📄 Making sense: The glamorous history of English grammar (a review)

Summary

This item is a book review, not an empirical study. Barry Tomalin assesses David Crystal's Making Sense (Profile Books, 2017), a popular history and explanation of English grammar. It involves no dataset, model or evaluation. The book's central claim is that grammar carries meaning: the structure of a sentence, more than the dictionary alone, decides which sense of a polysemous word applies. Crystal shows this with the verb "charge".

Twenty-eight short chapters interleave three threads:

• Child acquisition. Children move from single words to combinations, then word order, then tense. Harder constructions and literacy still lie ahead at school age.
• KEYWORD boxes. Each gives a term's definition, history and role in teaching.
• "Interludes". These are short sketches of grammarians and of changing attitudes, from the Greeks to Chomsky. They trace the twentieth-century move from Latin-based prescriptive rules to descriptive study.

The book ends with a ten-point manifesto. It treats change and variation as normal, gives roles to both standard and non-standard grammar, and insists that grammar be studied together with semantics and pragmatics. For an NLP system that goes from syntax to meaning, the book offers useful linguistic grounding and memorable test cases.

Key points

• Structure: the book has 28 short chapters plus a 29th containing an epilogue, a teaching and testing appendix, and further reading. It belongs to a series with The Story of English in 100 Words, Spell It Out and Making a Point.
• The "charge" example: the sentence frame selects one of three senses. Ticket prices give the money sense, a cavalry advance the military sense, and a phone battery the energy sense.
• Historical figures:
  • John Wallis (1616–1703), the first English grammarian, wrote Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae in Latin. He nonetheless argued that English syntax, for example its lack of cases, differs from Greek and Latin.
  • Otto Jespersen is credited with pioneering the descriptive approach.
  • John Dryden is blamed for the ban on ending sentences with a preposition, which Churchill famously mocked.
• Usage change: stative verbs now appear in the progressive, as in McDonald's "I'm loving it". The review notes that by the 1970s schools taught formal grammar less and less.
• The manifesto's ten principles include:
  • Change and variation are normal.
  • Society needs a standard grammar for wide communication and non-standard grammars for identity.
  • Schools should teach both.
  • "Regional standards" should be recognised for global English.
  • Grammar should never be studied apart from meaning.

Interesting ideas

• I1. The sense of a polysemous verb can be read off its argument frame (who the subject is, what follows the verb) instead of from surrounding vocabulary. This makes word-sense choice a syntactic decision that can be explained.
• I2. A stranded preposition ("the man I was talking to") and its pied-piped variant ("to whom I was talking") express the same relation in different surface orders, and neither should be treated as an error.
• I3. Usage change such as stative verbs in the progressive shows that aspect marking can shift without becoming ungrammatical, so a stative verb in "-ing" form need not mean an ongoing event.
• I4. The dangling-participle joke, a memorial reading as if the directors drowned George Baker, shows how a syntactically valid attachment can yield an absurd world.
• I5. Crystal's acquisition order (single words, then combinations, word order and tense, with passives and conditionals later) is a natural difficulty ladder.

For Mova

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

• I1 (frames): Choose the VerbNet class for verbs like "charge" from the semantic type of the subject and object in the UD tree, and record which argument triggered the choice.
• I2 (tree): Normalise both orders to one relative-clause analysis in the UD tree, so frames do not depend on the speaker's register.
• I3 (world): When building world states, treat progressive stative verbs ("I'm loving it") as states with an immediacy flavour, not as dynamic events.
• I4 (world): Check each competing attachment against the world model, flagging and down-weighting readings that produce implausible agent–event links.
• I5 (learn): Order training and self-play curricula along this ladder, and report evaluation separately per stage so weaknesses on late constructions stay visible.