Language Landscapes · TESL 5002
Standards, Standard Englishes, and what to teach
Brett Reynolds · Adapted narrated companion · AI narration using the author’s approved voice
00:53:25 · 51 sections
Audiobook with 51 chapters · Complete MP3 · Track playlist · Text transcript · Written references and examples
Chapter two. Standards, Standard Englishes, and what to teach.
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following.
Distinguish the word “standard” meaning quality from the word “standard” meaning convention.
Recognize Standard English as a cluster of related varieties rather than a single monolith.
Understand that Standard English is not inherently superior to other dialects.
Analyse the difference between grammaticality and meaningfulness.
Understand why intuitions about grammaticality can be unreliable.
Recognize how processing limitations affect grammatical judgments.
Apply form-and-meaning pairing analysis to understand grammatical acceptability.
Understand the role of speech communities in defining grammatical norms.
And distinguish descriptive from prescriptive approaches to grammar.
In the next chapter, I'll return to describing the lexical categories, but here we should spend some time considering a few issues that are all connected to perceptions of what is right and wrong when it comes to English. This chapter should help you think about the concepts of standards, Standard English or Englishes, grammaticality, and normativity, all of which are crucial for English language teachers to understand.
Why are these concepts important? Well, as teachers, we're often asked to be the arbiters of what's correct in English. But as you'll see, it's not always as straightforward as it might seem. What's standard? What's grammatical? And perhaps most importantly, what should we actually teach?
We'll start by unpacking the concept of “standard” and how it applies to language. Then we'll explore the notion of Standard English, or rather Standard Englishes, and why this distinction matters. We'll dive deep into grammaticality, examining what makes something grammatical or ungrammatical, and why our intuitions about this can sometimes be misleading. Finally, we'll consider the normative aspects of language and how they affect our decisions as teachers.
By the end of this chapter, you should have a more nuanced understanding of these concepts and be better equipped to navigate the complex landscape of English language teaching. So let's begin by considering what we mean when we say something is standard.
For most people, the word “standard” has positive connotations. Consider the words that we use together with it: pairs like “gold standard” and “quality standard,” or “standard of living” and “standard of care.” If you have high standards, or exceed them, that's a good thing. We set educational standards, environmental standards, and technology standards, all of which are supposed to make our education, our environment, and our technology better.
Standards, in short, are things we aspire to. And Standard English, with a capital S, may sound like something to aim for. You might think it's equivalent to good English, or grammatical English, or literary English. But it's not that simple, not that clear, and not that straightforward to define or to aim for.
You're likely old enough to know what VHS is. What you may be too young to know, though, is what Betamax is. For a time, they were competing video tape standards. By most criteria, Betamax was a higher quality product. It had a better picture and better sound. But it died so long ago that you may never have heard of it, and VHS became the standard for video cassette tapes and players, at least while people still used video cassette recorders.
Standard doesn't mean good, and good doesn't mean standard.
There are a lot of different rail gauges. The chapter shows a figure comparing several of them; the point it makes is the one I'm about to describe, so you can follow this without it.
The standard rail gauge is one point four three five metres wide. That's what they're using for a new light rail line in Mississauga, where I live. Toronto gauge, the one traditionally used by the Toronto Transit Commission, one city to the east, is one point four nine five metres wide. To be sure, each size has benefits and drawbacks, but the main benefit of standard rail gauge is that it is standard. It is the most commonly used, and so if you want new rail cars, or even used rail cars, it's much cheaper and faster to get them if you use standard gauge.
That's why Mississauga chose it, despite the fact that its rolling stock will not be able to interchange directly with Toronto's system. The choice was not about quality or superiority. It was about cost and availability.
Standard English is not the best form of English. Standard English is not inherently superior to other dialects. Standard English is simply the most widely accepted, the most institutionalized, the most common ground for diverse communication.
In linguistics, the word “standard” often serves more as a sociopolitical marker than a qualitative one. It is a product of historical, cultural, and often colonial forces that have elevated one dialect, usually that of a socially or economically dominant group, over others.
