Question 40 on the 2024 Year 6 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling paper reads as follows:

Before you read on, what do you think is the answer?

You may not have been sure about his, but you're nevertheless likely to have answered 'determiner', because you know that the is a determiner.

However, those who know the Department for Education glossary really well may have been puzzled and/or confused by this question. After all, possessive words like my, you, our, his, i.e. those occurring before nouns, as opposed to those occurring on their own (yours, ours) appear in two glossary entries, namely those for 'determiner' and 'pronoun':

Note that most grammars do not allow a word in a particular construction to belong to more than one word class at the same time. So we cannot say that his in his little brother is both a determiner and a pronoun. It can only belong to one word class.

The treatment of pre-nominal possessives in the glossary is a serious flaw which is likely to cause confusion. It should have been corrected a long time ago.

You may be wondering what is the correct answer? Is his in his little brother a determiner or a pronoun? Different grammarians will give you different answers, but I think the analysis in Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CUP, 2002) makes sense: because this word has a genitive ending, and only nouns can have such endings, these possessive words are best regarded as pronouns. (And remember that pronouns are a subclass of nouns.) This analysis has the advantage that his in his little brother and his in that bike is his are analysed in the same way, namely as possessive pronouns.

As for question 40 above, it should not have appeared in the test, and the normally meticulous test review groups at the DfE should have weeded it out.

With Charlotte Brewer and Jonnie Robinson I’m one of the co-organisers of the English Grammar Day 2024.

This year it will take place on Friday 28 June 2024 at the British Library (Pigott Theatre, Knowledge Centre, British Library, London NW1 2DB). The day will start at 09:30 and will end at 17:00.

For more information about the EGD, including the names of our speakers, see:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/events/egd24.htm

There a link to the BL’s booking page (click on ‘Book Tickets’).

If you’re a teacher, please do consider bringing along your students!

We are looking forward to seeing you on 28 June!

Bas Aarts

Charlotte Brewer

Jonnie Robinson

Beware of online grammar quizzes. Their authors often do not have a clue about grammar! Here are some examples from a recent one that make me despair.

There’s no pronoun in sentence (b)! For most grammars the correct pronouns are ‘its’ in (a), ‘their’ in (c) and ‘your’ in (d). (Though in the National Curriculum, confusingly, all of these are also labelled determiners.)

All these sentences are grammatically fine, so it’s not clear why (d) is chosen as the correct answer. Most grammars of English would say that English has only two tenses: the present tense and the past tense. There is no future tense in English. So sentences (a) and (c) are in the present tense, while (b) and (d) are in the past tense.

This is not a grammar question. Given the right circumstances, all these words can be used in the slot, though (b) would make the most sense outside of a context.

Sentence (a) has no comma. (b) and (d) are both fine, depending on your personal preferences.

Sentences (a), (b) and (d) are all fine. The prescriptive rule about ‘hopefully’ is just silly.

Sentences (a) and (d) use ‘you’re’ correctly.

It's so easy to get confused by these online tests. If you're a teacher and worried about your knowledge of grammar, use the Englicious website. It was written by experts, is FREE and in line with the National Curriculum for England.

englicious.org

Harris reports that:

“Grammar experts say English teachers will struggle to teach the subject when a new curriculum is rolled out in schools next year unless they are given refresher training, as most were never taught it at school themselves.”

This is reminiscent of the situation in England after the National Curriculum was rolled out here in 2014.

I had a look at the NSW English syllabuses for the primary level (Kindergarten to Stage 6), secondary level (Stages 7-10) and senior level (Stages 11 and 12), which can be found here:

https://curriculum.nsw.edu.au/learning-areas/english

I looked for the keyword grammar in the syllabus documentation, and found references to general teaching aims such as the following:

• Identify and use nouns in simple sentences, including in own writing GrA1

• Identify and use verbs in simple sentences, including in own writing
  GrA2

• Know that a simple sentence makes sense by itself and is a complete thought represented by a subject and verb
  GrA3

• Experiment with writing compound sentences and recognise that each clause makes meaning by itself GrA4

• Write a simple sentence with correct subject–verb–object structure to convey an idea

• Incorporate extended sentences (simple, compound, complex) during dialogue SpK3

I also found this in the Syllabus Support document for teachers (page 22):

Teaching sentence-level grammar and punctuation

Explicitly teach the concept of a sentence. Explain that a sentence is a group of words that make a complete message.

Through explicit teaching, demonstrate a range of sentence structures, variability of sentence length and sentence beginnings to show how these can impact the effectiveness of the message being communicated.

The NSW syllabus documentation makes reference to particular areas of grammar that need to be taught. Here’s an example from page 92:

Use adjectival clauses with noun groups to add information to subjects and objects

Example(s):

‘Rice paper rolls (subject),which most people love (adjectival clause), are usually healthy.'

This entry greatly worries me, because it uses the label ‘adjective clause’, instead of ‘relative clause’, which is unfortunate, for two reasons. First, the latter term is far more commonly used in grammar books than the former. Secondly, and more importantly, the label ‘adjective clause’ fundamentally confuses grammatical form and grammatical function. The clause which most people love in the example above functions grammatically as a Modifier, and presumably it is called an ‘adjectival clause’ because adjectives can also have this function when they are placed in front of nouns. However, that’s where the resemblance ends. A relative clause does not carry any of the other typical defining characteristics of adjectives (e.g. comparative and superlative forms, being able to be modified by very, appearing in attributive and predicative position, etc.), so claiming that the clause in question is ‘adjectival’ is misleading and will confuse many teachers and students.

Here’s another highly problematic example from the syllabus (page 92):

• Use adverbial phrases or clauses to add information to the verb or verb group of the main or other clauses, to provide reasons for or circumstances

In the first example if you don’t hurry is not an Adverbial phrase; it is a clause which functions as an Adverbial in the structure of the sentence. (See also here.)

