HISTORY OF GRAMMAR

You may wonder why grammar has been out of fashion for some time, and why it has come back. The following very brief history may help you to put the recent grammar history into context. Click here for more details about developments in the twentieth century.

The ancient world took grammar teaching very seriously as a foundation for instruction in writing skills hence the link between the word grammar and the Greek gramma, 'written character'. Another perceived benefit was for thinking skills, where grammar was paired with logic and rhetoric.

The 18th century developed prescriptive grammar teaching, and tried to analyse English grammar as though it was the same as Latin grammar. Grammar teaching in school was mainly about (a) Latin and (b) avoiding 'errors' in English.

The 19th century developed historical linguistics as an important university research subject, with heavy emphasis on how languages are related but little impact on school grammar teaching. Meanwhile, English literature, in the struggle to establish itself as a university subject, saw language as its competitor for the title 'English'.

The early 20th century saw a steady decline in the quality of grammar teaching in English schools, and increasing calls for its abandonment. One reason for this decline was the complete lack of university-level research on English grammar, which led a government report in 1921 to conclude that it is impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is. Another reason was an energetic campaign on behalf of literature, presented as a liberal and liberating alternative to the the so-called 'grammar-grind'.

The later 20th century (from about 1960) saw two competing trends. Most schools stopped teaching grammar in English (and somewhat later in MFL); meanwhile, Latin teaching had largely died out too, so pupils no longer had any systematic instruction in grammar. This is the educational background of most young English teachers.

English grammar became an important research subject, partly driven by the overseas publishing market in English as a Foreign Language and partly by the intellectual impetus of theoretical linguistics. Most universities now have a department of Linguistics or of English Language where undergraduates study English grammar. This is the research background of the 'modern grammar' espoused by the KS3 Strategy.

The end of the 20th century (from about 1990) reversed the anti-grammar trends in school through a series of major reports on the perceived shortcomings of English teaching (which was clearly failing in its major task of teaching literacy). These reports all followed the first one (the Bullock Report of 1975) in replacing traditional grammar with a much more defensible kind of grammar which should be: a form of grammar which can describe language in use; relevant to all levels from the syntax of sentences through to the organisation of substantial texts; able to describe the considerable differences between spoken and written English; part of a wider "syllabus of language study". Central government decided to promote the teaching of grammar (though different ministers clearly had very different ideas of what this meant) as part of a drive to improve literacy standards. This decision is: controversial, because grammar teaching has had such a bad press for such a long time; challenging, because it really involves the introduction of a new subject rather than a simple re-instatement of an existing one, with all that this means for syllabus design and for teacher support.

Parts Of Grammar

Word Classes

Introduction to word classes Words are fundamental units in every sentence, so we will begin by looking at these. Consider the words in the following sentence:
my brother drives a big car
We can tell almost instinctively that brother and car are the same type of word, and also that brother and drives are different types of words. By this we mean that brother and car belong to the same word class. Similarly, when we recognise that brother and drives are different types, we mean that they belong to different word classes.

Nouns
brother, car, David, house, London

Determiners
a, an, my, some, the

Verbs
be, drive, grow, sing, think

Adjectives
big, foolish, happy, talented, tidy

Preposition
at, in, of, over, with

Conjunctions
and, because, but, if, or

Minor word classes
There are some words which will not fit the criteria for any of them. Consider, for example, the word hello. It is clearly not a noun, or an adjective, or a verb, or indeed any of the classes we have looked at. It belongs to a minor word class, which we call formulaic expressions.

Formulaic Expressions
To express greetings, farewell, thanks, or apologies, we use a wide range of FORMULAIC EXPRESSIONS. These may consist of a single word or of several words acting as a unit. Here are some examples:
bye goodbye
hello farewell hi
so long excuse me thanks thank you thanks a lot
sorry pardon

Some formulaic expressions express agreement or disagreement with a previous speaker:
yes, yeah, no, okay, right, sure

INTERJECTIONS generally occur only in spoken English, or in the representation of speech in novels. They include the following:

ah, eh, hmm, oh, ouch, phew, shit, tsk, uhm, yuk

Interjections express a wide range of emotions, including surprise (oh!), exasperation (shit!), and disgust (yuk!).

Formulaic expressions, including interjections, are unvarying in their form, that is, they do not take any inflections.

Phrases
Defining a Phrase
A pronoun can sometimes replace a noun in a sentence. One of the examples we used was this: [Children] should watch less television
[They] should watch less television

Here it is certainly true that the pronoun they replaces the noun children. But consider:
[The children] should watch less television
[They] should watch less television

In this example, they does not replace children. Instead, it replaces the children, which is a unit consisting of a determiner and a noun. We refer to this unit as a NOUN PHRASE (NP), and we define it as any unit in which the central element is a noun.
Here is another example:
I like [the title of your book]
I like [it]

In this case, the pronoun it replaces not just a noun but a five-word noun phrase, the title of your book. So instead of saying that pronouns can replace nouns, it is more accurate to say that they can replace noun phrases.

Clauses & Sentences

Clause In more general use, however, phrases are integrated into longer units, which we call CLAUSES:
Q: What would you like to drink?
A: [I'd like coffee]

Q: How are you today?
A: [I'm fine]

Q: Where did you park the car?
A: [I parked the car behind the house]

Sentence
Most people recognise a sentence as a unit which begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop (period), a question mark, or an exclamation mark. Of course, this applies only to written sentences. Sentences have also been defined notionally as units which express a "complete thought", though it is not at all clear what a "complete thought" is.

It is more useful to define a sentence syntactically, as a unit which consists of one or more clauses. According to this definition, the following examples are all sentences:
[1] Paul likes football
[2] You can borrow my pen if you need one
[3] Paul likes football and David likes chess

Form & functions
The word Form was one of the criteria we used to distinguish between word classes -- we saw that the form or "shape" of a word is often a good clue to its word class. Form denotes how something looks its shape or appearance, and what its structure is. When we say that the old man is an NP, or that the old man bought a newspaper is a finite clause, we are carrying out a formal analysis.