So when we talk about Standard English, what we're really discussing is a set of codified conventions taught in schools, used in official documents, and expected in formal settings. It is not a measure of intelligence, morality, or worth. It is simply what is most commonly and broadly expected and accepted. And it's what most folks have in mind when they say they want to learn to speak English. The word “standard” in Standard English is less about quality and more about ubiquity and institutional backing. It's the VHS, not necessarily the Betamax, of the English language.
Standards underpin our modern world, but standards are often arbitrary. A4 paper is the standard in most of the world, so A4 is better there. US Letter is the standard in North America, so US Letter is better there. Neither is inherently superior. Their superiority comes from being standard.
Standard English follows this pattern. It's not inherently better. It's better because it's standard. Many Englishes could be standard, if only they were.
But there are two important differences between technology standards and language standards.
First, a technology standard is stipulated. Somebody planned it out and promulgated it. Language isn't like that.
Second, if you don't follow a technology standard, your technology often won't work. A Toronto streetcar, for instance, simply will not run on standard gauge rails. It's useless as a means of transportation. Similarly, a VHS cassette simply will not play on a Betamax player. In contrast, much of the time, perhaps most of the time, non-standard English is a perfectly workable means of communication, even with speakers of Standard English. There are dialects and varieties that you or I can't understand, or can't understand easily, but there are so many more that we can.
If communication is the main function of language, then, why do we have Standard English?
One answer is that another function of language is to regulate group membership. In other words, language helps us to identify people who are like us, who belong to our group.
Young people often create a sense of identity and belonging within their peer groups by developing, innovating, and using slang. For example, the word “fire,” used as an adjective meaning “excellent,” gained traction among some younger speakers for a period. Those who used it that way were also saying, I'm part of this group that knows this newer meaning of the word “fire,” and because I use it with you, it means I think you are too. Of course, adults were rarely, if ever, part of the group, and they rarely, if ever, used the word that way.
Or consider clothing. Jeans are standard at most colleges and universities in Canada. Some people wear suits or dresses, which are more formal but still standard ways of dressing. Arriving topless to class might be perfectly functional if the classroom is warm, but it's not standard, and people will react to such a choice of outfit with surprise and discomfort. A snowsuit is also non-standard, as is a sari, a chef's uniform, or a man's kilt. Some people on campus will react positively and some negatively. Many will suppress any outward reaction, but everyone will recognize that these ways of dressing are non-standard.
That's kind of the way it is with non-Standard Englishes. If you use one of them, people will notice. Standard English is a social standard, and it has social implications. Usually those are negative for those who don't speak Standard English, and as language teachers, we should recognize that our students' goals are often as social as they are instrumental. They want to learn English so that they can function in society, but they want to learn Standard English so that they will be a part of it.
George Eliot presents the following conversation in her novel Middlemarch.
“All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.”
“There is correct English: that is not slang.”
“I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”
Eliot knew the difference between correct English and Standard English. But many people don't. Unfortunately, there is no brief definition of Standard English that I can use to clarify it. More difficulties with definitions. In fact, one goal of this book is to outline a partial definition of the syntax, vocabulary, and phonology of Standard English. But I can at least make a few remarks about its dominant status.
To some degree, any dialect of English is a standard among some group, but most are not called Standard English. If you try to sell a standard gauge train to the Toronto Transit Commission for its subway, you will not make a sale. Standard gauge is not the standard used in Toronto.
If you grew up speaking First-Nations English, then First-Nations English is likely the standard in your home community. Anyone who goes to your community and speaks Standard English will mark themselves as outsiders and will be treated as such, for good or ill.
And to be clear, there isn't a single Standard English. There's Standard Canadian English, Standard British English, Standard Singapore English, and so on. For the most part, these are almost indistinguishable, at least when written down, but there are small differences. The unique aspects of any of the varieties will often jump out at speakers of another. Still, they are all recognized as Standard English, or more recently as Standard Englishes.
But let me reiterate that this is not because Standard English is better, more formal, or even the most common, though it is the most common in particular communities. Trudgill has written more about what it isn't, and the reference is in the notes.
The word “standard” is not synonymous with “grammatical” or “correct.” Nor does it imply truth, logic, beauty, purity, or clarity. It is not how English ought to be spoken. It is just a cluster of dialects, albeit a powerful one, and a norm that is enforced by the dominant social group of English speakers. In much of the world, that means educated speakers of English from Britain and the former British colonies where the Indigenous peoples were largely displaced, Canada for example, but not those where the Indigenous peoples were not, such as Bangladesh.