In the second example at midnight and from the chair are not Adverbial phrases; they are preposition phrases which function as Adverbial.

Harris writes:

“The head of English at Ravenswood, Stella Re, said she had bought grammar books for her staff to help bring them up to speed ahead of the change next year.”

I was not able to find an overview of the grammar model adopted in the NSW syllabus, so this raises the question which grammar books Stella Re bought for her teachers, and whether they are compatible with both the Australian Curriculum and the NSW Curriculum.

An overview of grammar also does not exist for the National Curriculum in England, but what we do have here in England is a glossary of grammatical terminology which offers teachers support for the understanding of grammatical terms. In addition, teachers can use resources published by non-government organisations such as the UCL Englicious website with a complete grammar of English, extensive CPD support, lessons plans and an extended grammatical glossary.

The NSW website also has a glossary, but the range of grammatical terminology is very limited.

Some of the entries will again cause a huge amount of confusion among teachers and students.

Take the following example:

This entry again confuses grammatical form and grammatical function: the strings with brown curly hair and in the vase are preposition phrases, not adjectival phrases, which grammatically function to modify the head nouns girl and flowers, respectively. The term 'adjectival phrase' is meant to convey that this phrase is 'like an adjective', but this is again highly misleading. There is no entry for ‘preposition(al) phrase’ in the NSW glossary.

Apart from the kind of problems signalled above the NSW glossary is out of sync with the national Australian Curriculum (which can be downloaded here). The latter does have an accurate entry for prepositional phrase, but has its own problems, e.g. by defining the subject of a sentence as follows:

This definition will make it hard to identify the Subject in clauses that do not express any kind of action. Compare this with the NSW glossary entry:

With misleading, confusing, inadequate and contradictory government resources at their disposal, teachers in Australia, especially NSW, can be forgiven for feeling daunted and worried at the prospect of having to teach the new curriculum from next year.

“A teacher running an interactive grammar exercise (still from Englicious in the Classroom video) A recent study, as you may or may not have heard, has found that teaching grammar to Year 2 children (age 6-7) does not improve their writing. But that’s not what it found.

The study, by researchers at UCL and the University of York, did not compare grammar teaching with no grammar teaching. It compared one particular programme of grammar teaching, called Englicious, with the grammar teaching that schools were doing already, and it found that Englicious produced results that were essentially no better than the other grammar teaching.”

Continue reading here.

Why is there so much resistance to the teaching of grammar in schools?

Well, one answer is politics. Grammar was brought into the national curriculum by Michael Gove in 2014 with the aim of bringing some rigour back into teaching and the use of language. The curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 specifies a range of grammatical concepts that children need to learn. Some of these are very basic, such as ‘noun’, ‘adjective’ and ‘verb’; others are less well known, such as ‘determiner’. Children are tested at the end of Year 6 in the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (Spag) exam. Many teachers feel, with some justification, that the tests are unimaginative tick-box affairs, and are designed to test them, rather than their charges, and to rank their schools. Some parents feel that the terminology isn't particularly appropriate for very young children and stymies their creativity. Labels that have been singled out as being particularly objectionable are ‘subjunctive’ and ‘fronted adverbial’. The latter has become the bugbear of English grammar teaching.

What is a fronted adverbial? To explain this, let’s look at this simple sentence: Ben met Jo last night. You can conceive of this sentence as a miniscule play in which there are two actors: Ben and Jo. We can’t do without actors in a play, so in English we can't say *met Jo last night or *Ben met last night. (Linguists use an asterisk to indicate an ungrammatical sentence.) In grammatical terms the actors Ben and Jo carry the functions of subject and object in this sentence. But what about the phrase last night? This phrase is not an actor in this sentence, but it provides some further background information about ‘when’ Ben met Jo. A phrase or clause in English that gives information about ‘when’, ‘why’ or ‘how’ something happened is called an adverbial. This is also a grammatical function label. Typically, these are optional and occur at the end of a sentence, as in my example. However, we can also put this phrase at the front of the sentence: Last night, Ben met Jo. We now have a ‘fronted adverbial’. The idea isn’t hard to grasp, but the label is admittedly off-putting for young children.

Why is it useful to teach young children about fronted adverbials? Well, one answer is that it helps children to write better. After all, if you don't always put an adverbial at the end of a sentence, but sometimes at the front or in the middle, your writing will become more varied and potentially more interesting. Linguists study how language users can convey information effectively under the heading of ‘pragmatics’.

Many teachers see the point. In a thread on Twitter one of them writes in Twitterese (which has a grammar of its own!):

“There are things I'd change about the National Curriculum. About what we teach/what fits into the school day. But. Fronted adverbials. Learning what type of words can be used where and how. I see the point, right there. In the stuck child going, ah ha, LATER THAT DAY! SNEAKILY! BEHIND THE SHIP! And writing on. For the way they can help unlock the gate, I kind of like 'em. I know I'm out of sync with most of Writer Twitter. But. Here I am.”

Read the full thread here.

But hold on, I hear you say, are you not one of the authors of a recent UCL report that found that teaching young children English grammar doesn't benefit their narrative writing? Yes, indeed, I was one of the investigators – in fact the only grammarian – on the project Grammar and Writing in England's National Curriculum. This involved a randomised control trial in which Year 2 children in London schools were taught 10 grammar lessons, while pupils in a control group were taught their regular (‘business as usual’) grammar classes. We asked children to do a writing test before and after the intervention, and we found that there was no measurable improvement in their narrative writing. We did, however, find some improvement in what is called ‘sentence combining’, i.e. putting together two or more separate sentences to form a single new sentence (for example, We went to the park. The weather was great. >  We went to the park because the weather was great), though the effect was not statistically significant.

