Professor Nikolas Gisborne, Chair of Linguistics, delivers his inaugural lecture entitled, What’s Grammar For?

If you listen to how people talk about grammar in the press you could be forgiven for thinking that it is little more than an aesthetic matter, to do with ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing.

A hundred and fifty years after Henry Alford popularized the spurious ‘rule’ that the English infinitive should not be ‘split’, there are still people who—against all reason—insist, and trenchantly, that it’s wrong to put an adverb between TO and the bare form of the verb it’s associated with. But grammar is so much more than this.

Find more information on this lecture at http://edin.ac/1nqN1SX.

Recorded on 29 April 2014 at the University of Edinburgh's Old College.