Miheer Desai suggested that I check out the Lisa VanDamme channel on YouTube for her views on parenting and teaching. I found the VanDamme Academy fairly interesting, and Ms VanDamme seems to be a very passionate person. Her video response to the Chinese Moms article was also thought-provoking, and it’s heartening to see that someone is putting an effort into improving pedagogy and understanding the ways in which we can educate kids in today’s world. As I was browsing her videos, I came across two videos titled _Why Grammar Matters_ (parts I and II), and I was obviously interested in checking out what Ms VanDamme had to say on the issue. I was also pretty apprehensive―I was rather impressed by her videos so far, and I didn’t want to see anything that might change that opinion. Have a look at them yourselves:

Miss VanDamme is not alone in her views. A lot of educated people, many of them good writers, speakers, or _users_ of the language1 in general, hold the view that the language people use is an errant kid that needs to be chastised by the rules of grammar taught in the classroom. It’s also an important way of asserting one’s intellectual superiority—correcting other people’s alleged grammar mistakes and saying ‘Gotcha!’.

Ms VanDamme says, and I quote her verbatim—”The goal of grammar is to help make our communication, our expression, completely, fluidly clear, for there to be no barriers to the understanding of what we are saying.” The rest of her video continues to stress on the same, almost like a record that’s got stuck—”Grammar helps in fully clear, effortless communication.” While this is a common motif that represents what most people think about language, it is quite untenable and doesn’t stand scholarly enquiry.

Let’s start with the specific example that Ms VanDamme mentions. LanguageLog already has a lot of analysis on it, but I will quote Ken Wilson, originally quoted here.

_Than_ is both a subordinating conjunction, as in ‘She is wiser than I am’, and a preposition, as in ‘She is wiser than me’. As a subject of the clause introduced by the conjunction ‘than’, the pronoun must be nominative, and as object of the preposition than, the following pronoun must be in the objective case. Since the following verb _‘am’_ is often dropped or understood, we regularly hear _‘than I’_ and ‘than me’. Some commentators believe that the conjunction is currently more frequent than the preposition, but both are unquestionably Standard. The eighteenth-century effort to declare the preposition incorrect did succeed in giving trouble, not least because it called the _‘than whom’_ structure into question, but it too is again in good order: ‘He is a fine diplomat, than whom we would be hard-pressed to find a better.’

But my concern is not that one particular example, but the thought process that went behind it. Similar thoughts have been relayed to me in the past. To give you a couple of examples, here are two snippets—one of them is from my chat history, and another from a discussion thread on the IITB Language Enthusiasts Group.

Language comes out of the necessity to make communication as accurate and as simplistic as possible
Language is first and foremost a means of communication, a means to convey a thought to another person(s), which one should be able to do in the simplest possible fashion.

However, there is a fundamental problem with this viewpoint—among other things, it reverses causality. Saying that grammar helps prevent ambiguity and makes communication more efficient conveys the impression that what people speak or write is inherently flawed or ambiguous or inefficient, and it is grammar that tirelessly helps prevent our conversation from degenerating into chaos. Of course, this cannot and does not hold up to the slightest amount of scrutiny, simply because grammar is and was an account of what constructions of a language native speakers consider correct, and which ones they don’t. And when you pick up _any_ language of the world and look at utterances that are considered grammatical in it (if you want, choose the most pedantic style manual for that language), you will realize that languages are rife with ambiguities, redundancies and general chaos. Of course, I am not saying that this is bad. This is perfectly acceptable, and sometimes the redundancies are there for good reason—phonology acts like an error-correcting code, and Gabe Doyle here has an interesting argument about how redundancy in language might even be an asset.

Ambiguities are everywhere, most of all in grammatical sentences! Two extremely important concepts such as Yesterday and Tomorrow have the same word in Hindi, and an English sentence like _I killed the man with the gun_ leaves it unclear whether the gun was the murder weapon or merely in possession of the victim. Languages can be extremely polysemous, with the same word having tens of meanings, many of which can’t be resolved even if you know the context. You may sit for as many hours as you want, and go through as many works of literature or trawl through corpora weighing in terabytes, and you still won’t be able to say that language and grammar were about clarity of expression and lack of ambiguity.

Now, I understand that if people around the world want to communicate effectively in a language, they should be following the same set of rules, or rather, they should know exactly what set the other party is following—but that doesn’t mean that these rules themselves need to resolve ambiguities, and they don’t. Even standard English, the kind whose grammar you’d see described in grammar texts and referred to by style manuals, is itself rife with ambiguities in construction—both lexical ambiguities and syntactic ambiguities—and this is in fact one of the many things that make natural language processing a difficult task. You have all kinds of Word Sense Disambiguation algorithms out there solely for the purpose of figuring out what a sentence can mean out of its numerous computable meanings. That languages are supposed to be for _clear, unambiguous_ communication, and that grammar is supposed to be the bouncer that keeps language from misbehaving, is not only factually wrong and empirically refutable, it is optimistic to the point of stupidity.

[Part 2 of this post can be found here]

Footnotes:

  1. By good, I only mean to refer to people whose usage of the language is generally appreciated. Famous authors, for instance. [return]