts doing it.
Yeah, that’s one of the things I was getting at by the different ways people understand what syntax is. Consider two extremes: syntax could be viewed as the determinable collection of hard and fast rules constraining the grammatical correctness of all existing as well as possible constructions in a language, or it could be viewed as providing a complete description of constructions already viewed as grammatically correct. One view of syntax will provide rules for future language use, the other won’t.
Of course, what constitutes grammatical correctness is subject to dispute – that is, what constitutes a meaningful (ie., grammatically correct) construction differs between context and people. And then there are disputes about the contribution semantics makes to determining grammaticallity. Denominals are an interesting case in point in that regard. There is clearly a linguistic convention (or rule) by which nouns can be used as verbs. Even proper names can be used as verbs (and adjectives, etc) in certain contexts. What all that means for syntax is a bit of a puzzle, really, since syntax is on one view a set of rules which *constrain* grammaticallity. It suggests (at least to me) that there are no hard and fast rules determining the correct (logically correct?) order for types of words within sentences for those sentences to be viewed as correct constructions within a language.
To go back to Mike’s examples in the OP, it seems to me the two sentences he pointed to as being not passing the ear test aren’t grammatically incorrect. Rather, they’re constructions which express non-standard ordering of words where correctness is determined by convention. Both of those sentences could be viewed as grammatically correct if more people used them.
I don’t think English has a syntax
I t does, or we couldn’t communicate in it. And syntax, meaning the way we combine words to make sentences, is much more stable than vocabulary, If you say “I’m jellying my toast”, I know exactly what you mean, because:
* The order is subject-verb-object
* The tense is a perfectly standard present progressive
* The adjective precedes the noun
If you said “Toast jellyed my me”, I ‘d have no clue, precisely because you’ve broken all of the normal rules of syntax.
If you say “I’m jellying my toast”, I know exactly what you mean
yes, but I would just ask you, um, “clean the kitchen” afterwards.
And another little-known rule of English syntax: any words that don’t make literal sense really mean either fishing or getting fished up. (“Man, last night after you left we got so jellyed!”)
Perhaps this is a question for Russell to explore someday…
But my first experience when I said “dang, I’ve hit middle age…” was when a co-worker said “man, that party was dank!”
And I realized that he was making some vague allusion to both that the party was “cool” and that it had “weed” and yet, still, I thought “crap… I’ve officially reached the age where young people sound stupid.”
Sooner or later, we’re all streets behind.
pedantic alert! there’s no adjective in your example. “my” is a determiner. heh.
That’s a question of terminology. If you stick with the traditional eight parts of speech, determiners are adjectives, since they modify nouns.
“Traditional?” Pedantic again–the traditional eight aren’t accurate enough to describe the language. It helps to think of noun phrases as a combination of any determiners, the headword noun, and any modifiers, which are adjectivals (since more things than adjectives modify nouns–like other nouns, verb phrases, clauses, etc). Determiners don’t modify nouns–they signal nouns.
Did you ever notice that when you see a word for the first time, you always see it a second time almost immediately? This is one of those. My daughter is taking a linguistics course in college, and just yesterday she showed me a homework assignment that uses the same terminology you’re using, (heads, modifies, and specifiers, where “determiner” is one kind of specifier.) I’d never seen it before.
Yeah, the eight parts of speech come from Latin, where they’re well-defined.
* A noun changes case but has a specific gender.
* Adjectives agree with their noun in both case and gender.
* Adverbs have neither case nor gender.
etc.
and they’re not the best fit for English, but I think they’re still the most familiar for discussing this with non-experts (like me.)
I t does, or we couldn’t communicate in it.
Yeah, sure, that’s one way to look at it. Personally, I think you’re viewing syntactic rules necessary for communication to occur and I’m saying that the appearance of syntactic rules is an artifact of convention. People as a matter of fact say “I buttered my toast”, but they *could* say “toast buttered I” (or something similar) without any loss of meaning or utility if the linguistic conventions were different.
It appears ro mr that you’re saying that the syntax would be different if the syntax were different.
Not really. It’s that syntax is in some very real sense an artifact of convention. In English we have nouns, verbs, adjectives, proper names, logical particles, etc, and the idea that those types of words must be used in certain orders within a sentence in order for that sentence to be a grammatically correct sentence is based on a fixed and already-determined conception of what constitutes correct English usage. On this view, syntax determined grammaticallity.
What I’m saying reverses the conceptual order of things: “correct usage” is determined by convention, and from that convention we (try to) determine the (syntactic) rules necessary and sufficient for that correctness. But there aren’t any. Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (in the early 90’s I believe) was reduced to a single syntactic rule (move-alpha), which is a far cry from his earlier work on deep structure and in Syntactic Structures.
