English Grammar: An Introduction

In GRAMMAR we study the ways in which words are combined to form sentences.

In Modern English (NE), WORD ORDER is very important in the formation of sentences. A change in word order can change the meaning of a sentence. If word order is unusual, meaning can be difficult to grasp. Notice too that in order to produce sentences from the words, we have had to add the word the. Another important feature of English grammar is the numerous small words like a, the, to which are essential to the structure of sentences. These are often called GRAMMATICAL WORDS.

Not all languages rely on word order and grammatical words to the same extent as English. Some of you may know such a language, for example German, Latin, Gaelic, or Arabic. In its earliest stage, known as OLD ENGLISH (OE) (c700 - 1100 AD), English resembled such languages in structure.

1.3.1. Most of the time, we communicate easily with one another, but communication can be impaired for various reasons. The text below may not immediately communicate a sensible meaning to you. After all, you know perfectly well that ladies don't have 20 nails on each hand; if they did, they would have at least 42 on hands and feet, not 25.

Every lady of the land
Has twenty nails upon each hand
Five and twenty on hands and feet
This is true without deceit

The text can be made more meaningful by supplying some punctuation. However, the interesting thing about it is why we were misled by it in the first place.

One factor is that it is written out as verse. In rhyming verse, we tend to assume that each line coincides with a unit of sense - the rhyme acts rather like a full stop. Secondly, some words seem to be missing (a phenomenon known as ELLIPSIS); the text would be clearer if the words "she has" were supplied at the end of line 2 and before twenty in line 3. "Nails" could also be supplied after five and twenty. Thirdly, the word order in lines 2 and 3 is somewhat unusual.

All these factors combined to deceive us. It is worth noting that we didn't therefore discard the text as nonsense; instead we discarded our first interpretation and tried again. This often happens when we read texts, such as poetry, where the meaning is not immediately apparent.

1.3.2. We can now construct a working definition of GRAMMAR:

"The grammar of a language is a body of rules which enables speakers to construct sentences and listeners to interpret them."

Different rules enable us to produce different types of sentences:

The structural relationships between the different types of sentences remain constant even though the meanings may change. In order to mark the question sentence, we insert the word do before the verb. In the negative sentence we insert do and n't (= not). These two processes are grammatical RULES.

Meaning can also be changed by the SUBSTITUTION of different words in SENTENCE FRAMES like that below:

FRAME	SUBSTITUTION
I don't like ......	kippers
	cornflakes
	peacocks' eggs

Notice that you can understand the last of these new sentences perfectly well although you have probably never heard it before.

1.3.3. If the rules are broken, sentences are said to be UNACCEPTABLE or UNGRAMMATICAL. Such sentences are marked with an asterisk *:

*I not like the porridge.

The question of whether or not certain linguistic forms are unacceptable is a controversial one, and will be referred to again. In the meantime, note that our perception of such rules can vary according to context: