The Washington Times
Why the bad grammar?
By Veda Charrow
Published December 16, 2004
________________________________
Have you ever wondered why so many reporters don't know that "criterion"
is singular and "criteria" is plural? How many times have you read
something like this in a magazine: "The student who brings a knife to
school to peel their orange may be expelled"? How many times have you
heard a newscaster saying, "The new phone bill is different than your
previous bills"? Or hypercorrections like "The judge admonished the
driver whom everyone knew had struck the cat"? In short, have you ever
wondered why so many people who should know better make grammatical
errors? Earlier in the 20th century, professional writers and educated
speakers could be expected to make few, if any, grammatical errors.
Newspapers and magazines were edited not only for content and length,
but for grammatical correctness. This is no longer the case. Newspapers,
magazines, newscasts and, of course, the Internet are rife with errors
like the ones above.
I have no doubt that the reason for this profusion of grammatical errors
is that most American elementary and high school students aren't taught
English grammar anymore. And I'm afraid that my own discipline,
linguistics, may be largely to blame.
Linguistics is a social science whose goals, among others, are to
describe languages and dialects, to show how various languages are
related, to explain how children acquire their native language, to
discover how language is understood and to demonstrate how different
forms of a language are used in different situations.
Linguists are trained not to make value judgments. Thus, if asked
whether a non-standard variety of English is worse than standard
English, we would unhesitatingly say "No." As a result of linguists'
refusal to be prescriptive, non-standard usages have crept into areas
where they would not have been allowed 30 years ago, and have become
accepted. The effect has been to lower the bar for students and their
teachers.
But even more damage to the teaching of grammar was wrought by the
misuse of a linguistic theory called transformational-generative
grammar, which was developed by Noam Chomsky.
Mr. Chomsky, better-known today for his anti-Israel and anti-Iraq war
stances, originally made his name as the father of transformational-
generative grammar, or T-G. In the '60s, Mr. Chomsky, a prominent MIT
linguistics professor, proposed a theory of grammar that could easily
explain the different meanings of an ambiguous sentence such as
"Visiting relatives can be boring." Traditional grammars would have some
trouble providing different grammatical explanations (and sentence
diagrams) for the meaning "Relatives who are visiting can be boring"
vss. "When one visits relatives, it can be boring." But Mr. Chomsky's
method could elegantly explain the "deep structure" of such sentences --
the underlying conceptual relationships among actors, actions and
objects. His method of diagramming sentences became standard in
linguistics.
Transformational-generative grammar was the beginning of the end of the
teaching of grammar in the schools. Since it was the up-and-coming
thing, and since Mr. Chomsky had great charisma, T-G spread to other
fields in the humanities, and particularly to university and college
education departments.
Attempts were made to incorporate T-G into elementary and high school
curricula. But educators and writers of school textbooks had missed the
point that T-G was a theory of grammar, and not a pedagogical tool.
Using T-G to teach elementary school students grammar was like using the
General Theory of Relativity to teach school children about gravity.
Teachers did not understand T-G, or found it too complicated for their
students, and were unable to teach it. Students viewed it as another
incomprehensible subject like "new math." Fortunately, in the 1960s and
'70s most teachers knew the English grammar that they had been taught,
and so could help their students learn at least some grammar. Within a
number of years, however, grammar ceased to be taught as a separate
subject, and was just sprinkled through basal readers. Somewhat later,
even fewer grammar rules were to be found in school textbooks. But, went
the thinking, why should American children have to be formally taught
their own language?
Twenty years later, the elementary school students who had not formally
learned English grammar were now teaching English. They had never been
exposed to the traditional grammar books of the 1940s and '50s, so they
could not explain even rudimentary grammatical forms. (What is a
dangling modifier? What is the difference between a clause and a
phrase?) The grammatical "herd immunity" conferred on teachers in the
'60s and '70s by their own exposure to traditional grammar had worn off,
and there was no one to teach grammar to our children -- who have become
today's reporters, journalists, writers and newscasters.
It's time again to formally teach traditional grammar in the schools.
(And, yes, I know I split an infinitive, but English doesn't have true
infinitives, so it's OK.)
-----------------------------------
Veda Charrow, the principal investigator on numerous federally funded
linguistic and pyscholinguistic studies, is the author of a leading
textbook. She is currently employed by the federal government. The views
expressed in this article are her own and do not represent the views or
positions of any federal agency.
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