I cannot deny that the outcome of the research was disappointing. I lead a team of linguists at UCL who created the Englicious website with free-to-use English language resources that aim to teach grammar in a fun and engaging way. The 10 grammar lessons I mentioned above were specially created on the Englicious platform. My hope had been that teaching grammar using a dedicated set of lessons would result in students using more varied sentence structures. For this age group (6-7 year olds) we did not get a positive result as far as narrative writing is concerned.

However, unlike what some of the newspaper headlines suggested, we cannot conclude from this research that grammar teaching is without value. We need much more research to find out whether perhaps grammar teaching should start in a later year, perhaps Year 4, and has a more direct effect on that age group and later ones. Importantly, as with all subjects taught in schools, it’s crucial that the teaching of grammar is engaging and fun, and that it is made relevant to young children by making reference to stories, poems and songs.

The qualitative part of our research, which didn’t make the headlines in the papers, showed that the teachers and pupils who took part in the intervention valued the interactive teaching resources that we made available for them, and that they had a positive impact on the children’s progress.  Teachers noticed their pupils’ enjoyment of learning about grammar and speaking confidently about it, and this included lower ability and ‘reluctant’ learners. As part of the project I visited several primary schools and witnessed some wonderful, brilliant and imaginative teaching fully engaging the pupils, for example when they were asked to ‘act out’ an adverb in the classroom: “Walk across the room sadly”, “Wave your arms slowly”. We need more of this.

Learning about grammar is no different from many of the other subjects that are taught in schools. We teach them because they are relevant to us. Language plays a crucial role in all our lives, and hence knowing something about how it works is very valuable. This is especially true when we set out to learn other languages. The intentions of the linguists who designed the curriculum were focused on improving children’s literacy by introducing knowledge of grammar into schools. There is no doubt that some of the specifications of the curriculum need to be revised, especially with regard to some of the terminology, and the testing regime is also in need of overhaul.

But those who have been saying that they have become successful individuals despite never having learned about fronted adverbials miss the point entirely.

Link: Grammar and writing in England's National Curriculum

These days there are many new meat-free food products on the market. How do food sellers describe them? Using the description meat-free is often only partially informative: it tells you a product has no meat in it, but nothing is said about how the product tastes. Consider this recent newspaper announcement:

Among 11 new plant-based foods going on sale at Tesco this week are centrepiece dishes using the wheat protein favourite seitan as a meat substitute, including a beef-free joint and hunter’s chicken-free traybake. Turkey-free crowns and vegan mince pies are launching in time for Christmas. (The Guardian 29/9/20)

The descriptions beef-free, chicken-free and turkey-free have a literal meaning at their core, namely that the food they describe is 'free of beef', 'free of chicken' and 'free of turkey', but they have acquired an additional meaning. The adjective beef-free actually means 'free of beef, but resembling and tasting like beef', chicken-free means 'free of chicken, but resembling and tasting like chicken' and turkey-free means' free of turkey, but resembling and tasting like turkey'. This is also true for some other combinations: arguably, alcohol-free means 'free of alcohol, but resembling and tasting like alcohol', at least I think this is the intention when you see this description on a beer bottle. It doesn't need to mean this, though. In some cases a product label may simply wish to convey that the drink in question does not contain any alcohol.

On further reflection, I think any of the combinations involving a particular type of meat, e.g. chicken-free, mean something a bit more complex, namely 'free of chicken, or any other meat, but resembling and tasting like chicken'.

Interestingly, meat-free itself does not (or does not necessarily) have the additional meaning 'resembling and tasting like meat'.

What's fascinating is that speakers of English know that beef-free means more than just 'without beef'. If they bought a beef-free steak and it tasted like turkey, they would be very annoyed. Strictly speaking, if they went back to the shop and complained, the shop keeper could say "Why are you complaining? This product really does not contain any beef. It doesn't say anywhere that is should taste like beef." All of this has made life a lot harder for lexicographers.

How does the additional meaning 'resembling and tasting like x' for food products come about?

My theory is that we need to invoke the notion of 'relevance' here: beef in beef-free is mentioned to signal that there is a link between the product being sold and (the taste of) beef. This may seem obvious, but it isn't. Linguists have studied the notion of 'relevance' in social interactions extensively, especially in Relevance Theory. Are there any Relevance Theorists out there who agree with me?

I have long been teaching a course called English Grammar for Teachers, initially face-to-face, and later online. This course is still available for booking here.

This course is now also available on the FutureLearn platform.

The course runs for six weeks, with a time commitment of approximately 90 minutes per week. It can be started on several different dates and you can study at your own pace. For more information, click here.

Aims of the course

On this course we will teach you the subject knowledge that you need to teach English grammar confidently and engagingly, using the innovative free resources offered by the Englicious platform that was developed in the English Department at UCL.

The course is designed to help primary and secondary school teachers who:

• want to be able to teach English grammar in a fun and engaging way

• want to refresh their knowledge of English grammar

• feel uncertain about their knowledge of grammar and want to improve their confidence in teaching it.

The course covers the key concepts of English grammar in the National Curriculum.

Topics include:

• the role of grammar in the UK education system

• grammatical subject knowledge and terminology

• how to teach English grammar in context

• how to use the free resources on the Englicious website

The course will also be useful if you are not bound to the NC.

The syllabus

The course will cover the entire grammar of English, starting with the word classes, and moving on to phrases, clauses, subjects, objects and adverbials. It combines a modern and innovative approach to the study of grammar with the opportunities that technology offers. It is designed for participants who either start from scratch in the study of grammar or who have a gap in their knowledge.

