Today, March 4th (march forth!) is National Grammar Day in the United States. There are plenty of postings and sites dedicated to that for your googling pleasure, so I won’t burden you with more of the same, especially because this site doesn’t have much to do with the United States.

Last year I coincidentally spent National Grammar Day with Geoff Pullum, one of the world’s top grammarians.  We even talked a lot about grammar, but neither one of us knew that it was that day until the following day when I saw Arnold Zwicky’s post about it.

We don’t seem to have anything like a “national grammar day” in China, unfortunately, so I can’t write about that either. But grammar for me has become a wondrous thing.

And Chinese has grammar, despite what everyone says.

“Chinese has no grammar”, he said, informatively.

“What?!” I exploded, “That’s absolutely ridiculous!  Every language has grammar, otherwise you wouldn’t know what order to put the words in!  Or what particles or suffixes to use!  You wouldn’t be able to communicate!  If I said “eat my your cat dog” what would you understand that to mean???”

He shrank four centimeters and stepped back.  Then stepped back again.  “W- what I-I-I mean was…um…um…gra…Chinese didn’t think about grammar in…in…in that kind of um way um until…until westerners introduced analyzing English grammar.”

That is what I remember of a real conversation (albeit in Chinese) I had with a parent of a student of mine.  What do people think grammar is, anyway?

We all know the answer to that question:  it’s memorizing rules that you can’t quite grasp, and using these rules to analyze sentences in unnatural ways.  It’s an endless list of rules that, when followed, forces your writing to be stilted and constrained.

I’m glad to say that for me it’s not like that.  The very word “grammar” fills me with excitement.  Why is it different for me?  It all started with a magical book by David Crystal, called The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language.  I still have it, within arm’s reach, it’s spine now reinforced with duct tape.  In college it was my favorite weapon of procrastination.  It helped me to discover that the longer you put off starting an assignment before the deadline, the less time you will waste on it.  Efficiency.

It introduced me to “real” grammar slowly, by mentioning it here and there among the myriad of fascinating articles on every aspect of language.  I found myself turning to the glossary so often that I pasted a marker to stick out on the page where it starts.  Then I began highlighting all the definitions in the glossary that were marked “(gram)” and discovering that not only did I now start understanding (through cross-referenced terms in the definitions!) all those words that my grammar teachers threw around, but there were fascinating new words, like “constituent”, “embedding”, “function”, and “infix”.

Suddenly grammar became an interest-driven exploration.  I learned that grammar, from a linguist’s point of view, is descriptive.  A grammarian is a person who watches language and tries to find the principles that guide it.

I still didn’t have a clear idea of how English grammar works, however.  Studying Latin in college and German and Japanese in grad school helped a bit.  Since it’s hard to understand the grammar of one’s native language, an outsider’s perspective makes it easier.

I ended up marrying a Chinese girl, and later moved to China, which caused me to learn Chinese more seriously.  Here in China, I discovered that the field of English language education is a huge mess, so I opened an English school and set to work designing a curriculum for elementary students to learn English.  (Adults are too lazy, and middle and high school students don’t have any time because they spend too much time at school and doing homework.)  This required a deep understanding of how English works.  I had a teacher once who told me that the best way to learn something is to teach it.  Sound advice, as it puts you under pressure, and you have a responsibility to your students.

So here was my still-not-so-clear picture of English grammar.  And that’s when I realized the key:  I had a picture of grammar.  It was unclear, and inaccurate in many ways, but I was trying to conceptualize it as a whole.  Once I realized that, all I had to do was to fix the misconceptions, and patch the holes, and clarify.  Grammar in a nutshell?  How about a seed?

A seed is something that produces a stem, which then branches, and grows into a complex structure.  I realized sentences are a lot like that too.  We use tree diagrams to show this.  The important kernel of understanding here is that everything grows out of the stem.  OK, in fact, in a sentence, things are not growing, and the branches are not actually attached to the stem, but the analogy is so strong and works so well that it would be unthinkable not to use it.

The structures have a functional relationship to each other, and there is a kind of hierarchy, like in a tree.  The “branches” all split off at specific points.  One can take a branch of any size (forking out), and that branch will have a functional relationship to the other part(s) of the fork.  And most importantly, each of the branches (on any level) can be collapsed into a single word (usually).

For a taste of what I mean, look at this sentence:

I would say that (the president and the president-elect both) have set a tone of cooperation.

The material in parentheses can be replaced by a pronoun, “they”:

I would say that they have set (a tone of cooperation)

“A tone of cooperation” is a noun phrase, so that can be replaced by a pronoun:

I would say (that they have set it).

And again:

I (would say it).

The verb phrase can be collapsed as well:

I would.

What we have left are two words, each representing the first branches of a sentence: subject, and predicate.  You can take a sentence like “I would”, and expand its parts to no limit, and you can take a long complex sentence and boil it down into its most basic components.  In the example above, I cut big branches off to get to the point faster, but it is certainly possible to collapse things word by word.  With this way of looking at grammar, as a structural organism, we gain a deep understanding that can be applied to the grammar of any language.  Yes, even Chinese.