The Hidden Grammar of English

By Emma Sohan

Simple Phrase Grammar (SPG) is a sequence of separated, meaningful phrases, ignoring all of the rules of English Grammar for connecting phrases. All readers understand it, even though it's never taught. So it's a valid, usable grammar of the English language. (The English rules for spelling and constructing phrases must be followed, but the rules for connecting phrases and clauses can be discarded.)

SPG can be followed in perfectly grammatical sentences, sentences that are ungrammatical yet a normal part of writing (such as a sequence of fragments), and sentences that are obviously ungrammatical. One short example: "Trying to remember the last time I had anything but cereal for breakfast. Maybe never. Remembering the last time Mom fixed me breakfast before school, it was the last day of 6th grade, an important day for her."

Though simple, SPG has different limitations, often making it more powerful than English Grammar. That's why writers have been breaking the rules of English Grammar in the direction of SPG for the last 80 years. You cannot understand the grammar of modern writing without understanding SPG.

English Grammar makes no promise of understandability, and it encourages disconnected phrases. So SPG is a useful tour of some of the basic principles for writing clearly. SPG has no conventions or rules, just psychological principles for clear and powerful writing.

This book thoroughly explains SPG, and along the way provides a unique view of grammar. English at first seems to use comma, period, and newline as a three-tiered system for grouping. However the comma is given roles within phrases, completely undermining the reader's ability to know whether or not a comma separates a phrase. This includes describing what makes a phrase meaningful. It includes the possibilities for different separators.

The third and last grammar term in SPG is "connector", which expresses how a phrase relates to the previous phrase. This category includes conjunctions and adverbs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emma Sohan
• Release date: Aug 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005956004

Emma Sohan

I write fiction, usually Y/A. I also write about punctuation and grammar, usually useful advice for writers but also rewriting the foundations of grammar.

Book preview

The Hidden

Grammar of English

Published by Emma Sohan at Smashwords

Copyright 2021 Emma Sohan

There's no Atlantis, no perpetual motion machine, and you're probably thinking there can't be a grammar for English that no one has ever mentioned. Statistically unlikely, right?

But a demonstration is straightforward and logical. A language first constructs words.

Stop

Help

Fore

Abandoning the conventions for constructing words is not an option -- it leads to nonsense:

nadd er ho rald gruwapt

You knew that. We have conventions for pronunciation and spelling, and they must be used. But note that if a writer was writing in English but all the readers knew French, then the writer could switch to French, because the readers know two different sets of rules for how to spell words.

Second, a language develops conventions for putting those words into meaningful groups, which I will call phrases. (I will not use the same definition of phrase as in grammar/linguistics, but it is close.)

He kissed me

I wish I was in Paris

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water

Abandoning the conventions for constructing phrases accomplishes nothing and just leads to difficult reading.

Spout spider up water bitsy the itsy went the

You already knew that too -- the conventions for constructing phrases must be followed. So writers also do not break the rules for constructing phrases.

Third, and lastly, a language can develop conventions/rules for connecting and organizing these meaningful groups. English does this. For example, two independent clauses can be connected with a comma followed by a coordinating conjunction. For short, I will call these conventions English Grammar, abbreviated as EG.

Without that third step, a language would be just a sequence of unconnected phrases. Would it be possible to communicate with a sequence of unconnected phrases?

Yes. The following is relatively complicated and perfectly understandable:

I grab some dirt

I run forward almost tripping on my skirt

I throw the dirt at the thief Casor is fighting

It is only dirt

It bothers the thief for only a heartbeat

But it is all I can do to help

Apparently a heartbeat is a long time in a sword fight

Casor plunges his sword into the thief's stomach

That follows the rules for spelling and the rules for constructing phrases -- as it must -- but it ignores all the rules for connecting phrases. There are no commas, periods, dashes, or semicolons; there are no connecting words such as and to achieve grammatical correctness. And yet it is easy to understand.

How could communication be so good without following the conventions for connecting phrases? Aren't those conventions supposed to help? In fact, aren't they supposed to be like spelling and constructing phrases -- nonsense if they are not followed? Apparently the rules for connecting phrases are unnecessary.

Was EG perhaps accidentally followed in that passage? I don't even know how to judge that, because it is so devoid of EG. But the following passage shows that the rules of EG do not have to be followed. After her first day at a new house and new school, she is not expecting her step-mother to be home:

Walking into the house after school, ah shit, I forgot about my father's wife, I never expected her to be waiting for me, an ambush, isn't she supposed to be working? (Not Exactly Perfect, Sohan)

That too is a sequence of phrases, separated now with commas. Again, there was no intent to follow the rules of EG or use its conventions for anything. And the rules did get broken, I hope flagrantly.

But it still makes perfect sense.

So, unlike the conventions for spelling and constructing phrases, the conventions for putting phrases together can be completely ignored. I will call this lack of convention Simple Phrase Grammar, or SPG for short.

Ah, you might say, SPG is not a hidden grammar -- it's just no grammar at all. Fair enough, and you could (in theory) think of it that way. But those two passages shared two important features. First, the phrases all made sense by themselves. This book, especially Chapter 4, will discuss in much more detail what is or is not a meaningful phrase.

Consider, in contrast, EG:

Jon, who was nervous about his upcoming test, suddenly left the room.

That is not a sequence of understandable phrases -- Jon suddenly left the room is broken into two pieces, and it has to be assembled during reading. The rules of EG help with this assembly (presumably).

