Speaking of Words
By Michael Ferber

          Suppose you never had a teacher who taught you “grammar,” by which I mean how to diagram sentences, distinguish singular versus plural possessives, avoid dangling participles, and the like, along with spelling.  When you said “Me and Jack played basketball” or “The coach spoke to Jack and I,” you were never corrected.  You might go through life revealing yourself as not very literate or educated, but if you grew up speaking the local language you could still make yourself perfectly well understood.  You might even be considered a good joke-teller, or a very thoughtful person, or even eloquent.

          That is because you will have readily picked up all the essentials of grammar as a child, most of it as a baby; the “mistakes” you commit, which make better educated people wince, are secondary matters.  No matter how many people wince at them (and I am one who sometimes winces), these features of your speech are superficial additions, almost decorations, on the fundamental syntactic structures of the language you share with everyone else in your linguistic community.

          Let’s assume you were born into a family and neighborhood that mainly speak standard American English.  As you listened to those around you, and babbled sociably in reponse, you would have noticed a few things, long before you had the words to describe them, long before you were even conscious of them.  You would have noted that English is an SVO language, that is, the default or unemphatic pattern is subject-verb-object, as in “you [subject] would have noticed [verb phrase] a few things [object].”  Where the verb does not take an object, such as “sleep,” the pattern still prevails in such sentences as “She is sleeping in the bed”; the prepositional phrase follows the verb.  When my daughter was eighteen months old, she spoke her first sentence, or at least the first that her mother or I had heard: “Ooh doggie outside rolling snow!”  That is a perfectly good English sentence with the little words left out.  Had English been an SOV language, she would have said “Ooh doggie outside snow rolling!”  Had it been a VOS language, she would have said “Ooh rolling snow doggie outside!”  But she “knew” that in our house we spoke SVO.

          There are six possible permutations of those three elements, and there are languages that exemplify all six.  The English type, SVO, is not the most common; the most common type is SOV, and that includes most languages in India, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Hopi, Navaho, and Latin, to give a few examples.  Very young children discern quite early which type they are hearing, and set the relevant parameter in their minds.  “Parameter” is a term that Noam Chomsky proposed, alongside “principle,” to characterize languages: all languages, he argued, have the same universal principles or they would not be human languages, but there is also a repertoire of parameters that can be set one way or another to generate the syntax of particular languages.  Some parameters are big, like the one that sets S, V, and O in a preferred order, and some are small, like one or two that differentiate French from Spanish.

          A principle that little children learn early is the integrity of phrases, such as “in the bed” or “after dinner.”  In the sentence “Can I watch the show after dinner?” none of the other words can intervene between “after” and “dinner.”  “Can I watch after the show dinner?” is not English.  Only in the artificial word orders of Greek and Latin poetry do you find such things.  They are called hyperbata or “over-steppings,” and they are intelligible (with some effort) because Greek and Latin were highly inflected, so you can sort out what adjective goes with what noun, and so on, but Greeks and Romans did not talk that way.

          A parameter setting in English is that adjectives precede nouns, and determiners such as “the” and “many” precede adjectives.  “The green house” is the English norm, but French has a different norm (la maison verte).  In Danish, if there is no adjective, “the” is attached to the noun as a suffix: “the house” is huset, while “the green house” “is det gronne hus.”  There is a more elaborate set of parameters regarding strings of adjectives.  “The new little red schoolhouse” is normal, while “the little new red schoolhouse” or any other order sounds odd.  The rule seems to be that the more intimate or essential the adjective the closer it goes to the noun.  Color seems more definitive than size, and both are more definitive than newness.  Mark Forsyth came up with a string of eight adjectives arranged in what he thinks is the natural English order: “lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.”  The differences here are more subtle, but the order sounds OK, at least to my ears.

          Then there is the placement of adverbs.  We can say “I often visited Paris,” with the adverb preceding the verb, or “I visited Paris often,” with the adverb at the end.  In French these orders would sound wrong; the norm is to place the adverb right after the verb: J’ai visité souvent le Paris.  But in English that is the one position an adverb may not occupy: “I have visited often Paris.”  If you hear someone say that, you know the speaker did not grow up speaking English.

          All these patterns or parameters—and there are many more—children pick up easily when they are very young.  They don’t have to be taught them, either by their parents or by their teachers in school.  Kids can absorb two languages at once, or three or four, with very different syntactic parameters alongside totally different vocabularies and sounds.  Infant human beings are predisposed to learning languages while they are pretty much hopeless at everything else that their fellow primates can do.  This gift weakens as they age, though a few lucky people seem to keep it well into adulthood. 

          So you know practically everything important in your native grammar by the time you are three or four; after that you expand your vocabulary and learn, or fail to learn, the secondary “rules” for “correct” or socially “received” English.  Those secondary rules may be important if you want to succeed in certain arenas, but they do not make you any more proficient as a native speaker.

          I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu

Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.