Bad Grammar Makes Me (Sic)

FOURTH BLOG 6.11.13

Fourth in the continuing series of retro blogs (written in 2013)

that I am reissuing before I have to pull my big girl pants on and write something fresh. This one might appeal if you have recently followed my proofreading post on Facebook. *facepalm*

WARNING: it gets really 'teachy' (made up word) and dull towards the end, so if you're not in a learning mood, skip past it quickly. There are some fun bits in the first half though.

I’ve been in Devon this week and apart from the wind and rain we also had a stunning day of autumnal blue skies with barely a cloud in the sky. I did a couple of the stereotypical things, that of eating a pasty, and driving across Dartmoor, but I didn’t visit the beach (for a change). I’ve pondered about what to write, and kept coming back to the follow-ups to my blog last week. I appreciate that setting out my stall as a copywriter and proofreader sets me up for target practise from all my friends and associates who also fancy themselves as spelling/grammar experts. I know you’re out there - just waiting for an incorrect phrasing, a missed apostrophe, an unclosed parentheses, and woe betide if I dare to make a spelling mistake! It might not surprise you to learn that after the original draft, I will usually go back and tweak each piece at least twenty times, trying to avoid repetition within adjacent lines, trying to improve the syntax, or how it ‘scans’, and checking, checking, checking that I haven’t made some ghastly mistake. As we know, everyone’s a critic when we get something wrong.

I would like to state clearly for the record that I am not an expert, I’m not a teacher, I have no degree (after finally getting my maths ‘O’ level at the seventh attempt, I decided I couldn’t be arsed to go to university and would go and get a job instead), and am not putting myself out there as some ‘grammar guru’. I make mistakes, I don’t always get things right, but I have a more than decent grasp of the English language. Due to the voracious nature of my reading from an early age (see last blog post) I am fortunate in that I appear just to ‘get’ the English language. I am constantly learning and teaching myself new things (and re-teaching myself old things.) I had some encouraging comments from a couple of real-life teachers, who suggested that their students might benefit from reading my blog (a real compliment, and one which I doubt I am worthy of), as well as asking if I might help with some more points of grammar, including ‘modal verbs’. My response to that was ‘WTF are they?’ (yes, I too use common modern abbreviations ... LOL.) More of them later in a revision spot for any teachers having to work within the cloying confines of Michael Gove’s education ‘reforms’ (to the Dark Ages) and the cryptically titled ‘SPAG’ test - no, it’s nothing to do with bolognese, it is (of course) the Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar test.

Whilst we were in Devon we visited our oldest friend (and by that I mean in age rather than the number of years we’ve known him because he’s in his eighties.) He had a charming friend visiting him who had worked in the education system over forty years ago. She mentioned a book called ‘A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language’ by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. I shall no doubt end up purchasing this and referring to it greatly in the future.

We did discuss our annoyances with a lot of the incorrect use of words today - with my especial pet peeve ‘off of’ heading the list. This appears to be an Americanization, (and whilst I used to believe that the -ize ending to certain words was also such a thing, have learnt in the past twelve months that this was actually the correct (and archaic - from at least the sixteenth century) British word ending, as evidenced by Jane Austen and also by some of the more traditional UK publishing houses, notably Oxford University Press.) ‘Off of' is appearing in epidemic form across the UK, with television and newspaper journalists, and radio presenters - amongst many others - happy to adopt it. It seems to be used in place of ‘from’ or ‘off’, i.e. “that man off of the television programme” or “take your feet off of the table.” It should of course be ‘that man from the television programme’ and ‘take your feet off the table’. The ‘of’ is completely unnecessary and also clumsy, and I wish I had the power to make it stop. Please help me in my crusade and stamp it out wherever you see it. Join the Grammar Police now!

We also touched upon ‘footballers’ ‘English’ or rather their lack of knowledge regarding the correct application of adverbs ‘we played fantastic/fabulous/amazing’ rather than fantastically/fabulously/

amazingly. This sort of slicked-back hair, aftershave-soaked, claptrap makes me ‘sick as a parrot, (John)’.

Other bastardizations (ooh, sweary) of the English language to Americanisms include words such as ‘burglarize’ where ‘burgle’ will do; ‘transportation’ - what’s wrong with ‘transport’; and ‘veterinarian’ whilst in the UK we tend to use the term ‘veterinary surgeon’. (Veterinarian was first used in print by Thomas Browne in 1646 - and he was English!)

I’ve had friends ask me about conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs - as I say, being no expert, I tend to go to Google (which has largely replaced the piles of heavy reference books I have surrounded myself with in the past) to learn and attempt to impart what people want to know.