What's a shibboleth?
There is a story about the gatekeeping function of dialects in Judges, the seventh book of the Hebrew bible, which goes like this.
Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say Shibboleth.” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
From this story, we get the English word “shibboleth,” a manner of speech distinguishing a particular group of people, often used as a means of identification or a test of belonging. The term now signifies any type of linguistic or cultural indicator that separates insiders from outsiders. In modern usage, a shibboleth might not be a matter of life and death, but it can still significantly influence how we perceive and interact with others.
When I was first hired as an English teacher, it wasn't because of my qualifications. I had none. Nor was it because of my experience. As I said, it was my first teaching job. Even so, when I arrived in Japan, I was hired within two weeks. I assume this was because I am a “native speaker” of Standard English. Being white probably helped, too.
As someone who grew up speaking Standard English, I was obviously a competent user of the language, but I had little explicit grammatical knowledge. Most schools in Canada teach essentially nothing at all about English grammar. That was true when I was in school, and it remains true today. I was lucky in that I was among an early wave of French immersion students, and so I knew something about French grammar at least. But this was only the tiniest help to me when I tried to address my students' questions.
Why do you use the present continuous here, but the present simple there? When do we need the word “the”? Why do we ask “who does she know” but not usually “who does know her”?
To all of these questions, I could say little more than, it sounds right. I had strong intuitions about what was grammatical and what was not, but I had no way of conveying those intuitions to my students in any systematic and generalizable way. I'd never even thought about what it means for something to be grammatical.
At this point, you, yes, you, already have much more explicit knowledge of English grammar than I did. In fact, you probably have more explicit knowledge about English grammar than the average college professor.
If a student asked you about the determiners in “I had coffee and a piece of toast for breakfast,” you could tell them that “coffee” is a non-count noun, so it doesn't require a determiner, but that “piece,” as a singular count noun, can't go without one. You know something about English grammar. So you're way ahead of where I was when I started out.
But you still probably haven't thought about what it means for something to be grammatical. This is what I'd like to explore here. A fuller treatment is given in the chapter on grammaticality.
The fallacy of monosemy.
Before we dive in, just a few words about the fallacy of monosemy. If a word is monosemic, it has a single meaning. Mono, meaning one, and the “sem” of semantics, meaning meaning.
This is the idea at play when a child asks, “can I go to the toilet?” and the teacher responds cruelly, “I don't know, can you?” The teacher acts as though the word “can” really has only one meaning, ability, when in fact “can” has multiple meanings.
In Chapter 1, I mentioned technical meanings and everyday meanings. When somebody says, technically the word means such-and-such, they could simply be saying that there is a technical sense of the word, but more often they're falling into the fallacy of monosemy.
We don't need to pretend that the word “grammatical” has only one true meaning, but nor does it mean just anything. How do we establish the meaning of “grammatical”? As a comic in the chapter explains, what a word means depends on what we mean when we use it. That comic asks whether a hotdog is a sandwich, and it's reproduced in the written material.
So spend some time thinking about what “grammatical” and “ungrammatical” mean to you. Recall cases in which you've used them. What were you referring to? If none come to mind, consider creating some examples for each. Either way, try to think of commonalities that might generalize to other examples, especially if some borderline cases occur to you.
Pause here.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics, by Matthews, defines “grammatical” like this. There are two senses.
One. Having to do with grammar.
Two. Specifically of sentences and the like, which conform to the rules of a given language. For example, “I like tea” is grammatical in English, while “I tea like” is ungrammatical. Hence grammaticality, or grammaticalness, is variously a property either assigned to sentences by a specific grammar, or of sentences judged to be acceptable to speakers who hypothetically know its grammar.
Are we reduced to Wittgenstein's notion that language is mere use? That whatever we say is grammatical? That our speech defines our grammar? Well, yes, but that's of no help to you or your students, so I would like to consider some examples.
Let's start with an easy one. Example one is presented without any judgment mark.
Example one. “Me key there happy mine the.”
