English Grammar FAQ
As posted to
alt,usage.english and to the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange.
These are some of the postings I have made, mostly to the newsgroup
alt.usage.english. As a linguistics professor, with a special
interest in English and a background including some time as a teacher of
English to speakers of other languages, I frequently have to explain how
things work to people who don't really know much about English grammar.
I don't find it particularly disturbing that people
ask questions about English grammar; after all, this is why people ask
questions, and this is what I do (in part) for a living.
I do find it somewhat disturbing to see how many
English speakers are clueless about the realities of English,
and how many different varieties of confusion they display,
and how often one encounters them.
The questions I encounter and attempt to answer in this group are thus far
more valuable to me than the answers, because any linguist generally
knows the answers to these, and has generally gotten tired of answering
them. What I value more is questions, which allow me to
frame my understanding in a context that makes it more valuable to
others. Thus this collection, to keep me from repeating myself so often.
Each post represents
some question (or at least is sparked by a posting by somebody else),
which is usually quoted at the beginning in the typical Usenet style
(using ">" as a context-citation marker and stacking these as needed for
meta-context). I have edited them lightly and deleted some material in
the course of tightening them up, and I've deleted a lot of the original
context, including names of most of the original posters, so they aren't
the same as they were when sent. The longer ones often contain several
posts on the same subject, with discussion of issues raised; these are
called "extended discussions" below.
Series 1 and 2 files now have a concordance,
thanks to the efforts of Markus Laker and Bob Cunningham, of the alt.usage.english Website.
Click on the concordance link to search for any word or phrase in use
here, or in the other sites the a.u.e site points at. One-stop usage
shopping.
Series 3
started in 2011 and is still continuing on the English Language and Usage Stack Exchange is fully formatted, with Unicode and links.
- As of 3/26/14, it consisted of 852 answers to user questions, with far more information than these files. It's all searchable on this page.
Series 2 (which dates from 1996 for
the most part) is lightly HTML-ized, and
Series 1 (1995) is almost strictly
ASCII. In order of size (longest first), the posts in Series 1 are:
- a list of interesting books
about English and language
- an extended discussion of English tenses
- an extended discussion of the phenomenon of Negative Polarity Items
- an extended discussion of English Quantifier/Negative ambiguities
- an extended discussion of the use of commas in English orthography
- a very detailed discussion of English modal auxiliaries
- an extended discussion of mass and
count nouns
- an explanation of how the English phrase the hell is used
- the use of non-standard English
constructions,
exemplified by amn't and the past
participle of wake
- the origins, spelling, and pronunciation of the word alumin(i)um
- the proper use of hyphens in
English orthography
- the interpretations of participles in headlines
- the sense of the English slang term zilch, with usage notes
- on grammatical "correctness"
- the placement and interpretation of only in English sentences
- English phrasal verbs, with
bibliography
- a discussion of the proper use of whom
- differences between beside and
besides
- "eye dialect" phrases like gonna
and wanna
- the proper pronunciation of vehicle
- about the American linguist Henry Lee
Smith
- a reference to an article on the English as far as ... construction
- a clarification on two types of English that-clauses
- a discussion of equative
constructions
- a modest proposal for a new word
in English
- an apicobuccal description of a ceremony of The Academy
Series 2 follows up on some topics and adds some
different ones. I've linked these behind the scenes to one another
and to the Series 1 posts, to some extent, but be aware that not every
concept is necessarily linked. Ars longa, vita brevis, after
all.
Mostly in order of size, the posts in Series 2 are:
- an extended discussion about
the it in It's raining
- my contribution to the Culture Wars on the use of they for generic or gender-neutral reference
- a discussion on the history of
English, with an excursus on Literacy
as Technology
- The Cliff's (as my students say) on English Object Complements
- a discussion of the common grammatical rule known asExtraposition
- a discussion of some of the peculiarities of Indian English
- a discussion of the varieties of English
L-sounds, with phonetic
instructions
- more on phrasal verbs
- a discussion of the use of that
and which in relative clauses
- the can't help thinking construction
- the difference between bring and
take
- a discussion of English spelling reform
- an attempt to make some mathematical sense out of the perennial
question of
whether there are an infinite number
of English sentences
- a discussion of the English vowel shwa, and other central vowels
- some remarks on doubly-apostrophic contractions like
couldn't've, wouldn't've, and hadn't've
- the meaning and usage of the American English distinction
between got vs gotten
- English vowel phonemes, with phonetic
charts of those that occur in general
and after /r/
- on the relative importance of writing and
language
- when you should use "a" and when you should use "an"
- more on the appropriate use of commas
- the pronunciation, the usage and occasionally the spelling of modal paraphrases like hafta
- a discussion of the colloquial expression "Quote, unquote"
- whether buoy rhymes with boy,
or aural with oral
- does verbing weird language?
- a lengthy and somewhat technical description of the syntactic
concept island
- an experiment you can perform in the privacy of your own mouth
to see How Canadians really pronounce
house
- more on a particular class of Negative Polarity Items, including
the Give a Damn construction
- the use and spelling of
any( )more
- an example of what passes for humor among linguists, dealing with
Negative Polarity Items triggered in strange ways
- a discussion of the difference between
"gerund" and "participle", and of the five different
varieties of -ing in English grammar
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