The focus will be on how grammatical structures communicate meaning and how they offer different ways of expressing the same idea. We will make links to age-appropriate texts.

Course facilitation

Throughout the course we will use Mentimeter, an interactive tool that will allow you to actively engage with your peers and comment about your practice of grammar teaching. Your Lead Educator will monitor the answers and will provide feedback on the group contribution.

Learning outcomes

After taking this course, you will be able to:

• explain basic grammatical terminology to young learners at the appropriate Key Stages

• recognise sentence components and identify grammatical form and function labels

• distinguish nuanced differences between grammatical patterns in terms of structure and meaning

• navigate the Englicious website, and incorporate activities into your teaching practice

• explain how different grammatical constructions create different effects for readers in age-appropriate texts.

There is a charge for this CPD course, but remember that we offer the Englicious website for free.

It's not unusual for a name to be preceded by an indefinite article in English, as in this example:

These are troubling times, but a President Barack Obama could handle them.

However, grammatically, the construction is odd because we combine the indefinite article a with the definite expression President Barack Obama, so you would expect this to lead to a semantic clash of sorts. However, it doesn't . We interpret the phrase a President Barack Obama to mean 'a person like President Barack Obama'.

But what about the following example, which I came across in a newspaper:

More specifically, a President Biden would confirm that a candidate who is unexciting but capable and conspicuously decent can win – especially during a crisis. (The Guardian, 17/10/20)

Here, as a reader, you would initially try to interpret this phrase in the same way as above, namely as 'a person like President Biden'. But that doesn't quite work when you realise that if the modalised would confirm is actualised after Biden's election, the phrase a President Biden is no longer appropriate, as he will then be President Biden. The very fact that he has become President then confirms (an unmodalised verb) that an unexciting candidate can win elections. The writer could not have used the phrase President Biden in his text, as that expression carries the presupposition that he has already been elected.

So what's going on here? I think that the writer of the Guardian sentence is trying to combine two authorial perspectives: the current perspective of the writer before the US elections (modalised, because we can't be sure what will happen), and the perspective he will have after Biden's election (unmodalised because it will be a fact).

Have a look at this headline in a newspaper:

It took me several minutes - and the help of my wife - to understand this headline.

Why?

You may not see any problem with it. But I kept interpreting the noun pay as the object of the verb block, resulting in an imperative: block pay. I then interpreted as you go phones as a subordinate clause, but immediately stumbled as it doesn't make any sense. The way the headline is laid out doesn't help, nor does the fact that no hyphenation was used.

What is being blocked are pay-as-you-go phones.

This kind of construction is called a garden path sentence, because when you start interpreting such a sentence you are being 'led up the garden path'.

The most famous example of a garden path is this one:

The horse raced past the barn fell.

Initially you interpret the sentence to mean that the horse 'raced past the barn', i.e. a structure in which we have a Subject (the horse), then an intransitive verb (raced) and then an Adverbial in the shape of a prepositional phrase (past the barn). But then you get to fell, and the sentence no longer makes sense.

You've been led up the garden path!

So how should the sentence be interpreted?

Well, the intended meaning is for raced past the barn to be a relative clause, as in:

The horse that was raced past the barn fell.

In this sentence the grammatical structure is different. The Subject is now the horse (that was) raced past the barn, and this noun phrase is followed by the intransitive verb fell.

Want some more examples?

The old man the boat.

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Head over to Wikipedia for an explanation.

They come in two types. 'Basic explainers' are aimed at NQTs and teachers with very little grammar training, whereas the 'Advanced explainers' are aimed at more seasoned teachers.

The podcasts will be posted on the Englicious Twitter feed (@EngliciousUCL), but if you want to binge-listen to them all, then visit the Englicious Soundcloud page here: https://soundcloud.com/search/sets?q=EngliciousUCL

Let me know if you find the Grammar Explainers useful.

Rob's response - "Hmm, ok" - is to a particular interpretation of consider teaching fair, namely the reading in which it is an imperative clause, i.e. 'you should consider teaching a fair thing (to do)'. I think most readers would probably read the announcement in this way, as one of the Twitter replies indicates: "I shan't".

But of course, the wording is ambiguous, and this is not the intended meaning. More about that in a moment.

Let's first take a closer look at the grammar of the announcement.

Under the interpretation just discussed we have a special grammatical construction, namely one that has a verb, followed by a noun (teaching) and an adjective (fair). (I have simplified things a little bit here: they are arguably a noun phrase and an adjective phrase, respectively.)

What are the grammatical functions of the noun and the adjective? The noun clearly functions as direct object, but what about the adjective? Well, this takes on the function of object complement, a unit in grammar that attributes a property (in this case the property of 'being fair') to the direct object. Using brackets the grammatical structure is as follows:

[_verb consider] [_noun/object teaching] [_{adjective/complement} fair]

But what about the other interpretation, the one that was intended by the organisers of the event being announced? Under this reading people who are considering becoming teachers are invited to a fair, at which, presumably, they will be given information about the teaching profession. We can use brackets to show the intended interpretation:

[[consider teaching] fair]

The wording of the announcement is linguistically very unusual because we have a verb+object combination (arguably a verb phrase) modifying the noun fair:

[_{noun phrase} [_{verb phrase} consider teaching] fair]

(With thanks to Rob for posting the image.)

PS After publishing the post above an interesting further possible interpretation emerged (see below). Let me know your thoughts!

• I like chocolate, for it is yummy.

Which word class do you think for belongs to?

For many of you for is a coordinating conjunction, because it represents the 'f' in FANBOYS. If you don't know what FANBOYS is, it's acronym that acts as a mnemonic for remembering the list of coordinating conjunctions:

f - for a - and n - nor b - but o - or y - yet s - so

If you google FANBOYS you'll find that many websites use the acronym, including Wikipedia. The set of examples used on many of these websites are often similar. Here's an example:

If you look at the first example sentence in the image, you will see that for in this case means 'because', and for that reason it's actually best regarded as a subordinating conjunction in this case.

