Structured Visions

What comes to mind when you hear the word ‘grammar’? Red pen marks all over your assignments? Being told there’s something wrong with the way you speak or write? A disgruntled feeling when you see a misplaced apostrophe?

My love of grammar has never been about recognising ‘errors’ in speech or writing. For me it’s a fascination with the beauty of structure. When I was an undergraduate at Washington College I got to play with structure regularly as part of Bob Anderson’s class in symbolic logic.* Then in a music class taught by Amzie Parcell, I had a moment of synaesthesia where logical structure become not just an intellectual experience, but also an auditory and emotional one.

My introduction to the study of linguistics was with John Lyons’s book, Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. I read the book as part of an MA in English Linguistics I did at the University of Strasbourg. I found Lyons’s words on misconceptions about grammar particularly inspiring:

There are all sorts of social and nationalistic prejudices associated with language, and many popular misconceptions fostered by the distorted version of traditional grammar that is frequently taught in the schools. To free one’s mind of these prejudices and misconceptions is indeed difficult; but it is both a necessary and a rewarding first step. (p. 2)

However, in spouting out my new ideas about freeing our minds of prejudices and misconceptions, I learned that the connection between people’s views about language and their internalised social structures are more intimate than I’d realised.

If we admit there’s an intimate connection between people’s sense of social structure and their sense of grammatical structure, what will that then reveal? What alternatives to unjust social structures can we find?

Download ‘Objective’, ‘Descriptive’ and Other Broken Promises in Linguistics here.

* Here’s Peter Suber’s solution to the logic problem I remember from college. Isn’t it beautiful? Delilah wore a ring on every finger and had a finger in every pie. (x)(y)[(Fxd · Ry)  (Oyx] · (x)(y)[(Fxd · Py)  Ixy]

In this episode I talk about the experience of internalising a judgmental, hierarchical social structure. In my case it was like living by the rules of Chutes and Ladders (Snakes and Ladders). Some arbitrary set of characteristics is graded on a scale of 1 to 100 and you find yourself landed on one of the numbered grids. What if ‘whiteness’ was the thing you were being graded on? (This is the question Cheryl Harris discusses in her article, ‘Whiteness as property’.) What if it you were graded on your level of ‘Americanness’? I talk about my feelings of not measuring up when I lived in France.

What does grammar have to do with any of this? I ask listeners to consider the difference between these three clauses, which come from a story that was told to me by an American student living in Strasbourg:

Clause 1 is an example of what in Systemic Functional Grammar is called a material process, realised by the verb phrase are making.

Clauses 2 and 3 are examples of relational processes, realised by the verb is.

Relational clauses sometimes put people on a Chutes and Ladders-type grid: they situate you, statically, in a particular social structure. (I am white. I am a lecturer. I am American.) In their most ‘normal’ form – that is, their unmarked form, they’re in the simple past or the simple present. What happens if you were to use the present-in-present form (otherwise known as present continuous or present progressive)? I am being American. I am being white. Does that upset the Chutes and Ladders board?

Next week I’ll talk more about these types of ‘grammatical intervention’.

The book I mentioned, cited in Cheryl Harris’s article, is Two Nations by Andrew Hacker.

The type of grammar I’m using is Systemic Functional Grammar, and my reference guide is Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar.

Download Chutes and Ladders or I Am Being So American, here.