An Innate Sense of Grammar?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Do you think it’s possible for one to have an innate sense of grammar? Or, perhaps more accurately, for one to internalize grammatical concepts(particularly if one was an avid reader)?

I’m trying to figure out why this happened to so many people in my grammar class:

All of the students in the class were English-Teaching major juniors. They all wrote beautifully, and were rarely marked down for grammar on any of their papers for other classes. However, several of them had to repeat the class, because they were not able to get the C required by the university. What happened? How can one have “good grammar” without understanding the concepts behind it? I, for example, passed the class, yet have trouble picking out the objects in sentences. I never fully understood the rules of grammar as a child, but I did read avidly…could my classmates and I have subconsciously absorbed things like sentence stucture and subject-verb agreement merely by being exposed to it countless times?

2

Built-in brain function. Children pick up the grammar of their native language(s) just by hearing it spoken. You don’t have to teach it to them, correct their mistakes, or teach them to read. It just happens. Child language acquisition is an amazing field of study and it will take your breath away.

How to write properly is another story. Written language is not like spoken language. Spelling, elements of style, punctuation… all radically different from the spoken word, and not everybody has the knack for it. Needs to be taught. Many eloquent orators are terrible writers. Some are illiterate.

Maybe your fellow students failed for non-grammar related reasons… skipping class, turning in papers late, not following directions, etc.

-fh

3

In linguistics, often we refer to “native speaker intuition.” Most literate people tend to internalize grammar rules without necessarily being able to explain the rules.

4

Chas and hazel-rah are right. Interestingly, this process is where many of the incorrect “babyspeak” words we hear come from. The child applies the regular rules it’s figured out to an irregular verb, for example, and you get words like “brang” as the past tense of “bring.”

5

One needs to distinguish between descriptive and prescriptive grammar.

When a linguist says that children automatically acquire the grammar of their native language, or theorizes about a species-wide universal grammar, they are referring to descriptive grammar. All languages have a descriptive grammar; it’s simply the structure of that language as spoken by a native speaker. That’s why we usually describe utterances as “well-formed” rather than “proper” or “correct”. Ex. “He don’t got none” is well-formed in various dialects of English; but *“The car with street” is not well-formed as a complete sentence in any dialect of English.

Prescriptive grammar is the elevated usage that various authorities have, essentially, arbitrarily decreed as the proper standard for educated use. Not all languages have such a grammar, and it is not of structural-linguistic interest. (Sociolinguistic interest, yes.) It is prescriptive grammar that decrees that such things as splitting an infinitive or using “they” as a singular pronoun are incorrect.

6

What matt_mcl describes is the key difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar in spoken language. Although revealing somewhat of a bias against prescriptive grammar, it is essentially correct.

But the OP described a situation in which students who were good writers were struggling with a teaching-English class. The problem here, as referred to by hazel, is that of written language, which has rules that are often different from, or in the case of mechanics, irrelevant to spoken language. Spoken language doesn’t have punctuation or spelling, the rules of which must be learned. People who read a lot have been exposed to a lot more properly punctuated written language than those who don’t read much, and so have internalized many of the rules, which they can then apply to their own writing.

But English teachers don’t necessarily have to be great writers. Because they are going to be teaching writing, they need to be able to identify the good and the bad in their students’ writing, and be able to articulate to their students exactlty what the problem is and how to fix it. For this, the teachers do need to have a solid fundamental understanding of the prescriptive rules of written language: diction, syntax, usage, mechanics, and spelling.

A useful analogy. A person can drive a car, and drive it quite well, while understanding very little of how the car works. To operate the car, one only needs to be able to use the ignition switch, steering wheel, accelerator, brake, clutch, and gearshift. One doesn’t need to know why or how these things work, only how to operate them. Likewise, knowledge of how any of the numerous, complicated systems in the car work is not needed to drive it.

But if you want to fix the car when something goes wrong with it, you need to have much more in-depth knowledge of how the car works.