So is it wrong to have for as part of the FANBOYS acronym? 

That question is not so easy to answer because there is some grammatical indeterminacy in this area of grammar. I'll explain why in a moment, but let's first look at and, but, and or. 

And, but and or

These are unproblematic as part of FANBOYS, because they are (almost) always coordinating conjunctions. Recall that coordinating conjunctions can link equal units such as words, phrases and clauses:

• [dogs] and [cats]

• [rain] or [sunshine]

• [cool] but [pleasant]

• [the dogs] and [the cats]

• [the rain] or [the sunshine]

• [very cool] but [mostly pleasant]

• [I like cool weather] but [I also like hot climates]

But what about about for?

For is actually rather special, because in some cases it behaves like a coordinating conjunction, but in others like a subordinating conjunction.

Reasons for saying that for is a coordinating conjunction

One reason is that clauses introduced by for cannot be placed at the start of a sentence. In this regard they behave just like clauses preceded by a typical coordinating conjunction such as and or but:

• *And I like cakes, I like chocolate. (Recall that the * indicates that a sentence is ungrammatical.)

• *But I do like fish, I don't eat meat.

• *For it is yummy, I like chocolate.

If for  were a subordinating conjunction, we would expect it to behave like typical subordinating conjunctions such as because which can appear at the front of a sentence:

• Because it is yummy, I like chocolate.

Another way in which for is not like a subordinating conjunction, but like a coordinating conjunction, is that you can't link clauses introduced by for, whereas this is perfectly possible for two clauses introduced by typical subordinating conjunctions:

• I like chocolate, [because it is yummy] and [because it is sweet].

• *I like chocolate [for it is yummy] and [for it is sweet].

Reasons for saying that for is a subordinating conjunction

There are also reasons for saying that for is a subordinating conjunction.

First of all, as we saw earlier, when it is followed by a finite clause for is an alternative to because, albeit a rather rare and formal one. The following sentences, in which the subordinate clauses function as Adverbial, mean the same:

• I like chocolate, for it is yummy.

• I like chocolate, because it is yummy.

Secondly, for must always be followed by a full clause; the subject cannot be left out:

• *He liked the conference, for was treated as royalty.

Compare this to a sentence that contains the coordinating conjunction but:

• This is a very good idea, but may be impractical.

Here the clause after but lacks a subject.

Thirdly, typical coordinating conjunctions can link more than two items, as in this example:

• I went to Paris and I visited the Louvre and I had dinner in a fancy restaurant.

Although stylistically this is not a great sentence, it's perfectly grammatical. (For the true grammar nerds among you, this is an example of polysyndetic coordination.) However, you cannot link more than two clauses that start with for:

• *I had the steak and chips for I felt like a big meal for I was hungry.

Apart from finite clauses, for can also introduce nonfinite clauses. (They are nonfinite because they have a to-infinitive inside them.)

• I arranged [for Michael to meet me in the park].

• [For her to call me at three in the morning] was inconsiderate.

In these cases for clearly has a subordinating function.

So we see that for shares some of the characteristics of coordinating conjunctions and of subordinating conjunctions.

The general point that emerges from this discussion is that it's not always that easy to assign words to one grammatical category or other.

With regard to the example sentences in teaching resources illustrating the use of for as a coordinating conjunction: they are almost always wrong because they instantiate the use of for as a subordinating conjunction.

Philosophical thinking about the notion ‘category’ goes right back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Aristotle set up particular categories on the basis of their characteristics, and he thought of them as sharply bounded, as in the image. He also argued that all the members of a particular category are equally representative of that category. The Aristotelian way of looking at categories was very influential. A famous taxonomy of the natural world was proposed by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (1735). He divided the ‘Kingdom of Animals’ into six classes: mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms, each of which was typified by a set of unique characteristics. It is perhaps not surprising that Aristotle’s views were so long-lasting, because his way of thinking allows us human beings to make sense of the world around us.

However, in recent decades scholars have argued that the Aristotelian system is perhaps a bit strict. For example, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) mused about the notion of ‘game’ in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), and noticed that it is not so easy to define. Think about it for a moment. Do games involve winning and losing? Are they always entertaining? Are they played by more than one person? He decided that it is impossible to define games in an Aristotelian way by enumerating a number of characteristics that must apply to all of them. Instead, he said, games bear ‘family resemblances’ to each other, much like when members of a family have a similar-looking ears, share eye colour, etc.

Psychologists have also wondered about the way we should view categories and concluded that within them we should perhaps recognise prototypical members and peripheral members. For example, within the category of birds we have prototypical birds such as sparrows and red robins, and less typical birds such as penguins and ostriches. As you will know, the latter can’t fly.

What does all this have to do with grammatical categories, you may be wondering? Well, in grammar, we also use all sorts of categories, such as noun, adjective, verb, phrase, clause, etc. When we describe the grammar of a language these categories are useful, because they help us understand how it is structured. In many grammar books the grammatical categories are seen in an Aristotelian way by regarding all their members as being equally representative. But is this the right way to view them?

Within the class of verbs, take the words eat and must. Are they equally typical members of their class? Arguably, this isn’t the case. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that just as a sparrow is a more typical bird than a penguin, eat is a more verby verb than must? The reason is that eat behaves grammatically more like a verb than must, as becomes clear from the following examples:

He eats his breakfast on the bus. They ate all their sandwiches within a few minutes. She was eating nuts throughout the film.

As you can see, eat can take a third person –s ending, can occur in the past tense and in the progressive construction. But none of these are possible for must.