So, on the surface, there appear to be some syntactic rules. What I’m suggesting is that the appearance of those rules is an artifact of convention. Of course, a person could respond that that’s what they’re viewing as syntax anyway. And lots of people do that (I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing). But if so, then I think syntax isn’t really a condition determining grammaticallity in English so much as a set of conditions describing what’s currently understood by certain speakers in certain contexts to be “correct” English.
How much has English evolved since, oh… let’s go with the “everybody owns a radio” thing. That’d be the 1930’s, right?
How much has English evolved since then?
Slang has evolved over time, of course… but that feels more like churn than forward progress. (There was a biker movie I watched a few years back where one biker was yelling at his lieutenant “YOU DIG?” and the lieutenant answered “I dig it.”)
It seems to me that the evolution of English ever since the advent of mass popular culture is the addition (or evolution) of *WORDS* but not the addition (or evolution) of *RULES*. Our evolution has been arrested over these last 80 years.
Am I wrong on that?
Everything about language is an artifact of convention. There’s nothing inherent in the sonds that make up the word “cat” that mean “obnoxious, selfish, domesticated mammal”; it’s something we just happen to agree on. People in other times and places have different agreements. Syntactical rules are no less conventional.
The facts that we can all agree on which sentences are well-formed and which ill-formed, even without having a specific rule to point to, shows that we have a shared, implicit knowledge of these conventions. Moreover, we can apply it to sentences we might never have encountered before. That makes it deeper than conventions about vocabulary, which don’t help much with new words. (If you’ve never heard of an ocelot, knowing the names of other felines won’t help you divine that it’s a feline too.) It’s that shared knowledge that amounts to syntax, and it’s no less real for being a set of conventions. Nor is it less real because we don’t know how to state it explicitly, any more than gravity was unreal before Newton.
Syntax always changes more slowly than vocabulary; there’s really nothing in Dickens or Fielding that seems wrong now. 80 years is too short a baseline to draw conclusions.
Mike,
FWIW, what you are discussing here is the difference between things that are concrete versus those that are abstract.
Rocks are dense and heavy. We didn’t need to decide on that or agree to that. They just are that way. We can learn this property by going out and picking up rocks and exploring their properties. And everyone who does so is going to come to the same or similar conclusions.
But the letter D? That is just two strokes of a pen, one straight, one curved. Nothing about those strokes really tells me anything about the letter or what it represents. It is symbolic. But we agreed that those two strokes put together in that specific manner represent a particular sound.
It is why it is developmentally appropriate for young children (up through age 7, though our education system generally doesn’t allow for it to go on so long) to reverse letters in their writing. If you take a rock or a dog or a chair and turn it backwards or sideways, it is still a rock or a dog or a chair. But take a d and write it backwards and suddenly it is a b, a different letter symbolizing a different sound entirely? Fuck that, man… that makes no sense to a kid.
So let’s go back to the printing press. The KJV seems a bit archaic but that’s a function of vocabulary rather than syntax, right?
(No Religion)
I just flipped through the KJV’s Genesis and the only thing I notice is how many sentences begin with “And”.
Mike, You wrote “It’s that shared knowledge that amounts to syntax”. If you mean that community-wide agreement on certain linguistic conventions determines individual speakers judgments of grammaticality, then I agree. If you mean that individuals have an implicit knowledge of “deep” rules determining grammaticality in a language, then I don’t agree.
I noticed in the videos that I do that when I tell jokes. (“There’s this guy at a bar. And he’s talking to a duck. And the duck is wearing a pirate hat.”)
My suspicion is that syntax has always changed glacially compared to vocabulary or pronunciation, and that big changes have big causes, like the Norman Conquest.
If there is nothing in the word itself that says “subject” or “direct object” or “indirect object”, you’re pretty much stuck with a fairly strict sentence structure that will tell you which is what by how it’s placed.
And there is a cost exacted – reduced comprehension – if the commonly-agreed-upon (even if not easily-articulated) rules are not followed.
This can be called a “syn tax”, if you will.
And the “rules” of syntax (as the book I use suggests) DESCRIBE language–they don’t prescribe it. Young children have mastered the basic rules of syntax when they learn to speak in sentences (even if they don’t know the rules–hell, most adults don’t know the rules). Jaybird’s right, the order of things is important in English.
They know the rules, because they obey them. They just can’t state the rules.
Right, their knowledge is implicit.
This is true of most of the things that we do automatically, without having to “think” about them: we know the rules but we can’t express them, because our knowledge of them is not represented in an accessible or verbalizable form.
Chris and Mike,
But what if the rule is simply, “Do what everyone else is doing”?
@Kazzy: in a sense it is. But we can predict with complete accuracy what they’re doing, even in sentences we’ve never seen before. So what they’re doing is following a rule, and since we all can follow that same rule we all (in some sense) know what it is.
