Let’s talk about grammar... fun stuff, huh?
We’re all familiar with the traditional idea of grammar
that we learned in school.
You know... the grammar we have a love-hate relationship with.
Even outside of school,
most of us have argued with someone about what is or is not “proper grammar.”
But what is grammar for a linguist?
Well, it’s not really the grammar you learn in school.
Let’s look at what grammar is
and how linguists go about understanding it.
[♫ Snap Language theme song ♫]
Hi!
Welcome to Snap Language.
My name is Marc Franco.
This is Part 1 of a short series of videos on grammar.
No, we’re not gonna learn English grammar here.
We’ll explore how we understand the fact that languages have grammars,
how traditional grammar isn’t always a good tool to understand
how language really works,
and how it is rooted in social, cultural, and historical contexts.
So, let’s go!
Think about learning a new language.
What do you think you’ll need to learn?
Probably, one of the things that comes to mind is that
you’ll have to learn a new set of rules, or a new “grammar.”
Some of those grammar rules may be identical to English...
but you’ll very likely find some that are very different... even “weird.”
(Well, I’m making the assumption that English is your native language.
If it’s not, just think in terms of your native language
compared to other languages.)
So, what is the “grammar” of a language?
In lay terms, we think of grammar as a set of rules that tell us
what you can and can’t say in the language.
All languages have something in common, though.
There are things... concepts... ideas in the world
that we use language to express.
But different languages may express them using different structures.
Now keep in mind that language is shared by a culture and society
(unless you create your own language and only use it to talk to yourself).
[NONSENSE SENTENCE] I sentence this like make speak were if,
through each other you be very would...
right?
[YOUNG MAN] I’m very confused now.
[MARC FRANCO] Nothing stops a language from creating
a structure like this...
As long as you always organize these ideas
(and other, similar ideas) the same way,
you can call it a grammar.
It just wouldn’t be English as we know it
because English speakers do not share this way of organizing these ideas.
They don’t share this set of grammar rules.
So grammar is a system of rules
that govern how speakers organize words into sentences
in a way that *others also understand.
But organizing words into sentences is just one aspect of it.
Linguists are also interested in other components of grammar.
The main components are phonetics, phonology, morphology,
syntax, and semantics.
In phonetics, we study the inventory of possible sounds in a language.
The sounds /p/, /k/, /n/, and /æ/ are part of the phonetic inventory of English.
The sounds /R/, /rr/, /y/, or /ø/ are not.
We can also combine these sounds to form, for example, “pack,”
“can,” or “cap.”
How about /knæp/ or /kpæn/?
You won’t even look these words up, will you?
Because you know that
these combinations of sounds violate English phonology.
Phonological rules vary from language to language.
Even though English has these sounds in its phonetic inventory,
the /k/ + /n/ sound combination is not part of English phonology.
(Well... we’ll get back to that in a minute.)
It is allowed in German, for example, which is why English speakers
have a hard time pronouncing
[GERMAN WORDS] “Knabe” (boy) or “Knoblauch” (garlic).
[SLIPPING INTO GERMAN]] Ich esse rohe Knoblauch nicht gerne.
But, wait... when you say “dark night,”
you’re kind of saying a /k/ sound followed by an /n/ sound!...
... “dark night.”
That’s because the phonological rule in English is that a /n/ sound
cannot follow a /k/ sound at the beginning of a word.
The rule doesn’t apply to that combination between word boundaries,
as in “dark night.”
In fact, if you’re an English speaker learning German,
that’s a way to practice saying words in German that start with K-N.
“Dark night... dark night... k-night...
Knabe...
Knoblauch.”
Morphology refers to the rules of word formation.
For example, in English, we learn to
form regular plurals by adding an S to nouns.
For a linguist, you actually add
what’s called an inflectional morpheme
which, in the case of English plurals, could be represented by the /s/ sound.
So, you say “one book” and “two books.”