I hope you agree that example one seems unequivocally ungrammatical. But why? No, really, why? If you feel that it is ungrammatical, what can you point to to support that intuition? If somebody claimed that this is actually grammatical, what counter-arguments could we make?
Well, we could start with the word “key” and say that, as a singular countable noun, it needs a determiner and it doesn't seem to have one. A noun phrase like “my” could function as a determiner, but “me” doesn't function that way, at least not in Standard English, though perhaps this is the “me” of a different dialect wherein “me” can mean “my.”
You could look at “key” and ask yourself whether it's a noun or a verb. If it's a noun, then there is no verb, and if this is supposed to be a clause, it needs a verb phrase as its head. So let's assume “key” is a verb. That makes “me” the subject, but we would expect “I” here, not “me.” And if “key” is a verb, then you expect to key something. Unfortunately, “there” and “happy” aren't things that can be keyed. You could say, “please key mine,” but “mine” seems too detached from “key” for that to work. And “the” is just left at the end there, in a position where it never occurs.
I could go on, but perhaps it's simpler than that. Maybe example one is ungrammatical because it doesn't make sense. Could it be that grammatical language always makes sense? Could it be that something that makes sense is grammatical? These are not the same claims.
As critical thinkers, we need to try to disprove our ideas. We could do this by creating a grammatical utterance that makes no sense and comparing it to an ungrammatical utterance. Fortunately, the hugely influential linguist Noam Chomsky has done that for us already, with the famous examples, at least famous in linguistics, in example two.
Example two has two parts. Two a carries no judgment mark. Two b is starred, which is to say it is marked ungrammatical.
Two a. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
Two b, starred as ungrammatical. “Furiously ideas sleep green colorless.”
Chomsky claims that two a is grammatical and that two b is ungrammatical, which matches my intuition, and yours too, I expect. It seems you don't have to make sense to be grammatical.
But Chomsky also claims that neither the sentences nor their subparts would occur in a corpus of English, and that they would be, in his words, equally remote from English in any statistical model of English. He wants to say that frequency has nothing to do with it.
Here, I think he errs. Fernando Pereira has shown that two a is actually much more statistically likely than two b. And the success of large language models shows that language truly is built on statistical regularities.
Next, we'll consider the converse, that all meaningful language is grammatical. Before we do, try to think of something that is ungrammatical but has a clear meaning.
Pause here.
Now consider example three, which carries no judgment mark.
Example three. “Jean Paul, very very good.”
This example was heard by my friend, Geoff Pullum, in an interview on National Public Radio. The speaker was Turkish. Her meaning, in its context, is clearly that Pope John Paul was a very, very good pope or person. But for this to be grammatical in English, we need a clause, with a subject and a head. That head should be a verb phrase, which means we need a verb, presumably “be,” though another verb that licenses predicative complements, such as “seem” or “become,” would also be possible.
It seems, then, that something can be grammatical but not meaningful, and meaningful but not grammatical. So meaning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for grammaticality.
So here's another thought: perhaps we just go by the rules in grammar books.
Example four has two parts. Four a carries no judgment mark. Four b is starred as ungrammatical.
Four a. “He was a beautiful young man, a beautiful beautiful boy.”
Four b, starred as ungrammatical. “The boy was beautiful beautiful.”
As you can tell by the star, I think four a is grammatical, but not four b. I assume you agree. The rule that explains this appears in the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language and was first noted, I believe, by Watt. But it is not widely known, and I assume that you've never encountered it before.
I also assume that the grammaticality of four a and four b didn't change between the time Watt wrote his article and the publication of the Cambridge Grammar. Given that, I guess we can set aside the idea that rules in grammar books dictate what is grammatical. Many rules are not mentioned in grammar books. In fact, many languages exist without any linguist having written a grammar for them at all. We wouldn't want to say that anything goes in those languages, just because no books have been written about them.
Now consider example five, which is starred as ungrammatical.
Example five, starred. “What movies do you have friends who acted in?”
