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The Ideology of Spoken English in English Grammaticography

Paper · 2024 · Andrea Nava

Summary

Nava asks how spoken English and its grammar were treated in pedagogical grammars of English written for Italians by university academics. The comparison sets a book published in the latter half of the 1800s against one written roughly a hundred years afterward. The background is a familiar story. From the 18th century onward, codification and standardization made formal written English the yardstick of correctness, and speech was cast as sloppy or even ungrammatical. The paper first surveys the reference works these Italian authors relied on: Murray (1795), Sweet (1892; 1898), Jespersen (1909–1949) and Palmer (1924). It then examines the text and paratext of Cann's Grammatica teorico-pratica della lingua inglese and Chinol's later grammar. Three questions guide the analysis:

  • whether prescriptive rules allow for informal usage;
  • which spoken-grammar phenomena are covered;
  • what evaluative wording is applied to speech.

The finding is that both authors gave spoken usage progressively more room. Chinol sometimes even recommends simpler colloquial or American patterns. Prescriptive norms still tend to occupy the prominent position, though. The study complicates the assumption that grammaticography simply ignored speech.

Key points

  • The three diagnostics are:
    • prescriptive rules, such as preposition stranding versus pied piping and the pronoun case after be;
    • spoken phenomena, such as ellipsis;
    • evaluative terminology.
  • Murray tolerates stranding in conversation and informal writing, but he rejects It's me by insisting that the same case appears on both sides of be.
  • Sweet takes a descriptive stance. He accepts it is me when educated speakers use it and adds that literary style avoids it. He treats than me in a similarly open way.
  • Drawing on Milroy and Milroy and on Cheshire, the paper argues that standard ideology mixes up two judgements: being less acceptable in formal settings and being ungrammatical.
  • Chinol sometimes criticises bookish English. Even so, spoken variants often end up in footnotes or other less visible positions, beneath the prescriptive rule.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Keep "unacceptable in this register" apart from "ungrammatical", so that informal forms are labelled by context instead of being rejected.
  • I2. Sweet's approach is to record every attested variant and simply note where it is avoided, rather than choosing a single correct form.
  • I3. Where a grammar places a variant (main text versus footnote) shows its hidden bias as clearly as what the rule says.
  • I4. A grammar's evaluative vocabulary ("bookish", "simpler", "familiar") reveals the author's stance toward a variety.
  • I5. Prescriptive answers and descriptive usage can conflict, and a good reader needs to know both.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Stranded prepositions, it's me and elliptical replies should get normal UD analyses plus a register feature, not be routed into error repair.
  • I2 (back): The generator could keep variant pairs (than I / than me) tagged by register and pick between them according to the target style.
  • I3 (learn): Audit silver data and treebanks for how often spoken constructions appear at all, and add spoken-style sentences as controls to expose a written-only bias.
  • I4 (frames): Treat metalinguistic judgements and prescriptive advice in text as their own speech-act type, with the evaluated variety as a role.
  • I5 (answer): On school grammar tests, the reader should give the textbook norm when asked while still recognising the colloquial form as real English.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Andrea Nava. 2024. The Ideology of Spoken English in English Grammaticography. Iperstoria.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.13136/2281-4582/2024.i23.1439

@inproceedings{nava2024ideology,
  title = {{The Ideology of Spoken English in English Grammaticography}},
  author = {Andrea Nava},
  booktitle = {Iperstoria},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.13136/2281-4582/2024.i23.1439},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2024.i23.1439}
}

References

25 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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  16. Leech, Geoffrey. “Grammars of Spoken English: New Outcomes of Corpus-oriented Research.” Language Learning 50.4 (2000): 675-724. ↗
  17. McCarthy, Michael J. Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. find
  18. Milroy, James. “The Consequences of Standardization in Descriptive Linguistics.” Standard English: The Widening Debate. Edited by Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts. London: Routledge, 1999. 16-39. find
  19. Milroy, James and Leslie Milroy. Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. Third edition. London: Routledge, 1999. ↗
  20. Murray, Lindley. English Grammar: Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners. York: Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1795. Nava, Andrea. “English Grammaticography for University Students in Italy (1999-2011): Pedagogical Grammars or Pedagogical Presentations of Linguistic Theories?” SILTA— Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica e Applicata 67.2 (2018): 249-268. — . “Innovation, Prescription and Pedagogy: Which English is Presented in English Language Teaching Materials Published in Italy in the Late Nineteenth/Early Twentieth Centuries?” Lingue seconde e istituzioni: Un approccio storiografico. Edited by Alessandra Vicentini and Hugo Lombardini. Bologna: CLUEB, 2019. 123-143. find
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