Skip to main content

current edition:International edition

The Guardian - Back to home
Support The
GuardianSubscribeFind a job
Sign in
Search

 News
 Opinion
 Sport
 Culture
 Lifestyle

ShowMore

 Books
 Music
 TV & radio
 Art & design
 Film
 Games
 Classical
 Stage

Reference and languages

The lavender of the subjunctive
Eric Griffiths on the pleasures wrought by grammar from Ben Jonson to the
Pet Shop Boys, as revealed in The Cambridge Grammar of the English
Language by Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K Pullum

Sat 13 Jul 2002 00.55 BSTFirst published on Sat 13 Jul 2002 00.55 BST




 View more sharing options

Shares
0

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

by Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K Pullum
1,860pp, Cambridge, £100
Carved on the west front of the cathedral at Chartres, Grammar, a stern
dame, looms over two small pupils. She holds an open book in her left
hand, beneath which sits a "good boy", notably round-shouldered, already
vested in what is probably a monk's habit, his fingers tracing the page he's
intently squinting at. In her right hand, she brandishes a bundle of twigs
above the bare torso of a "bad boy"; he's holding his book with its cover
toward him, his eyes are turned up into her disapproving stare and, though
he looks as if he's about to get a hiding, he has a big grin on his face.

The scene has been restaged many times since it was sculpted 850 years or
so ago, and was in all likelihood traditional even then. In one version, the
two boys have names - respectively, Eric Griffiths and Sir Paul McCartney -
for I share with the former Beatle not only lyric gift and fabulous wealth but
also an English master, AJ "Cissy" Smith.

Paul had just released "Yesterday" when Mr Smith began to teach my class
clause-analysis and how to avoid dangling participles. We gazed at him,
agog and aghast, because it was a legend in the school (rescued years later
from dereliction by Sir Paul and now the Liverpool Institute for Performing
Arts) that he had washed Paul's mouth out with soap and water for
persistent solecisms or excess fruitiness of vocabulary. Cissy has long gone
to his reward, I struggle on with my round shoulders and inculcated dislike
of the "split infinitive", and Sir Paul still has the big grin.

Neither Dame Grammar's fasces nor Mr Smith's mouthwash would be

approved by The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. This
massive work (it weighs 2.5kg) is a "synchronic, descriptive grammar of
general-purpose, present-day, international Standard English", which is to
say that it offers a satellite Polaroid of the current language and avoids on
principle any suggestions about how to air-brush up your style. Fretful sub-
editors who want to know the better way with "which" and "that" must
apply elsewhere.

For descriptive grammarians, "grammaticality" is distinct from

"correctness" because, from the standpoint of quasi-anthropological
neutrality proper to their task, in language whatever is accepted is
acceptable. Advice about style amounts to no more than "aesthetic
authoritarianism" or "taste tyranny", "a universalizing of one person's taste,
a demand that everyone should agree with it and conform to it". We hang
on the words of style gurus about everything from trainers to varieties of
olive oil, but on the subject of our language there is nothing to say, only
market research to report.

So the Cambridge Grammar's editors note that sentences like "They invited
my partner and I to lunch" are "regularly used by a significant proportion of
speakers of Standard English... they pass unnoticed in broadcast speech all
the time". They explain convincingly why "my partner and me" would be no
more grammatical; there is no better reason to require English pronouns
always to comply with Latin inflection for the accusative case than there is
regularly to hear English verse according to Graeco-Roman templates such
as the "iambic pentameter" which have been misleading our ears since the
19th century.

But they fail to specify when a "proportion" becomes "significant" - does it

take a bare majority or will a stroppy minority equally suffice ? - and show a
touching but unexamined reverence for broadcasting as a source of English
undefiled. Descriptive grammar can find nothing wrong with the inert
officialese of, say, Radio 4, in which forthcoming speeches by government
ministers are predictably "major" before they are uttered, and all majorities
"vast", and from which decent words like "many" are disappearing, their
place taken by "an awful lot of". "Standard English" recognises no
standards of English and, indeed, cannot be distinguished from
standardised English.

We should not expect too much from linguists; they are witnesses not
judges. Yet even the members of this excellent Cambridge team sometimes
fail to confine themselves within the narrow bounds of testimony. They
rightly decline to prescribe usage, but they exceed their remit when they
proscribe prescription, for it is a fact of language use that writers and
speakers concern themselves with more than information throughput and
grammaticality as strictly understood.

