A bit of a rant about grammar, and about change.

 I went out for lunch yesterday, as I have already said in yesterday’s post, with a couple of friends, former work colleagues, both former teachers of modern languages, as am I. You get three linguists together and at some point you get some strong opinions expressed about the question of teaching grammar. We all three agreed that detailed teaching of grammar (i.e. making children learn the names of parts of speech and grammatical constructions) is largely unnecessary beyond some very basic stuff. Correcting ungrammatical stuff - I were and we was corrected to I was and we were - is good, encouraging the use of more complex language is good but there really is no need to teach the subjunctive. Come to that, I have met Spaniards who can’t explain the use of the subjunctive despite using it all the time! 

Really you only need to know grammatical terms as a shortcut when learning foreign languages. It makes life a lot easier if you know that “the bit of the verb that means ‘to do something’, the title of he verb as it were, is called the infinitive. But as a native speaker, you don’t need to know that in order to speak, read or even write English well. However, reading a lot of stuff helps. 

So this morning I was amused and exasperated to read Adrian Chiles talking about “possessive determiners” in an article in the Guardian. He was expressing his annoyance at people, mostly medical or social work professionals, omitting the possessive adjective when talking about his mother. “It’s in the context of health or social care that it really starts to niggle. If a doctor, nurse or carer of some kind refers to “Mum” or “Dad”, I appreciate it comes from a good place. I suppose the informality is there to imply a gentle shared concern. But for me it strikes the wrong note, the tone cloying yet impersonal,” he writes. “I mean, if it’s a friend making the inquiry about a parent, then fine. Grates a bit, but no bother. Otherwise, the only people entitled to drop the my/your/our in reference to my mum and dad are me and my brother.”

I quite agree with his feelings on this. Especially when referring to one’s aged parents, it sounds a little as though said parents are reduced to a kind of infantile state. 

But it was his use of the grammatical terminology that most struck me. He began his article by saying: “It turns out that I have strong views on the use of possessive determiners, which is odd because I’ve only just found out that’s what they are called.” Great! I wouldn’t expect him to know the term! Except that whenever I have taught this aspect of grammar “my”, “your”, “his”, her”, etc, I have always called them “possessive adjectives”. And “this”, that”, these” and “those” have always been “demonstrative adjectives” as far as I was concerned. In gender-based languages, all the Latin-based languages for example, it’s useful to see them that way as, like plain, unadorned adjectives, they have to agree with the noun they accompany. 

So when did “possessive adjectives” become “possessive determiners”? I did wonder if someone had invented the term along with “fronted adverbials”, a term by the way that one of my linguist friends had never heard of. But no, it’s been around for a while. Well, the term “determiner” has been around for a while:

“The linguistics term "determiner" was coined by Leonard Bloomfield in 1933. Bloomfield observed that in English, nouns often require a qualifying word such as an article or adjective. He proposed that such words belong to a distinct class which he called "determiners".”

There you go, I stand corrected! However, I stand by my right to use the terminology I have always taught.

Things change! 

The Guardian has run an article about the Islas Cíes, the beautiful islands in the Atlantic, opposite Vigo bay, protecting that city at times from the worst Atlantic storms. Quite a lot of tourist-popular cities want to restrict entry to their cities as they are becoming overwhelmed. Because it is nature reserve, only accessible by boat, the management of the Islas  Cíes has been able to the numbers of visitors to the islands at any one time. 

There have been changes  though, since ai last went here. The cost of the boat trip from Vigo has at least doubled. And then there is this: 

“People used to reserve their places on the day, but now they reserve them three months in advance. They really plan their visits. People are also coming all year round, when it used to be just July and August.”

There you go!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!