Test your knowledge on Grammar Puss by Steven Pinker By Mª Teresa Naves http://wwww.ub.es/filoan/naves.html         naves@fil.ub.es Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya Universitat de Barcelona

I. Before reading "Grammar Puss"

Ia.  Read the following staments and decide whether you think they are true or false

1. All societies have complex language, and everywhere the languages use the  same  kinds  of grammatical  machinery  like nouns, verbs, auxiliaries, and agreement.
2. All normal children develop language without conscious

effort or formal lessons, and by the age of three they  speak in   fluent   grammatical   sentences,  outperforming  the  most sophisticated computers.
3. Brain damage or congenital conditions can make a person a linguistic savant  while  severely retarded,  or  unable  to  speak normally despite high intelligence.
4. Many scientists,  beginning  with  the  linguist Noam  Chomsky  in  the  late  1950's,  conclude  that there are specialized circuits in the human brain, and perhaps specialized  genes,  that  create  the gift of articulate speech.
5. the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson.
6. The  rules  people learn  (or  more  likely,  fail  to  learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought"  to  talk.
7. Scientists  studying  language propose  [descriptive]  rules,  describing  how  people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people  who  speak the language and ask them.
8. To  a  scientist,  the  fundamental  fact  of  human  language  is  its sheer improbability since most objects in the universe -- rocks, trees, worms, cows, cars --  cannot  talk.
9. So there is no contradiction, after all, in saying that every  normal  person can  speak  grammatically  (in the sense of

systematically) and ungrammatically (in the sense of nonprescriptively), just  as  there  is  no  contradiction  in saying  that  a  taxi  obeys  the  laws  of  physics  but  breaks  the  laws of Massachusetts
10. Forcing modern speakers of English to not -- whoops, not to  split an  infinitive  because  it  isn't  done  in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and  togas.
11. Julius  Caesar could not have split an infinitive if he had wanted to. In Latin the infinitive is a single word like [facere], a  syntactic  atom.
12.  But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments,  the  rules survive  by  the  same  dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing.
13. Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule,  rather than  challenging it.
14. Frequently the language mavens claim that nonstandard American English is not just  different,  but less sophisticated and logical.
15. Fifth of all English verbs were originally nouns


Ib Study the examples from the following excerpts:

1. To fly flied flied, to ring ringed ringed  and to grandtand, grandstanded, grandstanded vs To fly flew flown, To ring rang rung...

Take the baseball term [to fly  out], a  verb  that  comes  from the noun [a pop fly]. The past tense is [flied], not [flew]; no mere mortal has ever [flown out] to center  field.  Similarly,  in using  the  verb-from-noun  [to ring the city] (form a ring around), people say [ringed], not [rang], and for [to grandstand] (play to  the  grandstand),  they say [grandstanded] not [grandstood]. Speakers' preference for the regular form with [-ed] shows that they are tacitly sensitive tothe  fact  that  the  verbs came  from  nouns.    They  avoid  irregular forms like [flew out] because they intuitively sense that the baseball  verb  [to  fly]  is  different  from  the ordinary  verb  [to  fly]  (what birds do): the first is a verb based on a noun root, the second, a verb with a verb root.  Only the verb root  is  allowed  to have  the irregular past-tense form [flew], because only for verb roots does it make sense to have [any] past-tense form. The quirk shows that when people  use a noun as a verb, they are making their mental dictionaries more sophisticated, not less so -- it's not that words are losing their identities as verbs versus nouns;  rather,  there are verbs, there are nouns, and there are verbs based on nouns, and people store each one with a different mental tag.

2. ______ do you trust? Who vs Whom

George  Bush had  recently adopted the slogan "Who do you trust?," alienating schoolteachers across the nation who noted that [who] is a subject pronoun and the question is asking about the object of [trust].  One would say [You do trust him], not [You do trust he], and so the question word should be [whom], not [who] In reply, one might point out that the [who/whom] distinction is a  relic  of the  English case system, abandoned by nouns centuries ago and found today only among pronouns in distinctions like [he/him].  Even  among  pronouns,  the  old distinction between  subject [ye] and object [you] has vanished, leaving [you] to play both roles and  [ye]  as  sounding  completely archaic.    [Whom]  has outlived  [ye],  but  is clearly moribund, and it already sounds pretentious in most spoken contexts. No one demands of Bush that he say [Whom do  ye  trust?]. If  the  language  can bear the loss of [ye], using [you] for both subjects and objects, why insist on clinging to [whom], when everyone uses  [who]  for  both subjects and objects?

3. Everyone returned to ______ seat. His vs Their.
Consider this alleged barbarism:      Everyone returned to their seats.      If anyone calls, tell them I can't come to the phone.      No one should have to sell their home to pay for medical care. The mavens explain: [everyone] means [every one], a singular subject, which may not serve as the antecedent of a  plural  pronoun  like  [them]  later  in  the sentence. "Everyone  returned  to [his] seat," they insist.  "If anyone calls, tell [him] I can't come to the phone."
If you were the  target  of  these  lessons,  you  might  be  getting  a  bit uncomfortable.    [Everyone  returned  to  his  seat] makes it sound like Bruce Springsteen was discovered during intermission  to  be  in  the  audience,  and everyone rushed back and converged on his seat to await an autograph.  If there is a good chance that a caller may be female, it is odd to ask  one's roommate to  tell  [him]  anything  (even  if you are not among the people who get upset about "sexist language"). Such feelings of  disquiet  --  a  red  flag  to  any serious  linguist -- are well-founded.  The logical point that everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasps is that [everyone] and  [they]  are  not  an antecedent and a pronoun referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a "quantifier" and a "bound  variable," a different logical relationship. [Everyone returned to their seats] means "For all X, X returned to X's seat."  The "X" is simply  a  placeholder that  keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships: the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that  X  comes  back  to. The  [their]  there  does  not,  in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all.  On  logical grounds,  then,  variables  are  not  the  same  thing  as  the more  familiar "referential" pronouns that trigger agreement ([he] meaning to some  particular guy,  [they]  meaning  some particular  bunch  of  guys).  Some  languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for  referential  pronounsand for variables. But English is stingy; a referential pronoun must be drafted into service to lend its name when a speaker needs to use a variable.  There is no  reason  that  the vernacular decision to borrow [they, their, them] for the task is any worse than the prescriptivists'  recommendation of [he,  him,  his]. Indeed, [they] has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences.
 
 
 
 
 

Key to this exercise

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II. Read Grammar Puss by Pinker

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III. Test your knowledge on "Gramamr Puss" by S. Pinker Say whether the following statements are true or false:
 

Under construction!

 

Key to this exercise

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Key to the Initial Evaluation Exercise
All the statements are correct according to Pinker. All the statements are excerpts from Pinker's Grammar Puss

Key to the Reading Comprehension Exercise
 

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Last Updated on  14 February 2001 by Teresa Naves