When we disagree about such phrases as "my partner and I", this may be a
matter of taste, but from that it does not follow, as the editors assume, that
"all evidence" is simply "beside the point". If that were so, then nobody
could be "someone eminently worthy of being followed in matters of taste
and literary style", as they say on the same page, nor would there be any
reason for appealing, as they sometimes do, to "the writings of highly
prestigious authors" or "the usage of the best writers" (they carefully refrain
from naming these paragons).

They say of the sentence "In this day and age one must circle round and
explore every avenue" that it "may be loaded with careworn verbiage, or it
may even be arrant nonsense, but there is absolutely nothing grammatically
wrong with it". The sentence seems innocent enough in contrast to their
own comment, which groans with inexactitude and redundancy: the
example is not nonsense of any kind, being easily intelligible; the
grammarians' "arrant" and "absolutely" are semantically empty,
thoughtlessly transferring habits of spoken emphasis into the written
language. And what is "careworn verbiage"? Perhaps the adjective is here a
new portmanteau word made up from "outworn" and "careless".

Nor are they to be wholly trusted when they tell us "The most frequent use
of media is in the phrase the media, applied to the means of mass
communication, the press, radio, and television, where both singular
agreement and plural agreement are well established" (we indiscriminately
say "the media is..." or "the media are..."). All descriptive grammarians can
determine is whether something is "established" or not; their "well" is
illicit. After all, there are many things which are certainly "established" but
only arguably "well established" - the Church of England, for example.

Take the case of "only". The Cambridge Grammar observes wearily: "There
is a long-standing prescriptive tradition of... saying that in writing only
should be placed immediately before its focus... This is another of those
well-known prescriptive rules that are massively at variance with actual
usage." Yet those of us who are not only grammarians have just cause for
complaint about official letters which run along the familiar lines of "We
can only say how sorry we are that your train was late" - that may be all
they can say, but we want them to do something too, improve the service or
compensate us.

Because linguists busy themselves with "actual usage" ("synchronic" study

of the language, in their terms), they are professionally bound to scant
other, earlier usages; the "long-standing" must always give way to the
"actual". This is merely the mirror-tyranny of a previous rÀgime in which
the past lorded it over the present.

For the purposes of linguistics, sharp focus on current English is entirely

legitimate, but there are things we may, and perhaps should, want to know
about our language other than those synchronic description can reveal.
Such as what Ben Jonson meant when he wrote:

Drinke to me, onely, with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kisse but in the cup,
And Ile not looke for wine.

He was not asking Celia to restrict her drinking of healths to his alone but
either calling her his "onely" or, more likely, saying that her eyes were the
one intoxicant he needed, just as "leave a kisse but in the cup" means that a
blown kiss, the mere aftermath of her lips, is all he wants on his.

The traditional usage is actual in his lines every time somebody reads them
with understanding; it was still going strong when Dick Powell, in a Busby
Berkeley musical, sang the magnificent compliment "I only have eyes for
you". Put the "only" elsewhere and the schmooze evaporates: "Only I have
eyes for you" (nobody else would look at you twice); "I have only eyes for
you" (I like looking but don't want to touch); "I have eyes for you only" (the
others leave me cold) - none of them matches the hyperbole of "I only have
eyes for you", which can imply he was given vision just to look at her.

"Actual" usage is anyway not the thin, consistent layer a systematic

grammar unearths, but resembles rather Freud's metaphor for the mind as
a Rome seen by an eye that pierces through time: "an entity, that is to say,
in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away
and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the
latest ones". The usage of those who abide by exploded, traditional rules is
usage still; maiden aunts who would rather expose themselves at evensong
than ask for "a large quantity of stamps" should be equal in the eyes of
historical description with those who don't even remember that "agenda"
was once a plural and feel they need an s for the agendas they progress
through.

Freud imagined that "where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same
time admire Nero's vanished Golden House. [...] The observer would
perhaps only have to change the direction of his glance or his position in
order to call up one view or the other." Such time-travelling can happen in
language too, and goes by the name of "literature". The last line of Geoffrey
Hill's poem, "Pisgah", reads: "Formalities preserve us: / perhaps I too am a
shade."

Cissy Smith might have asked 2A whether "preserve" is an indicative or a

subjunctive. That is, does the poet report that formalities have this effect or
does he wish for them to do so (compare "Saints preserve us!")? The
Cambridge Grammar rightly doubts that "present-day English" can be
grammatically analysed in this way, because "historical change has more or
less eliminated mood from the inflectional system", and it sensibly re-
describes "subjunctive" as "the name of a syntactic construction - a clause
that is finite but tenseless, containing the plain form of the verb".