All the examples below are ungrammatical:

*He musts leave early tomorrow. *She musted have seen this. *They are musting to send their CV.

So we see that particular words can be more or less typical representatives of their grammatical categories. Perhaps this is not surprising. After all, language is a natural phenomenon and life shows us there are always exceptions to the rules.

(This blog first appeared on the Macmillan International Higher Education blog.)

Randolph Quirk was born on 12 July 1920 on the Isle of Man. He studied at University College London, where he later became Quain Professor in English Language and Literature. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1981 to 1985.

Quirk became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1976 and was knighted in 1985. He was President of the British Academy from 1985 to 1989 and became a life peer as Baron Quirk of Bloomsbury on 12 July 1994.

He is well-known for founding the Survey of English Usage at UCL in 1959, but most of all for the monumental Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), which he co-authored with Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. This book, which became known as Quirk et al. is one of the great standard reference grammars of English.

If you knew Randolph personally, were inspired by him, or would simply like to learn more about his impact on linguistics and the university, you are more than welcome to attend.

Speakers:

Bas Aarts Dick Hudson Jenny Cheshire Liliane Haegeman David Denison David Crystal

Location: The British Academy, Carlton House Terrace, St. James's, London SW1Y 5AH

Register here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/events/quirk19.htm

The British Academy's public events are free, but not everyone who registers for tickets attends. To make sure we have a full house we may allocate more tickets than there are seats. We do our best to get the numbers right, but unfortunately we occasionally have to disappoint people. Admission is on a first come, first served basis, so please arrive in good time for the start of the event.

https://amzn.to/2QLkeQC

In a recent column Kamm discusses the verb warn in the sentence below, published in his newspaper:

Crashing out of the European Union without a deal would generate an abundance of red tape, raise food and drug prices and cause lengthy delays at the border, businesses have warned.

Kamm cites his nemesis Simon Heffer, who argues in his book Strictly English that the verb warn cannot be used intransitively:

We often read in newspapers that somebody has warned that something will happen. This is ungrammatical. The verb warn is transitive: it requires an object. Somebody has to be warned.

Could Heffer be right, if only just this once? After all, we cannot say:

*She warned.

The verb warn requires a specification of who is being warned (optionally) and of the contents of the warning. For example:

She warned (us) that the shop would close very soon.

You can find hundreds of examples online where the target of the warning (the indirect object) has been left out. However, in the example above we cannot leave out the clause that is introduced by that which functions as direct object.

Because objects usually appear after the verb that selects them it may seem as though the verb warn is indeed intransitive in the Times sentence because nothing follows the verb.

However, transitive verbs are not always directly followed by their object. Consider this example:

Tea, I like, but not coffee.

In this sentence the verb like has a direct object, but it is not positioned in its usual place. Instead, it is placed at the beginning of the sentence. Grammarians call this process topicalisation. They would not say that like is intransitive here.

Consider also:

"I will not let you eat all the cake," he said.

This would be an unremarkable structure in a novel. Here too the verb say is transitive. Its object (the clause I will not let you eat all the cake) has merely been preposed.

Now, something similar is happening in the sentence from the Times. I would argue that the object of the verb warn is the clause Crashing out of the European Union without a deal would generate an abundance of red tape, raise food and drug prices and cause lengthy delays at the border.

This becomes clear when we reorder the words:

Businesses have warned that crashing out of the European Union without a deal would generate an abundance of red tape, raise food and drug prices and cause lengthy delays at the border.

Here the clause introduced by the subordinating conjunction that comes immediately after the verb and is its object. This means that in both versions of the sentence warn is in fact transitive.

Kamm also cites an example of 'intransitive warn' from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590):

And chearefull Chaunticlere with his note shrill/ Had warned once, that Phoebus fiery carre/ In hast was climbing up the Easterne hill . . .

However, in this case too, warn does have an object, namely the clause that Phoebus fiery carre/ In hast was climbing up the Easterne hill.

What about examples like this:

Anne: What were you doing on Sunday afternoon?

Kamal: I was reading. Surely, this would be an example of intransitive read? Well, possibly, but we would then have to say that the dictionary should list read under two headings, namely read₁ (transitive) and read₂ (intransitive), which would suggest that they have different meanings. Alternatively -- and I would prefer this option -- we can say that in such cases there is an implicit object, because Kamal must have been reading something.

Diversion, amusement, sport; also, boisterous jocularity or gaiety, drollery. Also, a source or cause of amusement or pleasure.

Which word class does fun belong to? Well, it’s a noun, of course. What else could it be? The OED agrees.

However, the latest edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary allows for fun to appear before nouns, as in this example:

There are lots of fun things for young people to do here.

Could fun be regarded as an adjective in this example? Well, maybe, but we mustn’t forget that, although adjectives are indeed typically placed before nouns, it is also possible for nouns to occur there, as in the phrases lunch menu, mattress protector, business trip, and so on, so this particular example doesn’t conclusively show that fun can be an adjective.

However, the dictionary has two further examples:

She’s really fun to be with

This game looks fun. An even more persuasive bit of evidence for the claim that fun can be an adjective is the fact that it is now also found with the comparative and superlative endings –er and –est, so that can we hear people say this:

There’s nothing funner than those new video games.

This is the funnest thing we’ve ever done together. Not everyone would use the words funner and funnest. Indeed, after I wrote these sentences, red squiggles immediately appeared underneath them, indicating that my word processing software doesn’t like them either! Nevertheless, it seems that these days the evidence that fun can be used both as a noun and as an adjective is quite convincing.

Are there any other examples of nouns used as adjectives in English? I came across this sentence recently:

We have to be adult about this.