It’s like if you always list number with the odd ones before the even ones. I know you’ll say “7, 4” and not “4, 7”, which proves that at some level I
1. Know the rule is odds before evens, and
2. Know that size or prime-ness doesn’t matter, only even or odd, and
3. Know odd numbers from even ones.
But what if the rule is simply, “Do what everyone else is doing”?
That’s about the only rule there is, it seems to me. Grammar nazis, of course, will disagree.
Heh… but as in the real world… some rules are actually NECESSARY.
In English, we don’t decline our nouns, so word order is VERY important.
“Dog bites man” means something very different than “Man bites dog”… and the only way we have to know which you mean in English is by word order, specifically Subject-Verb-Object.
When I studied Latin, with all its declinations, my teacher taught us that word order was not as important but was more customary and aesthetic than necessary, as it is in English, because the words themselves told you what was what rather than the order. So while it might be preferred and customary to say something like “The big red truck” there was nothing actually wrong with “The red big truck”… it just wasn’t how everyone else was doing it.
Now, if my Latin teacher was teaching us wrong… well, fuck it then…
Kazzy, there are some people who are heavy into pragmatics who essentially think that the only rule is “Do what other people will understand (in this context).” Obviously, we can express the more common constructions in some sort of abstract rule, though, so it makes sense that instead of having to come up with those constructions each time we begin to speak, we store them somewhere, somehow, in some form. Then those stored rules for constructing utterances (or writing, because the rules for writing are somewhat different, pragmatically at least) influence the way we construct things even when we’re not sure whether the rule applies. In young children, this becomes obvious when they’ve only internalized some rules (e.g., for verb tenses), and so they overgeneralize them.
One of the interesting things about dialects, to me, is that they tend to come up with their own idiosyncratic rules, often in ways that directly violate of other (perhaps more dominant) dialects of the same language. My girlfriend is continuously saying things that I understand perfectly well, but that set off my grammar alarms anyway. The difference between her and me is that she knows, and can use both sets of rules, but I can’t produce some of her constructions without a great deal of effort (and even then, I’m limited).
When I do storytelling activities with my students, where they draw pictures and dictate the words, I make a point to not correct their many grammatical errors, unless they undermine the clarity of their message. Because, whether the cat runned home or ran home, the message is clear.
English is particularly different to learn because there are so many rules, exceptions to rules, and exceptions to exceptions. The example that often comes up with my students is the name Thomas… While not something necessary for them to know while in my class, I do talk with them about how T sometimes works with H to make a different sound, but how even there exist times where it still makes its normal sound… like in Thomas. I think of what you described in your first paragraph there with spelling a lot. When I see letter combinations such as -eigh, as in sleigh or weigh, I never think of any other sound than the -ae sound, because I’ve internalized that -eigh makes the -ae sound, even though there is nothing about -eigh to indicate it makes that sound… I’ve just learned that rule.
That seems like a pretty good approach, Kazzy. They’re going to learn the irregular verbs by hearing adults and other children using them, anyway.
Also, English spelling is stupid. We can’t decide if we want our spellings to be old, old Germanic, French, Greek, Latin, or some impossible admixture of all of these.
Late to the party.
There is a grammatical reason why “Home, we will go tomorrow” sounds odd. It is this: adverbials can play various roles in English clauses, both semantically, which is obvious, and syntactically, which is less obvious. In this case, “home” is functioning as a clause *complement*, and its presence is licensed by the verb “go.” In effect, it is an adverb functioning in some ways as a direct object. This is different from the more common “adjunct” adverbials, whose meaning is less directly involved in the meaning of the verb.
For instance, the temporal adverb “tomorrow” is functioning as an adjunct in your examples. Adjuncts, it turns out, can be moved quite freely, in most cases. However, they do not work well when placed between a verb and its complement/object, which is why the third clause sounds odd.
By the way, in literary language you will find inversions such as “Home, we will go tomorrow.” It sounds odd in isolation, but in a paragraph such things can work. (Although I’m not up to the task of constructing an example. Google “grammatical inversions” or similar. Examples can be found.)
To me, it just puts a ton of emphasis on “Home” — someone contemplating the concept, and then telling someone else -when-.
“Daddy, will we ever go home, again?”
“Home, we will go tomorrow.”
Right. This is related to Michael Halliday’s theme-rheme structuring. The start of an English clause has a particular emphasis, usually relating to the *prior discourse*. (The end of the clause often is the focus of new information. These are empirical observations of spoken English, but they seen to hold true as well for well-structured written text.)
Anyhow, you do find examples in spoken discourse, such as “There you go!” But in many ways such things read as idiomatic. However, literary writers exploit this natural faculty in many ways, for instance, “Into the valley of death rode the six-hundred.” Here we have a complement-verb-subject structure.
Also, this is why passive voice exists. There are many ways to re-order the elements of an English clause while still retaining its basic meaning.