You'll probably agree that this is a very strange sentence, almost like an optical illusion, feeling grammatical and ungrammatical at the same time. The reason is thought to be the result of something called island constraints, a kind of rule or limitation that many linguists think might apply to all languages, though there is some debate about this. This could be the result of some processing constraint in our brains, or it could be something about how information can be structured. Fortunately, if this is true, then you'll never have to explain it to your students, because nobody would naturally try to use a sentence like this.
So it seems that our processing ability may help us decide what is grammatical and what is not.
With this in mind, here is example six, which carries no judgment mark.
Example six. “After the trip, my suitcase sat unpacked on the floor for days.”
The chapter shows two photographs side by side and asks which one the sentence describes. On the left is a suitcase with clothes in it. On the right is a suitcase that is empty.
Many people say the sentence describes the first suitcase, the one on the left with the clothes in it, but that is incorrect. The first suitcase is packed. You put clothes in when you pack a suitcase. The second one has been unpacked. All the clothes have been removed.
Why would anybody get this wrong? The people who have thought about this question often feel that there's something tricky in the negation, the “un” at the beginning of “unpacked.” After all, if you replaced it with “packed,” the meaning would be perfectly clear. So is there some kind of glitch in the way we process language that messes with our comprehension sometimes? Maybe we can't rely on instinct to judge what is grammatical at all.
In fact, this is exactly what Bever's famous sentence suggests. Here is example seven. Listen for the judgment mark, because there isn't one, and that matters.
Example seven, with no judgment mark. “The horse raced past the barn fell.”
I expect that example seven seems ungrammatical to you, but you may have noticed that there is no star. What if we change “raced” to “ridden”? Now it is clearly grammatical. If it's not yet clear, it means the horse that was raced past the barn fell.
The problem you had with example seven was that you interpreted “raced” as the past-tense form, like “rode,” rather than the past-participle form, like “ridden.” Again, maybe our instinct isn't a hundred per cent reliable. Sometimes we need to think things through carefully, step by step.
Example eight is marked with a raised question mark, which flags it as questionable rather than clearly ungrammatical.
Example eight, questionable. “I have 30 years.”
It seems to me that this is perfectly grammatical. Compare it with “I have 30 dollars.” In fact, this is how ages are discussed in many languages. But even though it's grammatical, it's still the wrong way to say “I'm 30 years old,” at least in English. So even being grammatical isn't the same as being acceptable.
Example nine is marked with a raised exclamation mark, which flags a form that differs between varieties of Standard English.
Example nine, differing between standard varieties. “I'll see you at the weekend.”
North American speakers of English generally judge this to be ungrammatical, but it is the normal way to express “I'll see you on the weekend” in British English. This is one of the small differences among Standard Englishes I mentioned earlier.
The reason for this difference is not a grammatical one. Rather, we are operating under different cultural assumptions about the relevant metaphor for weekends. It has been claimed that North Americans see a weekend as a platform or stage on which events play out, while the British see it as a point at the end of the week. There's more about metaphors and prepositions later in the book.
Example ten is marked with a raised percent sign, which flags a form that may not be grammatical in Standard English but is grammatical in other varieties.
Example ten, grammatical in other varieties. “I ain't no quitter.”
Unlike the weekend example, this is not a difference among Standard Englishes. The percent mark flags a form that may not be grammatical in Standard English but is grammatical in other varieties.
Example eleven carries no judgment mark.
Example eleven. “Me and Mia are taking the bus.”
In contrast, example eleven is fully grammatical in all dialects, but it belongs to an informal register. The more formal version would use “Mia and I.” This is a shibboleth for some people.
Finally, try to fix example twelve, which I find ungrammatical. It is starred.
Example twelve, starred. “Jim and me's teacher was Geoff.”
Pause here.
There's no good solution. If we change it to “Jim and my,” then it's like “my teacher and Jim,” which is not what I mean, and a similar problem applies to “me and Jim's.” But “Jim and my's,” which is also ungrammatical, sounds just as bad as “Jim and me's.” Could it be that we need to be ungrammatical sometimes in order to express certain simple concepts? I think that might be the case.
Summary.
Generally, things that are grammatical are meaningful and vice versa, but being meaningful is neither necessary nor sufficient for grammaticality. Many of the rules are described in grammar books, but many aren't, and often the descriptions in grammars are just wrong. Expert users of English can generally rely on our intuition to know what is grammatical, but our intuition can be fooled. Sometimes an explanation helps us to see something we didn't before. Some grammatical things are just not what we'd say, and some things just can't be said grammatically.
