Dean's World

I see that something called "National Grammar Day" is coming up, and (via Instapundit) I found this delightful rant by a linguist on why grammarians are all wet. I agree with every word of it.

Grammarians know nothing of importance about the English language. They are worse than useless, they are actually destructive, ruining perfectly good communications and promoting an artificial language that does not exist, has never existed, and will never exist, and which they themselves don't even speak.

Until the world's English departments get together and learn what the linguists have learned over the last 100 years about the actual English language and its many variations, they'll continue to make students of all ages miserable while contributing very little toward the goal of clear writing and speaking.

Steven Pinker is an professor of psychology in MIT's department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences. In 1994 he wrote the following in the pages of The New Republic:

Language is a human instinct. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the same kinds of grammatical machinery like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement. All normal children develop language without conscious effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they speak in fluent grammatical sentences, outperforming the most sophisticated computers. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant while severely retarded, or unable to speak normally despite high intelligence. All this has led many scientists, beginning with the linguist Noam Chomsky in the late 1950's, to conclude that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized genes, that create the gift of articulate speech.

But when you read about language in the popular press, you get a very different picture. Johnny can't construct a grammatical sentence. As educational standards decline and pop culture disseminates the inarticulate ravings and unintelligible patois of surfers, rock stars, and valley girls, we are turning into a nation of functional illiterates: misusing hopefully, confusing lie and lay, treating bummer as a sentence, letting our participles dangle. English itself will steadily decay unless we get back to basics and start to respect our language again.

What is behind this contradiction? If language is as instinctive to humans as dam-building is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our brains, why, you might wonder, is the English language in such a mess? Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts pen to paper?

It's worth considering that when we send children to school, we start teaching them to read and write. We don't set about teaching them to speak and listen, because they already do that quite well. Written language is not an innate skill, and until quite recently the vast majority of human beings were not literate. But speaking? Illiterate people have been inventing wildly complex languages since the dawn of history (and likely well before). Children often speak quite well before they can control their bowels.

Pinker also writes:

So there is no contradiction, after all, in saying that every normal person can speak grammatically (in the sense of systematically) and ungrammatically (in the sense of nonprescriptively), just as there is no contradiction in saying that a taxi obeys the laws of physics but breaks the laws of Massachusetts. But still, this raises a question. Someone, somewhere, must be making decisions about "correct English" for the rest of us. Who? There is no English Language Academy, and this is just as well; the purpose of the Académie Française is to amuse journalists from other countries with bitterly-argued decisions that the French gaily ignore. Nor was there any English Language Constitutional Conference at the beginning of time. The legislators of "correct English," in fact, are an informal network of copy-editors, dictionary usage panelists, style manual writers, English teachers, essayists, and pundits. Their authority, they claim, comes from their dedication to implementing standards that have served the language well in the past, especially in the prose of its finest writers, and that maximize its clarity, logic, consistency, elegance, precision, stability, and expressive range. William Safire, who writes the weekly column "On Language" for the New York Times Magazine, calls himself a "language maven," from the Yiddish word meaning expert, and this gives us a convenient label for the entire group.

To whom I say: Maven, shmaven! Kibbitzers and nudniks is more like it. For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century. All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

Before commenting further, I suggest you read the whole thing.

Pinker explores this and much else in his delightful book, The Language Instinct. And no, I don't think he's right about everything, but I do think he's right about practically everything in this essay. (And, having read it, and some other books on linguistics, I have to say I found this essay a scream.)

Some linguists speak of the uselessness of not splitting infinitives. They offer as a counter example the famous "to Boldly Go". And they claim that the rule is a mindless mimicry of infinitives in earlier languages, which are expressed with one word.

I am not so sure that the mimicry is either mindless or useless. And I do not pretend to know why the rule developed.

But at any rate, it seems to me that the rule is rational: I think that in most cases it's wise not to separate an infinitive's components. An adverb or adverbial phrase is notionally dependent on its object. Without the object, an adverb has no concrete meaning in so far as the context of the housing grammatical element (the phrase or clause).

So with a split infinitive and the reader arriving at the adverbial element before its object, the mind does not have anything notionally concrete to hold onto. When the reader, then, moves on to the object, the mind uses the non-concrete data contained in it's memory to define the notionally concrete object, thereby arriving at a more complex concrete idea.

In other words: (non-concrete data = '0'; concrete data = '1'; complex concrete idea = '2')

With a split infinitive, at step one (reading the adverb) the mind stores '0', and at step two (reading the object) he arrives, through adding '0' to '1', at '2'.

With a unified infinitive, at step one (reading the object) the mind stores '1', and at step two (reading the adverbial element) arrives, through adding '1' to '0', at '2'.

Therefore, if one holds, as I do, that it is more taxing on the mind to hold onto non-concrete data ('0') than it is for it to hold onto concrete data ('1')--it follows that unifying the elements of the infinitive is a more efficient way to communicate content, since it either does not require the readers mind to hold onto non-concrete data ('0') or requires it for less time.

To illustrate: The reader's mind being what it is, a writer can get away with "To boldly go". But it would seem more problematic for him to write, "To--boldly and swiftly, eyes frontward and never looking back--go.

"To go boldly and swiftly, eyes frontward and never looking back" is more easily understood.

Accordingly, it would seem logical to place adverbial elements after their respective objects generally; I do not know the rule on that.

Also, it would seem (?) to follow that adjectival elements should follow their respective objects as well. We rarely if ever do that it English, but, interestingly, that is the norm in Hebrew.

The following was added after the original posting:

After looking at the post, it occurred to me that according to the forgoing explanation not splitting infinitives is merely an instance of not placing adverbial elements before their respective objects.

In reality, however, splitting an infinitive is worse than placing (at least) one adverb before its object, as the "to" of the infinitive is at least as non-concrete as the adverb itself. And since, when reading a split infinitive, it takes as least one more step to resolve the non-concrete "to", the mind has to hold onto it for that much longer.

Therefore, splitting an infinitive is, according to this explanation, roughly equivalent to placing two adverbs before their object.

However, if "to" is even less concrete and thus harder to hold onto than an adverb, as I think it is, then splitting an infinitive is worse.

After reading the sample phrases mentioned earlier in the post, it also occurred to me that a split infinitive presents a unique difficulty in combining the language components to render their complex referent: (the 'to' element of the infinitive = '0'; the verb element of the infinitive = '1' ; the adverbial element = '2'; the complex idea = '3')

Resolving "To go boldly" requires the mind to add thusly: '0' + '1' + '2' = '3'. At step two the mind is able to perform '0' + '1', and thereby needs only to hold onto the product. At step three, the mind adds thusly: (presolved product of '0' + '1') + 2 to arrive at '3', the complex idea.

Similarly, resolving "boldly going" requires the mind to add thusly: '1' + '2' = '3'

Resolving "to boldly go", however, requires the mind to add '0' + '1' + '2' = '3', but receives the data in the order of '0' + '2' + '1' = '3'. So not only must the mind hold onto '0' + '2' as separate data entities until step three, at step three it must rearrange the data into '0' + '1' + '2' to arrive at '3'.