“cat... cats.”
That’s pretty simple grammar, isn’t it?
But that’s not how it works in all languages.
In Italian, you have “il libro, i libri.”
“L'uomo, gli uomini.”
In German, “das Buch, die Bücher.”
“Der Tag, die Tage.”
Notice the different plural morphemes and how even the article is pluralized...
And languages, such as Chinese,
Japanese or Vietnamese, don’t even mark the noun for plurality.
Let’s go back to the morpheme /s/ for English plurals.
You add an S or E-S in writing... but...
For a linguist, this grammar point is a little more complex than that.
There are actually three morphemes: /s/, /z/, and /əz/.
And you need phonetics and phonology to explain the rule.
When a word ends in a voiceless sound, the morpheme is realized as /s/,
which is also voiceless... as in “cats” or “maps.”
When a word ends in a voiced sound, the morpheme is realized as /z/,
which is also voiced... as in “combs,” “friends,” and “flags”
... unless the final sound is a sibilant, as in “church,” “face,” or “pledge.”
Then we need to add an extra schwa sound there
as in “churches,” “faces,” or “pledges.”
Oh, speaking of pledges, one way to show your support for Snap Language
is to become a patron on Patreon.
Check it out.
[notice the wink?
:)]
So, this is how a linguist explains the grammar of a language
from the ground up.
You need to know the sound inventory, the way sounds are realized
in different contexts, and how words are formed.
Now, syntax is how the lay person typically understands what grammar is.
It’s about how to put words together to form sentences or utterances.
In English, you’d say “My black cat ran away.”
The same idea in Italian would be “Il mio gatto nero è scappato.”
The syntax here is “the my cat black is run away.”
In Japanese, that would be Kuroneko wa nigedashita.
The syntax here omits “my” because it is
understood in the context that
I’m talking about my cat.
“Black cat” is a compound word.
The verb has a noun (escape) which is verbalized and put in the past.
But there’s more...
Semantics looks at how speakers use all of the above
to extract meaning from sentences and utterances.
Semantics is quite complex, and deserves a video of its own
(actually, it would probably be a series of videos to do it justice).
You need all of this to explain how we extract different meanings from
“My black cat ran away” in different contexts.
[unemphatically] My black cat ran away.
[emphasis on “cat”] My black CAT ran away.
[emphasis on “black”] My BLACK cat ran away.
[emphasis on “my”] MY black cat ran away.
[angrily] My black cat ran away.
[sorrowfully] My black cat ran away.
Try to use traditional grammar to explain
how these utterances can have can have such nuances in meaning...
The point I want you to get here is that, in linguistics, “grammar” is much more
than
the idea of grammar we learned in school.
When people get into Twitter debates about grammar,
they usually have to do with spelling, punctuation, and syntax.
How do you spell “there, they’re, and their.”
Should you say “less” or “fewer people?”
Should the punctuation go inside or outside the quotation marks?
These have to do with formal, traditional grammar which,
you could say, does play a role in the language,
but the grammar of a language goes far beyond syntactical rules
and the mechanics of writing.
[JOHN SEARLE] “So, the bottom line is that
the implemented computer program by itself is never going to be sufficient
for human understanding
because human understanding has more than syntax.
It has a semantics.”
[MARC FRANCO] In fact, there are things in the language that
traditional grammar has trouble explaining
or just can’t account for.
It has its purpose... it does its thing.
But, if you want to understand how language works,
well... it has its limits.
We’ll talk more about that in the next video in this series.
Also, as I explained in a previous video, linguists are generally concerned about
describing how speakers use language
rather than how grammarians think speakers should use it.
That’s the distinction between descriptive and prescriptive grammar.
People have strong feelings about that... and, of course, they take it to social media.
I have some thoughts of my own about it.
I’ll share them in the third video in this series.
For now, please like and share this video.
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[NONSENSE] At the watching your video this, thank I you very much for.
Bye!
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