Here the noun adult is used in the sense ‘grown-up’. This is less frequent than fun used as an adjective, but language users are experimenting with new usages all the time, as this passage from the Huffington Post shows:¹

Look at me adulting all over the place. Although I still look to adultier adults (i.e. my husband, who is the adultest) for advice, as I look back on the last almost-decade of my life, I realize I actually have learned a ton of lessons.

The passage is interesting, because its author manages to use adult both as a verb (adulting) and as an adjective (adultier, adultest). There is again a red squiggly objection coming from my word processor to warn me that these examples are unusual. Maybe this guidance is not unreasonable, because most English speakers would regard this as playful language.

The new uses of fun and adult again demonstrate that English is constantly changing, and that some words do not exclusively belong to only one word class over time.

¹ http://bit.ly/2wtNZeE

This post previously appeared on Spread the Word, the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries blog.

[This article first appeared in TES on 4 March 2018. I didn’t write the short summary above, which I feel is misleading. It seems to be blaming teachers for insecurity and a lack of subject knowledge, which is not what I say in the article.]

Teachers hate teaching grammar. At least that is the impression you might get if you venture into the comments section under any article about the teaching of grammar in our schools.

For a good example, just see a recent Grammar Bites column by Mark Brenchley and Ian Cushing. It concerned the difference between a conjunctive adverb and a subordinating conjunction, which was written in response to teachers’ queries about this issue.

They are knowledgeable and deeply passionate about effective literacy teaching and experts in giving advice: they work in universities studying how to help teachers teach grammar and both offer free resources to teachers.

Yet, the comments underneath their article and on social media were mostly extremely negative, and sometimes rude.

Teachers posted to call the teaching of grammar: “appalling”, “madness”, “codswallop”, and one stated that “a whole generation is having their childhood scarred by this unnecessary nonsense”.

Reasons to hate teaching grammar

There are, of course, valid reasons why teachers feel negatively about teaching grammar.

Insecurity and frustration are key factors. During teacher training, very little time is spent on grammar, simply because the ITT curriculum is so jam-packed already. And many people of teaching age did not get a thorough foundation of grammar taught to them at school.

Expecting teachers to teach the National Curriculum (NC) specifications without any support from the government (apart from a glossary of grammatical terms, which is non-statutory, and has only brief explanations of the terminology), was madness.

The situation is made worse by the fact that the resources that are ‘out there’ – that have filled the vacuum left by the government – have been produced by stakeholders with a commercial interest. They have often been created in haste by non-specialists, and are frequently inaccurate as a result.

And maddeningly, the internet doesn’t help when teachers look up grammatical terms, because they will often get several different answers to a question they ask, and it’s hard to know which answer is correct.

Then there is the perfectly reasonable question as to whether having a knowledge of grammar is necessary for school children.

Many teachers believe the answer to be ‘no’, so, for them, having to teach it is particularly galling.

Grammar responses

On the first point about the lack of assistance, I have the utmost sympathy: resources and professional support should have been supplied by the government.

On the second question, you will no doubt expect me to disagree with those teachers. But I don’t: the answer to whether knowledge of grammar is 'necessary' is emphatical: 'no'.

Some well-known authors have said, “I never learned any grammar and look at me now: I’m a famous author.” And, of course, they are right. You can have a successful career in any field and be happy, without knowing any grammar.

But this misses the point.

After all, the same can be said about studying history, art and music: you can get old without ever having heard about the Great Fire of London, van Gogh or Mozart. It’s almost impossible to identify any evidence-based positive benefits of having some knowledge about these subjects.

But I hope you agree that learning about them enriches your life.

What we need to persuade teachers of is that this is also true for grammar, and this is especially so because we use grammar all the time in our daily lives.

Political angles

Is the grammar taught at Key Stages 1 and 2 too hard?

Yes, some of it is, and parts of the curriculum ought to be changed, as became clear when the schools minister had to issue a clarification about so-called exclamative sentences.

A good case can be made for simplifying the KS1 curriculum, and for moving some of the concepts to KS2. However, it should be remembered that across KS1 and KS2, there are only around 40 terms that pupils need to learn, and these include many intuitively easy-to-understand terms such as ‘noun’, ‘adjective’ and ‘verb’.

True, there are also some harder terms, such as ‘subordinating conjunction’, but none of them is harder than some of the mathematics terminology that children need to learn at KS2, such as ‘place value’, ‘equivalent fractions’, ‘negative numbers’ and other very abstract maths concepts.

But even if you agree with me about this, you may point to the fact that children are tested on these grammatical terms, and “testing puts too much stress on children, and we shouldn’t subject them to that”.

An argument against tests is not, though, an argument against the teaching of grammar.

But I will address the testing point all the same. There is some evidence that the KS2 tests do not unduly put stress on children. In April 2016, the BBC carried out some research on Sats testing. They asked students ‘What do you think about tests at school?’ and ‘How do you feel when you take tests at school?’

When the results were released on 9 May 2016, the BBC headline, was "Primary pupils ‘feel test pressure’ – survey" (the link to the Com Res test results was removed from this website).

We might ask if this is the right headline when 60 per cent of children said they either didn't mind (48 per cent) or enjoyed (12 per cent) taking the tests? Some of you will point to the results that show that 59 per cent were nervous and 39 per cent were worried, and will say that this is unacceptable for young children, but surely it’s natural to feel some nervousness or worry before a test – and that’s something they need to be prepared for in life.

To my mind, a far more interesting outcome is that only a minority of children (27 per cent) felt stressed, and that 45 per cent were either confident, happy or excited about the tests.

To counter again, teachers may point to the political angle. The Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS) curriculum, and the associated tests, were introduced by Michael Gove – who has never had a wide fan base among teachers – during his tenure as education secretary.