So what makes grammatical grammatical?
A model of grammaticality.
Okay, so we've seen that grammaticality isn't as straightforward as we might have thought. But that doesn't mean we can't come up with a useful way of thinking about it. Here's a model that might help.
At its core, grammaticality is about form-and-meaning pairings that work for a particular group of speakers in a particular situation. It's not universal.
To see what I mean, consider that a teen saying “mommy sock” to mean “that's your sock, mom” feels very ungrammatical, and very odd. The same utterance by an infant doesn't evoke either of those feelings, though, because it's a good form-and-meaning pairing that works for a particular group of speakers in a particular situation.
Or consider the following conversation, recorded by Nishimura. Some of the speaker's words are Japanese, and I'll give the translation after each one.
B.C. ni iku toki, meaning “when I went to B.C.”, hikooki de yomoo to omotte kara, meaning “thinking I would read it on the plane”, I bought it, eh? So, it's not finished yet. She laughs. And it's hard, 'cause me-nanka, meaning “a person like me”, moo, meaning “really”, hon-nanka yomu to, meaning “when I read a book”, cover-to-cover yomanakattara, meaning “unless I read it cover-to-cover”, if I stop dokka de, meaning “at some point”, I forget the story.
This kind of code-switching is perfectly grammatical for any English-Japanese bilingual, but much of it seems ungrammatical for other English speakers.
The chapter has a diagram of speaker groups at this point, and it's worth describing, because the model depends on it.
Picture one large oval containing everyone: all English speakers. Inside it, a second, smaller oval: Standard English speakers. That second oval sits off to one side, so parts of the big oval fall outside it.
Now picture smaller circles scattered across those two ovals. Three of them sit inside the Standard English oval: teachers, teens, and lawyers. One straddles the edge: Singaporeans. And two sit in the outer oval, outside Standard English altogether: infants, and people in 1300.
The figure is not to scale, and the point isn't the sizes. The point is that grammaticality is settled inside these groups, and the groups overlap, nest, and sit outside one another.
When it comes to the meaning, there can often be layers and layers, any of which need to match the construction used to convey them.
“Try it and you'll regret it” has a literal meaning: an instruction to try something, followed by a prediction that the experience will lead to regret. In everyday speech, though, it has a conditional meaning: if you try it, you'll regret it. On top of those, it also may carry an implied threat: if you do that, I will punish you. Here, the literal meaning of the imperative “try it” is turned on its head and comes to mean “don't try it.”
Sometimes old constructions pair with new meanings. That's how we ended up with the “going to” future-time idiom. It began literally meaning going somewhere to do something. Why am I going there? I'm going to shop. But the fact that the activity could only happen after some period of travel time provided the opportunity for it to take on a future meaning.
Other times grammatical constructions become less grammatical or fall out of use. Take the way we make questions and negatives in English. Shakespeare would have asked “know you not?” instead of “don't you know?”, and obviously, that's not how you and I say it.
So when do we say something's ungrammatical? A few situations come to mind.
First, when the form doesn't pair with, or even suggest, any meaning at all. Something like “Can the have running?”
Second, when there's a mismatch between what you mean and what people expect you to mean. “I have 12 years” is a perfectly good way of replying to the question “How long do you have until retirement?” But it's ungrammatical in response to the question “How old are you?”
Third, when you've got contradictory form-and-meaning pairs in the same utterance. “I have two job” tells us both that the number of jobs is plural and that it's singular.
And finally, when there's a strongly preferred alternative form, and there's no good reason not to use it.
Take a common phrase like “It's very good.” Most English speakers would call this grammatical. Say “It very good” instead, and you'll still get your meaning across. After all, ungrammatical doesn't mean meaningless. But listeners might pause, wondering why you skipped the verb. Maybe you're quoting something? Referencing a meme? Without a clear reason for the unusual form, they're likely to judge it ungrammatical.
These judgments aren't always reliable guides. Our brains sometimes flag perfectly grammatical sentences as wrong just because they're tricky to process. Other times, we breeze right past actually ungrammatical phrases without noticing, especially in casual conversation when we're focused on meaning rather than form.