Hill's line, though, is a revolving door between Englishes past and present,
and intimates a history of moods, verbal and otherwise. The faint but
persistent lavender of the subjunctive about his "preserve" gives him reason
for a moment to regard himself as superseded or at least on his way into the
shade, as if, talking to an elderly relative, he began to feel his own self aged
too.

Similarly with gerunds, those elusive beasts from earlier grammars so

magnificently drawn by Ronald Searle in his cartoons of "The Private Life of
the Gerund" (in How to Be Topp). A gerund is sometimes hard to
distinguish from a present participle, but in "he's smoking behind the bike-
sheds", "smoking" is a participle, whereas in "smoking diminishes your
chances of getting Alzheimer's", "smoking" is a gerund.

The descriptive grammarian in quest of systematic clarity will correctly

observe that "historically the gerund and present participle of traditional
grammar have different sources, but in Modern English the forms are
identical. [...] The historical difference is of no relevance to the analysis of
the current inflectional system."

But when we read the exquisite loop of Hill's line "I imagine singing I
imagine" (from "That Man as a Rational Animal...", in Canaan), we need to
recognise that "singing" is both gerund and participle, so that the line
paraphrases out as "I imagine the sound of voices in song and I am myself
singing while I imagine", as if it had six and not five words, for "singing"
has been subjected to a grammatical "double exposure"; the poem at this
point takes a time-lapse photograph of English usage, brings historical
difference home to us now.

As a punishment for my sins in a previous life, I recently had to mark 64

examination scripts in which third-year undergraduates reading English at
Cambridge offered their comments on the opening of Dickens's Bleak
House:

"London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the
streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth...
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle with
flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning,
one might imagine, for the death of the sun."

The candidates were excited, even over-excited, by the "imagery", as they

had been taught in school that "imagery" is what counts in literature. Very
few observed the prime syntactical fact about the novel's first page: it has
no finite verbs in what traditional grammar used to call the "main clause",
and so the reader cannot tell whether what is being described is a past or a
present state of affairs.

You can see the ambiguity from the possibility of rewriting with either "is"
or "was" between "Michaelmas Term" and "lately", and again between
"Lord Chancellor" and "sitting", and so on. The Cambridge Grammar would
call this "desententialisation", and alert us to the lack of clear bearings on
"time referred to" (the time Dickens is writing about) and "time of
orientation" (the time Dickens is writing in or from).
Bleak House havers creatively over the boundaries between past and
present in order to ask whether the story it's telling is about the bad old
days or the way we live now, to question confidence about history's
direction, to gauge the gap, if gap there be, between the primordial "mud"
and the "Mlud" with which the Lord Chancellor is eventually addressed on
the novel's third page.

It was wrong of prescriptive grammar to stigmatise clipped sequences like

Dickens's as "not proper sentences", but such finger-wagging at least
alerted its victims to real features of writing which escape the notice of
those who have more recently been taught English.

Or consider some characteristic lines from one of the language's most

grammatically resourceful writers, Emily Dickinson:

The Luxury to apprehend

The Luxury 'twould be
To look at Thee a single time
An Epicure of Me
In whatsoever Presence makes
Till for a further Food
I scarcely recollect to starve
So first am I supplied -

This would be described as "confused" by today's undergraduates, who take

it for granted that "accessibility" is the first requirement of all writing and
impute confusion to any writer who stretches them.

It is not confused, it is superbly elliptical, even aeronautic. Dickinson's

vaults and swivels resolve themselves into plain sense, as a paraphrase
shows: "the sweetness of guessing how sweet it might be to see you, just
once, looking at me and fancying me, whoever else was around, is so great
that I almost forget to long any more for a greater satisfaction - that
sweetness is the first thing that keeps me going".

Readers need respect for, a capacity to delight in, usages other than their
own; such respect and delight are not encouraged by the tendency of
grammarians to treat "usage" as if it were a noun which occurred only in
the singular, nor by their habit of dismissing how the language used to be
with their equivalent of the characters' constant refrain in EastEnders:
"that's history, Kath, you got to put it behind you and move on". To those
who have interests in language other than those of the linguist, "synchronic
study" can at times seem like a polite name for parochialism.

It can be a sign of respect to raise an objection rather than roll over

permissively while re-describing usual practice in such a way as to make a
new locution fine by readjusted norms. One of the Pet Shop Boys' perkier
songs has a chorus which goes:

One in a million men

change the way you feel
one in a million men
baby, it's up to me

At first hearing, a traditionalist might want to change "change" to "changes"

- "one in a million men changes the way you feel" - though even Neil
Tennant might have difficulty getting his mouth round that extra syllable
while following the broad, expansive lines of the tune. The Cambridge
Grammar spends 20 extremely well-observed pages on "number and
countability" in current English, and would dismiss the claim that "one"
should take a verb in the singular; "one" with a plural verb is not looseness
but "usage".

