The Truth about English Grammar: Rarely Pure and Never Simple1

Two kinds of dogmatism afflict the study of English grammar. They have more in common than is widely realized. On one side we have tradition-bound fundamentalists who take the rules to be clear and simple regulative principles laid down centuries ago by unquestionable authorities. On the other, we have theoretical linguists, who correctly take grammatical principles as a topic for discovery rather than stipulation, but insist that the detail and complexity of grammar must be explainable through the action and interaction of principles that are universal, elegant, and biologically based. I believe both views are in error. Here I focus mostly on the traditionalists. Their system of analysis, essentially unaltered for two hundred years, is assumed in all dictionaries and almost all grammar textbooks today, despite its grave defects. The deepest errors stem from a longstanding confusion of category (word class) with function (grammatical or semantic relation). Attempts to define category in terms of function yield a familiar story: nouns name things, verbs name actions, adjectives name qualities, and so on. All of this is puerile confusion. And in the case of adjectives and adverbs, new evidence reveals that the contrast cannot be reduced to differences in function, because the complementarity view (adjectives modify nouns, adverbs modify non-nouns) is not tenable.