I will define SPG as containing phrases that are meaningful by themselves (and perhaps picking up ideas from the previous phrase following the principles for doing that). This could be considered a grammar rule, but it is also just a principle of psychology -- understandable phrases are, well, easier to understand. But SPG has no grammar rules to help with assembly.

1. Standing proud, I begin to speak.

Standing proud is not meaningful by itself; it cannot be imagined because there is no person to do it. So that breaks the principles of SPG.

2. I begin to speak, standing proud.

Standing proud is now meaningful, because it picks up 'I' from the first phrase. Modern grammar could not care less about the difference between those two sentences.

Second, both passages had a way of separating the phrases. In the first example, newlines were used; in the second, commas were the separator. That could be considered a grammar rule, but it's again a principle of psychology -- having a separation makes reading easier.

You might think EG separates, using the comma, but the full set of rules undermines that otherwise simple function:

John drove to Dayton, Ohio, and Ella stayed home.

Those commas do not divide that sentence into three parts. One divides the sentence into parts, the other does not, and you cannot know if a particular comma is separating into phrases as you read; you first have to already understand the organization of the sentence to know what the commas are doing.

In other words, you have to figure out how that sentence is organized before you know what the commas are supposed to be doing. So they really don't help with organization as much as they should. In fact, I had no thoughts about organization when I wrote those commas, I was just following the rules of EG.

Jon drove to Dayton, Ohio being a state he always wanted to visit.

That comma is an unfortunate ambiguity during reading. But the normal status for an English sentence is that the commas are playing too many roles to be good separators. A writer can of course think about organization, and a writer can even break the rules of EG to achieve a desired organization. But then the writer is more so writing in SPG.

As I define SPG, there is a third rule/convention/principle: A phrase can start with a word that shows how it connects to the previous phrase (or how it changes from the previous phrase).

Apparently a heartbeat is a long time in a sword fight

Apparently signals a shift from a description of facts to an inference.

EG can do this too, of course; the above is a perfectly fine EG sentence. But EG allows putting these connectors in other places.

A heartbeat, however, is a long time in a sword fight.

The insertion of however in the middle of a phrase wouldn't be allowable in SPG, assuming the comma is being used as a separator. In that example, a heartbeat is not meant to be a meaningful phrase by itself. And the following sentence is a particularly egregious breaking of the SPG principle:

Ella walked into the room. Because she was hungry, she headed straight for the food table.

Because does not show the relation between the phrase before and the phrase after; it shows the relationship between the two phrases that follow.

EG seems to have words that connect phrases, called conjunctions, and it is always described that way. But that classification illogically ignores how adverbs can play the same role.

Ella goes to the coffee shop every day. Occasionally she buys a croissant.

And it might seem like and is connecting in this sentence:

1. Ella likes to stop at the coffee shop, and the barista always greets her with a smile

But if and is doing something important, or doing anything at all, why is it missing when a semicolon is used?

2. Ella likes to stop at the coffee shop; the barista always greets her with a smile

The answer is, and is being used in #1 simply to follow the laws of grammar, and it's not used in #2 again just to follow the laws of grammar. So it's not playing an important connection role -- it is used or discarded merely to follow the rules of EG.

One last issue. From the sequences of sentences I started with:

But it is all I can do to help

Some grammarians once said that a sentence should not start with a coordinating conjunction (such as but). That's actually logical advice -- there is nothing in that sentence for but to conjoin.

Of course, we could describe the but as making a conjunction with the previous sentence, but it actually does the opposite, signaling a break with the previous sentence. We could try to describe but as being a grammatical conjunction to the previous sentence, but no grammatical conjunction is needed and but is being used only for its meaning.

Nowadays, it is considered okay to begin a sentence with a coordinating conjunction, but the only justification I have seen is that everyone does it. Of course writers do it, because i(1) indicating how a sentence relates to the previous sentence is very useful and (2) the start of the sentence is a logical place to put that information.

So SPG is constantly influencing how we write. It's not taught, it's not acknowledged, but it's there, it can be used, and writers can follow the principles of SPG.

So, there is a second grammar to English. Just as a writer could switch to French spelling if all the readers knew French, a writer can shift to this simple grammar, because all readers know and can understand it.

SPG is simple -- phrases, separators, and connectors pretty much exhaust the technical terms for SPG. And these are not conventions/rules, and no one can change them. You can violate them, but only by suffering the consequences of more difficult reading and forcing the reader to use EG.

And, a fundamental assumption of language is that communication is built on convention, so this simple grammar shouldn't be usable. We all have been taught rules for combining phrases. We have learned them explicitly and by example. So, one would assume, the reader should apply these rules and not following them should lead to confusion and jarringness.

And, yes, there can be a jarringness when SPG is unexpected. But only a little, and only at first.

And SPG certainly shouldn't be useful according to our standard understanding of grammar. I mean, the whole point of grammar conventions/rules for combining phrases should be that they make communication better. But it's not clear they do, especially for fiction.

Amazingly, a passage will always be understandable if it follows the principles of SPG:

I'm walking in a crowd in the school hallway, a hand rubs my butt, someone laughs. I turn around to see who did it, the guys are smirking, the girls are looking at me with contempt, everyone thinks I deserved that, I don't know who did it, someone behind me whispers trash, I whirl around, I can't tell who said that either.

EG does NOT make the same promise – sentences that are EG correct can be almost impossible to understand:

The book the girl whom the boy whom a father scolded kissed liked ended well.

Sentences that follow the rules of EG can also be easy to understand, of course, but that's only to the extent that they also follow the rules of SPG. Following both SPG and EG leads to very easy writing:

I shake my head and try not to smile.