This model frames grammaticality not as following rules from grammar books, but as being about using form-and-meaning pairs that work for your linguistic community in a given context. Grammar isn't hardwired into our brains, despite what many linguists since the 1950s have claimed. We don't, for example, have the innate principles and parameters that Chomsky claimed.
Language is fluid, shaped by its speakers. What counts as grammatical shifts across time, space, and social groups.
Most learners aim their speech at the Standard English-speaking world. Not everyone needs or wants to match these standards exactly. Many just want to communicate effectively, maybe to do business in a country like Vietnam. When students pursue Standard English, we guide them toward that goal.
Fortunately, unlike rigid technical standards, language standards bend without breaking. You can diverge quite a bit while still making perfect sense.
Grammar alone doesn't determine how language works. Social expectations and values cast long shadows, quietly shaping what people consider correct. And this brings us to normativity: how social rules ripple through language, shaping both our words and our place in the world.
Normativity.
A normative statement is one that deals not with how things are, but with how they ought to be, or how it is appropriate for them to be given some set of values.
The chapter sets out a table with two columns, normative on the left and positive on the right, and four pairs of entries. Each pair contrasts a domain concerned with how things ought to be against one concerned with how things are.
First pair. Normative: the rules of table manners. Positive: the claims of physics.
Second pair. Normative: ethics. Positive: number theory.
Third pair, and this one splits a single field. Normative: economics, in the sense of how we should distribute scarce resources. Positive: economics, in the sense of how we actually distribute scarce resources.
Fourth pair, and this is the one that matters for us. Normative: language teaching. Positive: linguistics.
Geoff Pullum gives examples like the following to illustrate normative observations.
“It is not polite to lick your knife” offers a reason for not licking your knife.
“Torturing children is wrong” implies a reason for not torturing children.
“Bach's music is beautiful” suggests a reason for planning to attend a Bach concert.
“Inflation is too low” signals to central bankers that they should lower interest rates.
And from the fact that torturing a child is immoral, it follows that we ought not to torture a child.
Are the rules of English grammar normative? And if so, what can be learned from them about how folks ought to speak English? In paraphrase, Pullum observes two things.
Since nobody is under any obligation to speak English, in general, nothing at all follows concerning what anyone ought to do or not do.
But if we want to be taken to be speaking a particular variety of English, then we ought to follow the rules of that variety.
On the other hand, if we merely want to communicate with an English speaker, then what we ought to do is less clear. Two thoughts here.
Perhaps we ought to aim to be comprehensible, or to be able to comprehend. Grammatical accuracy does not guarantee comprehensibility, and ungrammatical language can be comprehensible, as we've seen, but most comprehensible English is also grammatical.
And similarly, perhaps we ought to be timely and fluent, but concern about being grammatical may reduce timeliness and fluency.
Audience.
I would like to make one last point about normativity, which is that it often presumes a population within which the norm applies. Recall that diagram of speaker groups.
If grammaticality is a combination of meaning, expectedness, and processability, for a particular group of speakers in a particular situation, then we really need to take account of not only who the speaker is but who the audience is. That audience is a key piece here, and, when it comes to learning English, the audience is often the social group of Standard English speakers.
This may not always be the case, though. Some people learning English may wish to communicate with other non-native speakers, or with a specific cultural group, or perhaps even just within their own personal networks, and these groups may not be speakers of Standard English. For these folks, the norms of Standard English may be less relevant, and they may instead need to master a different set of linguistic norms, those that are relevant and meaningful within their specific target audience.
But to the extent that our students wish to become speakers of Standard English, it seems clear to me that we, as language teachers, should facilitate that. And yet, even for those students, time should most likely not be spent grasping for finer and finer levels of Standard English fidelity, instead of learning more vocabulary or increasing their processing fluency.
As noted above, unlike technology standards, which often require high fidelity, language standards are quite forgiving within a language, as long as we are. And so English-language learners can often communicate highly successfully while diverging significantly from the standards of their audience.
