Page 30 - ELG2304 Apr Issue 484

FEATURE .

Linguistics and grammar -

time for a divorce?

COPYRIGHT PEXELS.COM

inety years ago, a Danish academic in English, a concept that has flummoxed The marriage was a convenience for both
wrote: “It is important to keep the generations of students and language teachers. parties, English Grammar was a field of
two concepts time and tense strictly Separating time and tense may have been a philology in decline and Linguistics was a bold
Napart”. Unfortunately the writer was quantum leap for research in linguistics, but new human science in search of a place at the
Otto Jespersen. I say unfortunately because as a tool for explaining language use, it rather academic high table. It was a fruitful marriage
although Jespersen wrote this in chapter 23 complicated life. Grammar and Linguistics too, giving birth to a large family including
of his Essentials of English Grammar, arguably (should) have neither the same approach nor Generative grammar, transformational
the most substantial and important English the same purpose, yet the twentieth century’s Grammar and others most sporting the
Grammar of the first half of the twentieth academic infatuation with Linguistics has left surbame Grammar, but adopting the two-tier
century; it was advice whose unintended the two intimately wedded. approach to language derived from Saussurian
effects have shackled the teaching of Grammar It has not been a happy marriage, and it is Linguistics.
– as opposed to Linguistics – ever since. high time now for a divorce. The marriage was Jespersen’s separation of time and tense was
Admittedly, the teaching and study of one of convenience; a century ago, Grammar part of that two-tier approach. For Jespersen,
grammar were already in the doldrums in was a well-established and noble family, with time was “independent of language”, whereas
1933, as Hudson and Walmsley demonstrate a pedigree stretching back to Ancient Greek tense was “the linguistic expression of time
in The English Patient (2004). Long before and Latin. English Grammar was born in the relations”; the problem with this is that no-
Jespersen, British academics had sidelined the sixteenth century with strong Latin genes, one who thinks about language for any reason
study of the contemporary language as being genes which remained prevalent right through other than linguistic analysis thinks in terms
of minor interest compared to the more noble to the twentieth century, by which time of a two-tiered approach. Humans intuitively
study of literature. the subject was desperately in need of new associate notions of tense and time, and indeed
Jespersen’s separation of time and tense led blood. Linguistics brought into the world by in many languages such as French, tense and
to the premise that there are only two tenses Ferdinand de Saussure, was a natural suitor. time are the same word.
30 April 2023