Likewise, a person can write, and write well sometimes, without understanding the intricate workings of the language, but one cannot be a good editor without such knowledge. And since English teachers are by definition at least partly editors (they need to evaluate others’ writing, be able to identify good and bad parts, and give coherent advice on how to fix the problems) learning the formal rules well should be required.

7

I would disagree with this. On the copyeditors’ mailing list, many of us cannot recite and dissect grammatical principles off the top of our heads (although we know where to look them up when we need to). Quite often on the list, the topic of “the editing gene” comes up – the innate ability to “feel” one’s way around the language. One who has the “gene” can be trained to be a good copyeditor, and will probably have an easier time learning “book grammar.” But one who does not have that natural feel will never make a good copyeditor. At least this is the consensus in that forum.

8

I’m intrigued by this notion of “the editing gene.” I’m sure I was taught basic grammar principles in elementary, but I have clear memories of being reviewed on them in junior high. The topics were subject and predicate, use of “I” and “me,” complete sentences, etc. I paid little attention to the lessons, but I was able to complete the assignments almost perfectly because I could pick the words that “looked right” to me. For what its worth, I also read a lot, wrote fiction, and did copyediting in high school.

9

I would guess that most people who seem to have an “innate” knack for prescriptive grammar really picked it up as small children, from reading and being read to.

10

If we’re talking strictly about copyeditors, I concede your point. I would also contend that the copyeditors, even those with the “editing gene”, learned their craft, maybe not formally, but learned it nevertheless, probably through internalizing the rules when reading.

But the students in the class in the OP were teaching English students. To be a good English teacher, it isn’t enough that one be able to recognize and fix errors in writing. The teacher, as I said in my first post, must be able to communicate to the writer (her student) exactly what the mistake was, why the fixed version is correct (or at least better) and how such mistakes can be avoided in the future. To do this, the teacher needs to know the formal rules of syntax, diction, usage, mechanics, and spelling, and know them well.

11

OK, so we are talking about teachers performing the act of teaching, rather than editors performing the function of editing? Then I agree with you as well. No matter what type of editing I’m doing on a manuscript, most of the time I don’t have to be able to explain why my changes are correct (except sometimes to the author). I can do them intuitively. But yes, to impart that knowledge to someone else, you need a common language with which to convey that information, namely, the formal rules of grammar and so on. Of course a teacher cannot just say, “Because it’s right this way.”

I think I was responding more to the OP than to the general jist of your post.

12

I started reading when I was 18 months old. I just could.

I never got particularly good grades in English in school. To this day I can’t tell you why I write the way I do. I just write.

That would tend to support your original assertion, at least in my case.

Some people are just born to it. Both of my sisters struggle when they read. I read exceptionally fast. I strongly suspect that I have an innate ability to read and write. But I can’t prove it.

13

I don’t know the answer, so I’ll state my case.

I never enjoyed the grammer part of English classes. It always seemed pointless rote to me. In my mind, what was being said was more important than how it was being said.

At the same time I have a great sensitivity to grammar when I write. I keep a dictionary by my side, and usually reread my posts from mistakes. (Right now I’m wondering if I spelled “reread” right, and if I should have added a comma after “right now”.)

I was reprimanded once for overpowering the rules of punctuation. I throw commas around like nothing. I’m oversensitive to it in my own writing, and still don’t know the “proper” usage. I usually settle for something in the middle of my nagging grammar voice and what I think flows easily from the screen.

I can get it right in English papers good enough to get A’s after several drafts, but I rarely resort to such measures in posts like this.

I guess you could say that grammar is an annoying conscience monkey on my otherwise freewheeling writing style.

14

And I thought I was responding to the situation presented in the OP. We’re pretty much in agreement, though.

15

:blecchhh: I just drank the worst cup of coffee in the world…

Anyhoo, I have the best innate grammar in the cosmos and I haven’t a scooby where it came from. My dad was a journalist and a writer, so maybe it’s genetic, but I’ve never been much good at explaining grammar. I’m also a natural speller, and have a weird thing for “visualising” words. The word actually looks like what it is. Does that mean anything to anyone? I’m not just talking about onomatopoetica (which shouldn’t be so hard to spell), either - the word EVERY, for example, actually makes me think of many little things, each of which is chosen…

And I remember as children my brother and I were intrigued to notice one another’s habit for repeating certain unusual or new words, under our breath, a number of times. We’d never noticed ourselves doing it. It was only when we noticed one another that it became apparent.