The pedantic carper is, however, right and on the verge of a discovery; there
is something odd about that chorus, and its oddness is apt to the situation
in which two, previously promiscuous homosexuals shakily embark
together on a possibly monogamous future. Of course they are uncertain
about number, and whether number of partners matters.

The syntax is not what it seems; "one in a million men" is not the subject of
a sentence which continues "change the way you feel". "One in a million
men" is a vocative, an address to the new, perhaps permanent lover;
"change the way you feel" is an imperative, addressed by the singer to the
two of them (as is clear if you listen to the middle eight). The apparent
grammatical stumble expresses splendidly a trepidation such as any one at
such a moment might experience, but you have to wonder if the words
aren't wrong to find how right they are. Language too is an affair which,
from one point of view, is always just in the flush and tremor of beginning
while, from an other, quite as sharp-eyed a point of view, it continues to run
down foreseeable grooves formed by accumulated habit. To delineate the
experience of living with and through a language (a task beneath or beyond
the ambitions of systematic grammar), we need fresh-minted terms and
brilliant redescriptions such as the Cambridge Grammar supplies in its
strong arguments for the claim that "English has no future tense", soon to
be reported in the Daily Mail, no doubt, as "dons say english has no future".

These 1,842 pages are not short of terms which will be new to the non-
specialist, and they bristle with a more-than-grammatical deliciousness :
"nested dependencies"; "desiderative bias"; "sloppy identity";
"ambiclippings"; "mounting process"; "ultimate head".
Yet a language like English is simultaneously virgin and long clapped-out,
so old words for it are still good too. When Beckett gave his only broadcast
talk, about his experiences of the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Normandy
where he served as interpreter and store-keeper from August 1945 to
January 1946, he ended by entertaining

"...the possibility that some of those who were in Saint-Lô will come home
realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed
what they could hardly give, a vision and a sense of a time-honoured
conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms
in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in
France."

The words "a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins" are

ambiguous because of uncertain juncture. He might have meant that the
time-honoured conception of "humanity" was in ruins, or that there
remained an abiding conception of "humanity in ruins", kindness amid
dereliction, or even that his experiences in France refreshed for him the old
notion of "the Fall of Man", a long-standing ruinousness of the human.

The grammatical uncertainty of juncture was apt to his forlornness and to

his hopes as he wondered what would come next, how the future might or
might not be joined to the past. His last sentence expresses a determination
to learn from that uncertainty, a determination which governed his writing
till he died. The tense of that writing, like the tense of that last sentence
("will have been"), is best described with an old term: it is the "future
perfect".

· Eric Griffiths teaches English literature at the University of Cambridge

Since you’re here …

… we have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian
than ever but advertising revenues across the media are falling fast. And
unlike many news organisations, we haven’t put up a paywall – we want to
keep our journalism as open as we can. So you can see why we need to ask
for your help. The Guardian’s independent, investigative journalism takes a
lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we
believe our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective,
too.

I appreciate there not being a paywall: it is more democratic for the media
to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m
happy to make a contribution so others with less means still have access to
information.Thomasine, Sweden
 If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps fund it, our future
would be much more secure. For as little as £1, you can support the
Guardian – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.

Support The Guardian

Topics
 Reference and languages

 Higher educ ation

 English and creati ve writi ng

 Ben J onson

 reviews




 Share on LinkedIn
 Share on Pinterest
 Share on Google+

 Reuse this content

most viewed

Tessa Jowell hailed as an inspiration during MPs' cancer debate

'She wore it well': Jacinda Ardern takes Māori cloak to Buckingham Palace


Swaziland king renames country Kingdom of eSwatini

Mystery of sea nomads' amazing ability to freedive is solved

Javier Bardem defends Woody Allen: 'I am very shocked by this treatment'

Most viewed
 Books
 Music
 TV & radio
 Art & design
 Film
 Games
 Classical
 Stage

back to top

 become a supporter
 make a contribution
 securedrop
 help

 advertise with us
  work for us
 contact us
 complaints & corrections

 terms & conditions

 privacy policy
 cookie policy
 digital newspaper archive

 all topics
 all contributors
 facebook
 twitter

© 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

All rights reserved.