Professional Documents
Culture Documents
and
profoundly indebted to Project Gutenberg, offers roughly another 100 million
words,[Note 5] including most of the so-called classic or popular published
works in mainly British and American literature, philosophy, (auto)biography,
history, politics, science, economy, geography, exploration, and folklore of
legends and fairy tales, over the past three centuries up to the profit-minded
cut-off by International Copyright Law -- plus all of Shakespeare's plays and
the entire King James Bible. During my more recent periodic upgrades in size, I
tried my hand at accessing the swelling resources of Australian, Canadian, Irish,
South African, Native American, African American, J ewish, and Feminist data. I
have also utilized my Drama Corpus, which I hope is reasonably representative;
and only occasionally my Poetry Corpus, which is more symbolic than
representative.
I.11 Even at a total of around 200 million words, my two corpora leave all too many
blind spots, so I have often turned to the Internet, which proffers the advantages
of diversity and openness, and where contributors need not be -- and, in many I
observe, plainly are not -- self-conscious or apologetic about their usage; contact
is their objective. Large corpora can already impose tedious travails, yet the
Internet far more, at least with current software: leaky searches let target data slip
through; noisy searches present the target data in a wash of irrelevant but
superficially similar data; and bulky searches toss up hopelessly copious
quantities (thousands or millions) which may or may not be target data. Any of
these may trap us in the dizzying work I have heard called in computer circles
brute force -- trudging though dodgy wodges of data and hoping for lucky finds.
So, stating which data are frequent in English is a risky move; stating which do
not occur at all is worse. I can only report what I did or did not find, without any
aspirations toward completeness or finality.
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I.12 Under such circumstances, I must proceed within some boundary assumptions. I
notice myself saying plausibly more often than good style might prefer,
simply because grammar is not a field of certainties, validations, and proofs.
For my part, I can at least police my own usages as author: if I have felt unsure
about a whether people (still) say what I would, I have queried the BNC or the
Internet, and sought to tap the opinions of the language community. If I do treat
myself to occasional echoes from Shakespeare, Milton or such like for brisk
variety and entertainment value, then always in contexts where, if not recognised,
the meanings should still be evident. As for usages I present as instances or
samples of English, if one is nowhere attested in my corpora nor on the Internet, I
feel justified in disregarding it unless it serves as a counter-example, signalled
with
?
or
???
for (very) doubtful, or with * for nowhere found (by me, you see);
if I find it rare or uncommon, I say so. If an attested usage from some older or
regional usage might seem obscure to less fluent or non-native users of English, I
provide a rough-and-ready translation in [square brackets].
I.13 Regarding which issues might merit description, I have thoroughly familiarised
myself with A Grammar of Contemporary English (CGE) and its thoughtful
revision, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (hereafter CGEL);
plus the Collins COBUILD English Grammar (hereafter just COBUILD). Ill say
a bit more about them later (cf. II.26ff); here I would merely justify my
confidence by their basis upon authentic data and by their laudable intent to be
comprehensive. If an issue is not treated in any of these, I feel safe in assuming
it has not been treated in the turgid Sargasso Sea of past grammar-books since
Elizabethan times, or else has been firmly discredited in the interim. In exchange,
I shall be reporting some issues and usages which I have found to be authentic,
yet which have apparently been missed by my sagacious predecessors.
I.14 For convenient reference, my examples are numbered in square brackets; that way,
I can spare obtuse phrasings like the second of the three examples given two
paragraphs back. Alternative versions of the same example are identified with
lower-case letters after the numbers, e.g., [1] being shown in several variations as
[1a], [1b], [1c] and so on. To highlight items inside the samples, I use underlining,
which is the easiest to spot, especially for short bits like PRO-NOUNS.
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I.15 Again for convenient reference, each paragraph bears its own number printed off
in the left margin. These provide a precise means for cross-referring from one
section to another, as is frequently needed in describing grammar, with its
myriad interconnections.
