Talk:English grammar

Article Checklist for "English grammar"

Workgroup category or categories	Linguistics Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	Yes
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	John Stephenson 20:58, 16 April 2007 (CDT)

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Article perspective

As I've mentioned on the entry for Pronoun, we need to be careful here. The "parts of speech" model, as widely as it is used in primary and secondary schools -- and useful though it may be for those, such as copyeditors and editors, for whom consistency of written form is a legitimate and vital concern -- is really obsolete from the point of view of modern linguistics. We also need to be sure that, from the very start, a prescriptivist model is not implicitly given as the only or primary model. I would therefore propose that we use "word classes" instead of "parts of speech" as our model for subsidiary entries.

I've made some revisions in this direction to the opening paragraphs. Russell Potter 10:51, 18 April 2007 (CDT)

My initial idea for this article was to write a "how to" style entry. I teach English as a Second Language to adult immigrants (on a part-time basis). I guess I was thinking more on the WikiBooks idea.

For the while, I'll sit back and learn from your work. I work in the computer field and find the relationships between linguistics and computer languages interesting. --Alan Cohen 00:13, 21 April 2007 (CDT)

Local variants?

Does the article need to distinguish local variants? British from US and Indian from Australian? Should creoles be included or the opinion that English grammar was invented in the 1850's by Germans at the Universities of Heidelberg and Tuebingen (grin)?W. Frank 10:04, 23 April 2007 (CDT)

Yes, absolutely, I variants should be discussed -- this should be its own section, and could offer by way of examples such things as the Jamaican patwa's reversal of subject and object pronouns, to show that grammatical variation exists in English (the same could be done with other kinds of variation in an entry on English Phonology). Russell Potter 13:00, 23 April 2007 (CDT)