It’s quite likely that there were indeed dubious political reasons for introducing the GPS test: namely, to test schools, rather than pupils, as Bethan Marshall has argued (‘The politics of testing; English in Education 51.1, 27-43, 2017), but the time has come to ask: have there nevertheless been any positive effects of the GPS curriculum in UK schools?

I believe that this is the case.

The case for grammar

So what’s good about grammar teaching?

First of all, interestingly, as research by Huw Bell has shown (‘Teacher knowledge and beliefs about grammar: a case study of an English primary school’; English in Education 50.2, 148-163, 2016), school children actually enjoy learning about grammar, as this quotation from an interview with a teacher shows:

They love [grammar]. And I think it’s down to the teacher’s enthusiasm – and I am enthusiastic about it. A little girl said to me the other day ‘this is a present continuous,’ and I said ‘is it?’ I’ll be honest, I had to look it up. She said ‘I looked it up,’ and she must have learned it that way. . . I will stop a lesson if there’s a particularly good sentence. ‘Stop! Listen to this, listen to this!’ You big it up, and the pleasure the children get from that is just remarkable. Then, once you’ve grabbed them they will start producing really good sentences. (Jan)

Kimberly Safford reports similar sentiments (‘Teaching grammar and testing grammar in the English primary school: the impact on teachers and their teaching of the grammar element of the statutory test in spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPaG)'; Changing English 23.1, 3-21):

Children love the SPaG … Which is really odd. It is quite strange … kids really enjoy it. They look forward to their SPaG test. It’s one [test] they enjoy doing.(Teacher R)

When it came to doing the SPaG test they found it a lot less stressful than the others [statutory tests]. And that didn’t necessarily mean they achieved quite highly, they just found it less pressure … It’s so funny. We dread doing it and they really like it. (Teacher A) Sure, this is just anecdotal evidence, and more research needs to be done, but these kind of thoughts seldom make it into the debate about grammar teaching.

Another positive benefit of teaching grammar is that it is immensely helpful for learning modern foreign languages.

In this Brexit age, it is more important than ever that children learn foreign languages, though the sad trend is that MFL teaching is declining.

Thirdly, because the grammar of English often involves a kind of puzzle-solving – a bit like maths – learning about it helps children to develop sound analytical skills.

Finally, we now find that children’s knowledge of language is having positive effects at KS3-5 in secondary schools. Children have been empowered to speak about language and literature using a newly acquired linguistic metalanguage, in such a way that the terms ‘pronoun’, ‘phrase’, ‘subordinate clause’, and yes, ‘fronted adverbial’, will be as useful as ‘metaphor’, ‘metonomy’,  and ‘bathos’ for the study of literature.

Here’s an interesting quote from teacher Mark in Bell’s article:

The terminology enables you to. . . give them more effective, more constructive feedback on what [children’s] next steps are, and how they can improve.

In this connection, while talking about coaching a student, teacher Elaine says:

He’d just have a subordinate clause, full stop. . . I remember sitting down with him quite a few times going through a complex sentence, and I was able to articulate to him where he’s going wrong. And we went through subordinate clause, main clause, and I was able to say ‘here’s a sentence, show me the subordinate [clause], show me the main [clause]. Now show me your sentence. Where does it fit?’ And I vividly remember it because it was the only way I could get through to him. Whereas before [I could use this terminology] my favourite line was probably ‘it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t read right.’ And they’d say ‘what do you mean?’ And what do I mean?

These kind of comments should be eye-openers.

Will learning about grammar improve children’s writing? Safford writes: "On the positive side, teachers reported improvements in pupils’ technical skills as writers and pupils’ pleasure in acquiring and using metalanguage. Teachers who contextualise the study of grammar in the reading of literature and discussions about real-life texts reported a positive impact on pupils’ speaking and writing."

This is in line with the findings of Debra Myhill and her team at the University of Exeter, and also what my team at University College London found when teaching subject knowledge CPD.

However, my colleague Dominic Wyse at the UCL Institute of Education recently published an interesting paper on this topic with Carole Torgerson in which they suggest that ‘traditional grammar teaching’ has no effect on writing.

No right answer?

To my mind, the jury’s still out on that question, partly because the notion of ‘traditional grammar teaching’ is slippery. This is why I’m working with Dominic and his colleagues on putting together a research project to gather more evidence on this issue.

In the meantime, I think that we need a more balanced and nuanced debate about grammar teaching in schools. Grammar is often seen as a sock puppet to be beaten when mention is made of testing, political interference or the Govian curriculum. The danger is that we lose sight of the positive reasons for teaching grammar.

Are the former determiners in examples such as her book, and the latter personal pronouns, as in The book is hers?

What does the National Curriculum have to say about the first group of words? Well, if you look carefully you'll spot an anomaly in the National Curriculum Glossary (NCG).

The NCG has examples like his book in three entries, namely those for ‘possessive’, ‘pronoun' and ‘determiner’, as the screenshots below show.

This obviously raises the question: which is correct? Is her in her book a determiner or a pronoun? In our grammar videos (https://www.youtube.com/user/engliciousgrammar), especially videos 2 and 3, we hedge our bets and say that her belongs to both classes, i.e. it’s both a determiner and a pronoun, because this is what the NC seems to be claiming.

In my view it is best to regard her in her book, as well as hers in That book is hers, as possessive pronouns. Her in her book can then be said to have genitive case, and is analogous to Janet’s book. See my Oxford Modern English Grammar.

However, in the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling tests for KS1 and KS2, it is always assumed that these words are determiners, not pronouns, despite what it says in the glossary.

The National Curriculum Glossary has been integrated into the Englicious and can be viewed here:

http://www.englicious.org/glossary

The white boxes show NC terms, which we have expanded in many cases.