FollowThe Truth About English Grammar by Geoffrey K. Pullum (Polity Press, 2024)
Many years ago, I took a freshman course called English Grammar, taught by the Renaissance scholar Bridget Gellert Lyons. In that class, we read A Short Introduction to English Grammar by James Sledd. Sledd’s book was a tough-minded introduction to structural linguistics and its application to English grammar. It had the misfortune of arriving just a structural linguistics was being eclipsed by generative grammar so it may never have gotten the acclaim it is due, but it is one of the few books from my undergraduate days that I’ve still got with me. And now standing next to “the Sledd” (as Bridgette Gellert Lyons referred to it) is Geoffrey Pullum’s The Truth About English Grammar.
Pullum gives a breezy and readable survey of English grammar in 18 short chapters. His terminology follows the excellent, comprehensive Cambridge Grammar of the English Language by Rodney Huddleston and Pullum. That book weighs in at 1860 pages. The Truth About English Grammar, at just 189 pages, is just the thing for those who prefer something more concise.
After a few preliminaries, Pullum gets right to categories (words, sentences, nouns, verbs , determinatives, adjective, adverbs, etc. ), moving on to types of clause (content, relative, passive) and finishing up with Mythical Grammar Errors, and discussions of Spelling and Pronunciation, and Style. Pullum is remarkably concise, getting to the point of such complexities as when you can drop that subordinator that or how fewer and less actually work with a minimum of fuss or confusion.
He follows Occam’s Razor in deciding what fits into which categories and he is relentless about maintaining the distinction between categories and functions (things are thus “modifiers” or “adjuncts” rather than adjectivals or adverbials, and “content clauses” rather than “noun clauses”). His exposition is uncluttered with theory and he does as well as humanly possible to avoid the terminological clutter that sometimes arises when linguists try to explain English grammar.
Some of his conclusions will surprise readers who only learned traditional grammar (such as the status of words like before, after, and because when they introduce clauses). But his analyses are well-justified and it may be that there are so few people today who are wedded to fusty traditionalism that this is not something to worry about.
Pullum rounds out the book with a selection of sources for Further Reading, and a useful glossary. The Further Reading includes Disrecommendations—a handful of books which are “clueless about grammar, dogmatic in tone, and absurdly out of date.” The Glossary gives definitions of most of the terms an concepts in the book (omitting for some reason “adjunct” and “supplement,” which are described in pages 14 and 15.)
The discussion of Mythical Errors covers some of the usual suspects—who and whom, I versus me, like, split infinitives, sentence-initial conjunctions, and “the moral panic” about modal adjuncts (as he calls the much maligned hopefully), and more. He weighs in on singular they and the “befuddled dimwits” who object to it. He digs into the origins of such myths and time after time shows that the case that traditionalists who promote them simply ignore the evidence of how English works.
Even experienced grammarians will take things away from Pullum’s book: I learned for, example, a new diagnostic for telling whether something is a preposition or not (it can be preceded by the word right) and I discovered that the noun midst can neither be classified as a mass noun nor a count noun. And I learned something new about the who/whom choice in sentences like We’re talking about someone ___ everyone agrees is qualified. Is it who (who is qualified) or whom (we are talking about)? You’ll find his solution on page 127. And Pullum’s brief chapter on Style makes the clever point that so-called dangling modifiers are a “failure of empathy” rather than grammar: the writer fails to take into account how a reader will process something like “Being six-feet tall, the box was easy for Justin to reach” (p 168).
James Sledd intended his book to be “aimed at people who have no prior experience with grammar but would like a modest-sized introduction to it that makes sense.” The same can be said for The Truth About English Grammar. It deserves a wide audience.
