E304A

Exploring Grammar

English Grammar in
Context
 Chapter 1
Why study Grammar?

• Is grammar important?
• Grammar in general remains a popular topic of interest,
and is often considered worthy of close attention,
whether by scholars or the public at large, in relation to
everyday communication. The author of the book
suggested that there are two main reasons why grammar
is considered important:
1. It is associated with the maintenance of good standards
of language use.
2. Using grammar effectively enables us to get our desired
meanings across in deferent contexts.
• Take a look at the following grammar-related
headlines:
• All three headlines are taken from online
articles which stress the importance of
grammar for the financial success of individuals
and businesses.
• Headline A
• Cost of a Misplaced Comma: $2.13 Million
• Headline A focuses on an aspect of grammar
which is often a subject of debate: punctuation.
• It reports on a now well-known case in Canada, in
which a misplaced comma in a legal agreement
resulted in a major contractual misunderstanding,
entailing large financial losses for one of the parties.
• Headline B
• Report: How Grammar Influences Your Income
• Headline B appears on the website of the influential
financial media, it reports on a small study
conducted by a commercial grammar checker
software company. This study claims to show that
individuals with `good‘ grammar has more
successful careers.
• Headline C
• Bad Grammar Will Lose Your Online Business
Money
• Headline C reports on the words of a British e-
commerce leader, Charles Duncombe, who
conducted an investigation of traffic on one of his
company's website. Duncombe claimed to find
that poor grammar (along with spelling and
other `problems') was responsible for putting off
online customers, reducing the trustworthiness
of websites, and so discouraging visitors to a site
from parting with their cash.
• So as you see, all of these articles argue for
the importance of grammar by claiming a
direct connection between good grammar and
economic prosperity.
• For more details read and study the Activity:
pp. 7-9
• Now let's illustrate the distinction between
grammar as crucial to meaning on the one
hand, and grammar as an indicator of the
writer's level of education and personal
qualities on the other.
• For example:
• Let's eat grandpa.
• Let's eat, grandpa.
• The comma signals that grandpa is the addressee of the
imperative. Without it, grandpa becomes the direct
object of the verb group eat.
• However, not all changes affect meaning. For example, if
we left out the apostrophe in Let's, which indicates that
the u in us has been omitted. In this case, incorrect
grammar would only be a superficial problem: it might
make us question the attention to detail of the text
producer, or cause loss of marks to the writer in an
exam, for instance, but would have no significant impact
on the substance of the message.
 Grammar and real-world problems
• Here, we will look at how an understanding of grammar
can be applied to everyday professional contexts:
• In 2013, Lord Judge, retired Lord Chief Justice of England
and Wales, called for a major repair of the way in which
children were cross-examined in court. He does not
mention grammar explicitly in his concern, but what he
describes is essentially a problem involving grammar at
the level of meaning.
• About 40,000 children a year are called to give evidence
in England and Wales in criminal proceedings. His
concern is related to the language that is used in the
court when child witnesses are cross-examined.
• Example:
• You can ask a child `Did you hit him rst?' and a child
will understand that. If you say to the child `You hit
him first, didn't you?', you, in a position of authority,
are making an assertion . . . and it's not a question at
all. You can therefore ask a child `Did you hit him
first?', you can ask a child `Didn't you hit him first?',
both easily intelligible and the child will answer in
whatever way the child thinks right. But `You hit him
first, didn't you?' involves the barrister (legal
representative) giving evidence, which the barrister
with which a child might be inclined to agree, simply
because it's the voice of authority.
• The problem described above involves
grammar at the level of meaning. At a very
superficial level, if we compare the two
sentences “Did you hit him first?” and “You hit
him first, didn't you?” we can see immediately
that they differ in terms of grammar. The first
is a question or interrogative clause. In the
second sentence, the main clause of the
sentence is an assertion, or declarative clause,
followed by the question tag didn't you?
 Both utterances call for slight different sorts of responses.
The first calls simply for an answer to the question, without
proposing what that answer should be. The second makes a
proposition and invites the interlocutor to challenge the
proposition. Thus the second version- the style of questioning
criticised by Lord Judge- potentially `leads'. In the context of
the courtroom, which Lord Judge describes as a `completely
alien environment' for children, the assertive tone of the
second version reflects a context in which the experienced
adult barrister is in a very powerful position in relation to a
young child in the witness box for the first time. By choosing
this wording in cross-examination, a barrister enacts their
authority over the child and consequently there is a risk, that
the child will falsely agree to a proposition because they feel
unable to challenge the `voice of authority'.