The many mysteries of English grammar
You might think there are very few mysteries left in the English language. After all, it is spoken by about 1.5 billion people across the globe and has been the subject of rigorous academic study across several disciplines for many, many years.
“The English language is very well-described,” Professor Bauer says. “Despite that, there are all kinds of places where we don’t know what is going on, how the brain copes with it, or how best to describe it.”
Take the sentence: “The thing is, is that we don’t know the answer”. Grammatically, Professor Bauer says, we have no idea how to describe the construction of this sentence. We know the repetition of ‘is’ has become common in recent years, we know it doesn’t act like a grammatical mistake, and we know there are various places it might have come from, but we don’t actually know what is happening with the repetition of ‘is’ or how to describe it so we can identify the pattern and the grammatical sense of it.
Another example is the difference between ‘likelier’ and ‘more likely’. Are you more likely to say ‘likelier’, or are you likelier to say ‘more likely’? Why? When the English language is being taught to non-native speakers the rule often given is that you add ‘‑er’ to short adjectives and use ‘more’ for longer adjectives. In speech, that works reasonably well, Professor Bauer says, but it doesn’t always happen in writing.
“We know there are certain factors which influence which form is used, including the length of the word, what consonants the word ends with, the meaning of the word, and even what you have most recently heard,” Professor Bauer says. “Despite this, we still don’t know what is going on in people’s heads to lead them to use one version or another.”
There is also a lot of change happening in the English language, which leads to a confused situation, Professor Bauer says.
“Less than a hundred years ago the rules were quite stable for something like ‘you and I’ versus ‘you and me’,” he says. “Nowadays, you hear and see all sorts of things. We still don’t know where the language is going to end up.”
This confusion is usually caused by a number of systems clashing with each other, Professor Bauer says. That might be a case of old and new systems, British and American systems, or formal and informal systems.
“When people hear two different patterns of use, they don’t know which one to adopt themselves, and so the systems become unstable. This can cause language change and confusion, sometimes just temporarily and sometimes for centuries.”
This means the answers to many grammatical questions are less clear cut than they might seem.
“It’s not like ‘Which side of the road should I drive on in New Zealand?’, which has a clear and obvious answer,” Professor Bauer says. “It’s more like ‘Should I wear my jeans to the party?’, where the answer depends on your jeans, the party, the rest of your outfit, your personal preference, and so on. There is not just one answer to the question.”
Professor Bauer’s new book, Mysteries of English Grammar: A guide to complexities of the English language (co-authored by Dr Andreea S Calude from the University of Waikato), covers some of these areas, explaining why in many cases there is more than one answer to a grammatical question, and why multiple answers are valid.
“Our goal is to help readers—both students and those generally interested—to learn more about the vicissitudes and difficulties of English grammar.”
Laurie Bauer is an emeritus professor from the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.