Interview with Geoff Pullum

I’m Geoff Pullum, Professor of General Linguistics at The University of Edinburgh, and co-author of ‘The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language’. I’m amazed to find that there’s such a large number of popular books on my subject available at the moment. I don’t know why it would have taken such an up-swing, except, perhaps, that, contrary to popular belief, everyone is reading and writing much more than they ever used to in the whole human history. The fact is that the internet and the phenomenon of blogging have led people to be writing vastly more and reading vastly more every day, than they did in the age of quill pens and leatherbound books. That might have something to do with it, but people are just seeing more English language, and thus noticing more about it. But, what amazes me more than the sheer popularity of the subject, is that the books on it are, for the most part, so utterly terrible. Their grasp on the English language, their generalisations about its structure, and statement of what the rules are comes from not just a hundred years ago but two hundred years ago. And, the analyses they offer are confused and not really fit for purpose, and this has been known by linguists for nearly a century; I’m dating the real start of progress from the 1920s and 30s when The Linguistic Society of America was founded, and Leonard Bloomfield wrote his marvellous book ‘Language’ in 1933. At least since then we have known that you can’t define a noun as ‘a word that is the name of a person, place, or thing’, and we’ve known exactly why, and we’ve had perfectly good examples. So, the astonishing thing is the twenty-first century begins and still; every book on the market tells you that nouns are words that are names of persons, places, or things - a hopeless idea, but they all say it. And that is just one part of thousands of other things about grammar, that on which every book agrees, but all linguists will tell you just isn’t true.

Another really surprising thing is that when linguists point out that you can use evidence to figure out what the rules of standard English are, so that you can get them right, so that you don’t say things that are simply foolish - like that sentences never end with prepositions; they do, and they always did, and that old nonsense about prepositions at ends of sentences was never based on a true generalisation about any period in the history of the English language.

English is one of those languages like Icelandic that does allow prepositions at ends of sentences quite freely. But, when you point out that the evidence is clear on that point, and that couldn’t possibly be maintained by a serious person as one of the rules of standard English, instead of that being received like a scientific finding - possibly surprising, or possibly just pretty obvious - it’s treated as an attack by the far left on the whole structure of civilisation.

People treat you as if you had proposed to tear down everything; to abandon all morality; and everything should just go to chaos. You’re accused of being an anarchist.

Nobody seems to be able to grasp the idea that there is a position could be maintainted - in fact, a range of positions - in between the two extreme absurdities; the absurdity of saying ‘regardless of how any speakers or writers, no matter how expert, use the language it makes no difference, the rules are what they are’, which I refer to as the ‘nothing is relevant’ approach - as it means you literally can’t use any amount of evidence from literature to bear on the fact that the rules are not like this, they’re like that - it’s irrelevant; the other extreme, loony view is the ‘everything is correct’ view, which says ‘there are no rules at all.

Whatever anybody says, whatever comes out of anybody’s mouth - that’s just fine, and we shouldn’t be judgemental, forget about rules completely.’

Both of those views are completely insane. In the middle between them are a range of sensible views based on the idea that, ultimately, the rules of English must be based on the way expert English users use the language, because they couldn’t relate to anything else; that’s what they’ve got to cover.

To learn the rules of English grammar is to learn how to structure your sentences so that they have the kind of structure that all the other expert users of the English language have in their sentences. It’s got to be based on evidence, and yet we know that the evidence will occasionally contain unintended slips and errors; there are typographical errors in even fine and beautiful books, there are slips of the tongue - tips of the slongue, as we sometimes say - in even well-organised and well-managed conversation, so you’ve got to be careful. Sometimes, there’s an error in the data, it’s a bad data point, and sometimes the data is right and the rule is wrong, and you have to revise the rule. It’s not just that you can never have adverbs in such-and-such a position, it’s just that if you do something else has to be true. Sometimes you have to refine the rule, and sometimes you have to stick with the rule and say ‘that was just a mistake in the text’. Is this so hard? Is this like quantum physics? I would have thought it wasn’t, but the general public not only cannot grasp what I just said - as you can see from the comments area under any article online in a major newspaper about questions of grammar, and they do come up every so often; there’s an article about me in a recent Sunday Telegraph magazine, there was an article by Harry Ritchie about his book in The Guardian not so long ago - look at the comments underneath and you’ll find that people cannot grasp the idea of the sensible view in the middle, and they’re furious at the very idea that you might suggest such a thing. And, they hurl insults of the most amazing nature.

It’s very interesting that English has become, effectively, a global language, and I think it’s rather important that people should realise, if they’re English speakers, that this is their great piece of undeserved good luck. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing is not really a topic that I think we can address anymore; it’s a useful thing for lots of people that there is a language that’s almost the global language - you can get around the world using English - but never think that this is because the English language is so fine and noble and bold and true and suited to this purpose. It’s in some ways a rather rotten language to have fallen into this privileged position. It has a truly terrible writing system. Learning to spell English is just awful. You can literally learn to spell Finnish, and get everything right so you always have a hundred percent on any spelling bee, in about ten minutes - and that’s generous. There’s just an alphabet that works, and nothing else to learn; no exceptions. And, for English, thousands of exceptions and even years of education leave some people quite uncertain about spelling. What’s more, it’s rather difficult to pronounce compared to a lot of languages. It hasn’t got simple consonant-vowel syllable structure. You have syllables like ‘strengths’, and not everyone can do ‘-engths’ in a go and without stumbling or sticking extra vowels in. It could have been better chosen. And its grammar? Well, English has about two hundred irregular verbs and they’re so complex that native speakers get some of them wrong. Occasionally you hear people say that they ‘sung’ a song when they mean they ‘sang’ a song, and so on. Irregular past tenses, and about two hundred of them, and various different patterns - thirty or forty different patterns that they follow. You know the number of irregular verbs in Swahili? Zero. There are no irregular verbs. The language is highly inflected, but every verb is regular. That would have been a lovely language to have as the world language. It’s already a trade language across the whole of East Africa, and what do we get? English. Well, that’s unfortunate - though it’s lucky if you’re an English speaker and you want to travel in foreign countries. Just don’t ever imagine that you deserve it. You don’t deserve it; you’re just lucky.