I.16 Footnotes appear far more sparingly than in my recent New Introduction (2004),
and mostly where I thought there might actually be occasion to follow up a
reference. They appear as [Note 1] and so on, because tiny superscript
numbers can get uncharitably mangled on the Internet. To keep the presentation
uncluttered, I put the Notes at the end of each uploaded section.
I.17 To formulate my beginning, I stay clear of the convention of jumping right into the
grammar itself with a staid opener like The parts of speech in English grammar
are these:; or The English sentence is composed of subject and predicate. I feel
allowed, indeed obligated, to first explore some weighty issues and problems
pervading the term grammar in its various applications, as well as the
teaching and learning of a subject-matter. Insofar as conventional approaches
have been ineffectual in the past, we evidently still need to modify and deepen our
understanding of what English grammar is about and how it might be made
more friendly for all concerned.
I.18 By following and reporting the flows and currents in my authentic data, I am
released from the practices of inventing data out of my own intuition; or of
posing as a great expert who knows whats what without even consulting data.
Here, I must in some manner re-invent the role of the author (many editors and
publishers spurn that, too), since my own voice is but one in a many-headed
multitude. In the BNC, I talk back to omnivorous periodicals like Today, the
Independent, and the Guardian; trendy ones like Sky, The Face, and New Musical
Express; sober ones like New Scientist, Practical Fishkeeping, and the British
Journal of Medicine; stilted, verbose rhetoric from the House of Commons via
Hansard; well-meaning guidebooks and pamphlets on every aspect of life, as if
the dear Brits cant manage anything for themselves, not even how to be fuddy-
duddies; and modern literature, some high enough to imbue the wide world with
intellectual sense and soul, but some low enough to appease the pubescent
sensationalism or voyeurism with formulaic fables fantastical, apish, shallow,
13
inconstant, full of tears and smiles, such as Mills & Boon. In the EPC, I engaged
with astute writers who made over the English language to suit themselves, like
Shakespeare, Dr J ohnson, Addison and Steele, Austin, Dickens, or J oyce; but also
pioneers in the frontier life of Australia like Henry Lawson and Rolf Boldrewood,
or of Canada like Ralph Connor and Tekahionwake; but also visionary advocates
of social reforms as yet unrealised, like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin,
and W.E.B. Du Bois; heart-warming humorists like J erome K. J erome, Stephen
Leacock, and P.G. Wodehouse; intrepid tellers of Native American tales and
legends like Ohiyesa, Owindia, and Zitkala-Sa; and writers who were legends
themselves, like Sojourner Truth, Harry Houdini, and Sarah Bernhardt. And in
their wake parade the myriad characters portrayed or created, like a procession of
endearing acquaintances. So grand a family of voices must have something to
reveal about the grammar of English, beyond all reach of any lone
grammarians intuition or invention.
I.19 Which is why all of my presented data is at best a highway of road signs. A
lifetime of experiences around the globe has convinced me of the impracticality of
teaching English and learning English as subject matters cordoned off in the
schools. Our task cannot realistically be to dispense our own individual
knowledge of English into the minds of learners like empty containers being
filled to the brim; all too often, the results are disappointing. The more successful
learners are those who go foraging for the language out of class. Our task should
rather be seeking to kick-start this diligent enterprise, turn them loose on all the
data they can get, and help them along with guidance and demonstrations of how
to dig and explore, what to look for, and how to make workable use of it.
I.20 Which is also why I have not included Exercises using data samples of my own
choosing, even though I hope this cyber-book may be useful for courses in
schools and colleges. Learners can construe my presentations as demos of what
they can do in gathering and interpreting data in order to make their own
presentations, thus assuming the role and authority of local experts in the eyes
of their peers -- a rare and stimulating experience in education on any level. The
grammar is best understood by those who can seek out further examples of the
usages and patterns I describe.
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I.21 To make the Grammar come more to life, I have introduced illustrative cameo
visuals (carefully restored as appropriate in PaintShop