I’ve had someone hyperventilating because they thought I’d missed an Oxford comma (I hadn’t, there was no need for one as there was no list.) For those of you who are uncertain the 'Oxford comma' is an optional comma before the word 'and' at the end of a list, e.g. ‘We sell books, videos, and magazines.' Some people might prefer to write ‘We sell books, videos and magazines’, but they’re just not in the know. ;)

As mentioned, I was asked by a teacher to help with some revision of ‘modal verbs’. As this sounded like learning a foreign language, I’ve had to do some extensive research of my own here, so please don’t shoot the messenger; if you’re not in the mood for learning though, I suggest you stop reading beyond this point. (2018 EDIT - my eyes started to glaze over soon into reading this, and then I remembered this was what Gove was keen for secondary school students to know what modal verbs were. What a demoralising waste of students' and teachers' time.)

Here comes the grammar part (I’m learning as we go ...)

An auxiliary verb is a verb used to add functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it appears –

e.g.

• to express tense (not ‘...’ nervous headache, but past, present, and future)

• aspect (perfect and progressive - the verb that indicates completion, duration, or repetition of an action)

• modality (see below)

• voice (active/passive)

• emphasis, etc.

An example is the verb ‘have’ in the sentence ‘I have finished my dinner’– here the main verb is ‘finish’, and the auxiliary ‘have’ helps to express the perfect aspect. In principle, the perfect is used to indicate that an action or circumstance occurred earlier than the present time (or other time under consideration).

A modal verb (also modal, modal auxiliary verb, modal auxiliary) is a type of auxiliary verb that is used to express ‘modality’, i.e. likelihood, ability, permission, and obligation (e.g. may/might, must, can/could, will/would, shall/should).

It is also what allows speakers to attach expressions of belief, attitude, likelihood, etc., to statements.

Function: A modal auxiliary verb gives extra information about the function (i.e. subject, direct object, and indirect object) of the main verb that it governs. Modals can do many types of communicative functions, but these can broadly be related to a scale ranging from possibility (‘may’) to necessity (‘must’), in terms of one of the following types of modality:

(Is your brain hurting yet, because mine is?!):

Epistemic modality - relates to knowledge or the degree of its validation. It is concerned with the theoretical ‘possibility of propositions being true or not true (including likelihood and certainty)’.

Deontic modality - relates to the possibility and necessity with regards to freedom to act (including permission and duty)

Dynamic modality - which can be distinguished from deontic modality, due to the fact that with dynamic modality, the conditioning factors are internal, i.e. the subject’s own ability or willingness to act.

(seriously, totally skimming the text now)

To give an example of both epistemic and deontic uses of the English modal verb ‘must’:

Epistemic: You must be hungry. (‘It is possibly the case that you are hungry.’)

Deontic: You must go now. (‘You are required to go now.’)

An ambiguous case (i.e. one that does not have one obvious meaning) is ‘You must speak Italian.’ This could be be intended epistemically (‘It is surely the case that you speak Italian’, e.g. after having lived in Italy for a long time), or deontically (‘It is a necessity that you speak Italian’, e.g. if you want to work in Italy).

Epistemic modals can be studied as raising verbs (e.g. ‘They seem to be trying.’ - ‘seem’ is a raising-to-subject verb), while deontic modals can be studied as control verbs (e.g. ‘We tried to leave.’ - Subject control with the obligatory control predicate try’.)

I could go on, but I would suggest if you wish to study this in more detail you either search for it on Google (or your preferred search engine), or purchase a comprehensive guide to English grammar rulings (see above).

There’re bits about ‘the inferred certainty sense of English ‘must’ developed after the strong obligation sense.’

Then ‘the probabilistic sense of ‘should’ developed after the weak obligation sense.’

And finally, ‘the possibility senses of ‘may’ and ‘can’ developed later than the permission of ability sense.’

Then it all gets a bit complicated, and I already think I’m losing/lost my audience here. Man, this stuff is HARD!

(2018 EDIT - I just caught a look at my face rereading this and my nose was scrunched up and my mouth open in confusion!)

The following table lists the modal auxiliary verbs of standard English. Most of them appear more than once based upon the distinction between deontic and epistemic modality:

To finish the arduous task that I have started (*thinking* I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here) the verbs in this list all have the following characteristics:

• They are auxiliary verbs, meaning they allow subject-auxiliary inversion and can take the negation ‘not’

• They convey functional meaning,

• They are defective insofar as they cannot be inflected (change the form of (a word) to express a particular grammatical function or attribute, typically tense, mood, person, number, and gender), nor do they appear in non-finite form (i.e. not as infinitives, gerunds, or participles),

• They are nonetheless always finite (having a specific tense, number, and person) and thus appear as the root verb in their clause, and

• They take an infinitive as their complement.

Seriously, I’m glad that I grew up speaking and reading English because it makes it a whole lot easier. I can appreciate it when foreign language students (and teachers) say that English is one of the hardest languages to learn if it isn’t your first language and your first language isn’t in the Germanic language group.

Next week, I shall probably take a break from all this knowledge imparting, it’s not as much fun as talking about me, me, me. I’m off to take a nap now.

It did remind me of this funny little line though,

'I wish I may, I wish I might, do you-know-what with you tonight.'