However I’m still pretty clunky about the rules for grammar, and have to recite the alphabet to work out alphabetical order… those things seem more mathematical to me. Thus, philosophy reads like maths with words.

So to take this all to a weird new level, how relevant is it that in Christianity the world was spoken into being? That Christ is the living Word? That we are warned against the power of words constantly? I appreciate that non-Christians may immediately respond that it’s not relevant at all, but I’ve never believed it’s simply WRONG to imagine “magical” values onto words like liberty, democracy and nazism. It’s not as simple as that - these words are genuinely flowing with the realities they represent. When I say “Horsehead Nebula”, it’s conjured within your mind: all it means, all it represents, fictional, mythical and mathematical. When I speak of “men with wings”, somehow, somewhere, there are men with wings - only in your mind’s eye, perhaps, but then everything is in some sense “only” in your mind’s eye.

Well yahoo. Guess I shouldn’t stay up so late… :wink:

16

I have a weird way of remembering spellings. In my mind, the word sort of scrolls through, almost always left to right, like a marquee. It’s weird, and there’s always some sort of background image, either a color that I somehow associate with the word, or some image that reminds me of the word. Sometimes, in certain words, none of these visual bits appear; instead, a group of seemingly unrelated words come to mind when I hear the word. I’m wondering if there’s any psychological basis for this, or am I just a complete nutcase?

I just realized that I’ve been awake for upwards of 20 hours, and need caffeine like the southeastern US needs rain.

17

I have a great sense of grammar. When I right a paper for class, my rough draft has perfect grammar and spelling, except for the mistypings. I usually get B’s though, because I usually just run in the rough draft.

18

Steven Pinker writes a lot about what he terms the language instinct, in which children intuitively learn the structure of their own language. His books are very readable and entertaining if you want to give it a shot.

19

I think it’s entirely possible, as the OP pondered, that people can have a good grasp of grammar without knowing the formal rules that govern it. If someone generally speaks well, and also writes well, we might say that they have a good grammar sense. But by no stretch of the imagination is knowing how to diagram a sentence innate. Someone must teach a student what is a “subject” and what is a “predicate.”

I suspect some of the students in the English education class are victims of their own intelligence. In high school, a teacher might spend more time instructing students who are struggling with correct grammar in their writing than with their classmates who breeze by with nary a grammatical mistake in their assignments. When we get to college, the “good” students might be tripped up when expected to demonstrate a practical knowledge of grammar, while a more “average” student has already spent four years of high school memorizing and practicing grammar rules. If you have never been marked down on a paper for the incorrect placement of a direct object, then it might take you longer to master the concept in the type of class described in the OP. It might be a “not seeing the forest for the trees” kind of scenario – the direct object and its rightful place in society are so *obvious * to an avid reader that it’s almost painful to attempt to articulate the whys and hows of how it works.

I’d be curious (not that I expect elfkin to take a formal poll ;)) of how many of the failing students had never studied a foreign language. I think my own ability to discuss English grammar increased in a dramatic way after I learned another language. In a foreign language class, you’re usually learning things like case, tense, direct object, indirect object, etc. from scratch along with basic vocabulary.

20

I have a pretty good grasp of grammar and spelling, and I’m almost certain it wasn’t “taught” to me. I always did miserably in English classes until I got to Jr. High, and English stopped being about diagramming sentences or memorizing vocabularly lists, and started to be reading books and talking about them. From that point on, English was always been my best and favorite class. Sometime around the end of highschool, I realized that I’d almost completely stopped getting spelling/grammar corrections on my papers except in cases of typos (like Piell, I was never a fan of “second drafts”). I think I get it almost entirely from being a hopeless book junkie for as long as I can remember. I blame my Mom. The addiction was clearly passed on in vitro, like crack.