As Vivian Cook observed, and I quote, “people can't be expected to conform to the norm of a group to which they do not belong, whether groups are defined by race, class, sex, or any other feature. People who speak differently from some arbitrary group are not speaking better or worse, just differently.” End quote.
The difficulty will be in how differently they speak, how much they wish to belong, and how much we wish to accept them.
Finally, facilitation can go two ways. The standard way is to put the burden on students to conform. That's how most English teachers see our jobs, and it's probably our most central role. But there is another way, and that is to help Standard-English speakers to accommodate, include, accept, and welcome users of other varieties of English. Needless to say, language teachers typically do much less of this, many of us none at all. But, as English-language teachers, we should at least be aware of the possibility.
Conclusion.
Standard English has social and economic power, and your students need access to it. But “is this correct?” is rarely a yes-or-no question. The answer depends on the community, the register, and the purpose, and sometimes the most useful thing you can say is why a form is standard, not just that it is. That's a harder conversation than red-penning errors, but it's the conversation this chapter equips you to have.
Exercises. There are ten. Pause after each one if you want to work it through.
One. Explain the concept of “standard” in the context of language. How is it different from the idea of “good” or “correct”?
Two. Why is the distinction between Standard English and Standard Englishes, with an “es” on the end, important?
Three. Provide an example of a shibboleth and explain how it functions as a social marker.
Four. What are some limitations of relying solely on intuition to determine grammaticality?
Five. The text argues that meaning is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for grammaticality. Explain this claim with an example.
Six. What factors contribute to a form-and-meaning pairing being considered grammatical for a specific group of speakers in a particular situation?
Seven. Describe a situation where an utterance might be considered ungrammatical even if it successfully conveys meaning.
Eight. How can the concept of audience inform our understanding of grammaticality?
Nine. What is meant by the term “normative” in the context of language?
And ten. What is the role of a TESL teacher in navigating the complexities of Standard English and grammaticality for their students?
Answer key. Ten answers, in order.
One. A standard language is a set of widely accepted and institutionalized conventions, not quality or correctness. It's more about ubiquity and institutional backing than about being good or correct.
Two. The distinction recognizes that Standard English is not one but a cluster of dialects with subtle variations across regions and cultures.
Three. A shibboleth is a linguistic feature that distinguishes a particular group of people. An example is the pronunciation of the word “car” in various English dialects, where some pronounce it with a strong “r” sound, while others do not. It serves as a social marker, signalling belonging to a specific group.
Four. Intuition can be subjective and influenced by personal dialectal background. Also, complex grammatical structures or unfamiliar expressions can lead to incorrect judgments about grammaticality.
Five. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is grammatically well-formed, but it lacks meaningful content. Conversely, the utterance “Go store” conveys meaning but is ungrammatical in Standard English.
Six. A form-and-meaning pairing is considered grammatical when it aligns with the shared linguistic conventions, expectations, and processing capabilities of a particular group in a given situation.
Seven. “Him and me seen it already” would be considered ungrammatical in many settings, even though its meaning is clear. The context and the audience's expectations influence perceptions of grammaticality.
Eight. Different audiences have different expectations regarding language use. An utterance that might be acceptable among close friends may be considered ungrammatical in a formal presentation.
Nine. Normative statements are those about how language ought to be used based on established conventions or standards, rather than describing how it is actually used.
And ten. TESL teachers need to guide students towards achieving communicative competence in Standard English, while acknowledging the diversity of English dialects and fostering an understanding of language as a dynamic social phenomenon.
Discussion questions. There are five, and the chapter doesn't supply answers for these.
One. Discuss the historical and social factors that have contributed to the emergence and dominance of Standard English. How has its role evolved over time?
Two. Critically evaluate the arguments for and against teaching Standard English to learners. Consider the potential benefits and drawbacks for students in different social and professional contexts.
Three. Analyse the relationship between grammaticality, meaning, and comprehensibility. Provide examples to illustrate how these concepts can sometimes align and sometimes diverge.
Four. Explore the concept of linguistic prejudice and discuss how it can manifest in attitudes towards non-standard dialects. How can language teachers promote respect for linguistic diversity?
And five. Consider the future of Standard English in a globalized world. How might factors such as technology, migration, and the rise of new Englishes influence its evolution and international role?