3 ms·

Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar

17 points by fogus 16y ago

imagii 16y ago
This is going to get worse. Walk into a high school classroom, write a sentence on the board, and ask the students to label the parts of speech. Don't be too surprised when only two or three students even bother to raise their hands.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  While I have sympathy with this comment, it's not the same thing. Knowing the names for bits of a sentence is different from being able to comprehend a sentence. You might know what an adverbal phrase is, without knowing the name for it. To say otherwise suggests the strong form of Sapir-Worf, which is generally discredited (while still actually being contentious). This article isn't even talking about the ability to name the different grammatical components, though. It seems to be talking about comprehension of sentence forms. There is a hint that using "every" can sometimes be misinterpreted. But we see that linguistic shift anyway. Things like "I could care less" are regarded as conveying the speaker's meaning, while the linguistic analysis of the form suggests a meaning opposite to that normally inferred, or implied. "Every" is frequently misplaced, and people seem to assume they know what the speaker means. Following logical analyses we often find that the speaker didn't actually say what they meant, and the listener understood something different again.
  - kenj0418 16y ago
    Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dXXX or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fXXXed up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your sXXX's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you know what I mean, like...
    - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
      Not sure if that's supposed to be informative, clever, funny, or something else. It's certainly not communicating anything to me, except something about you - something I'm sure you didn't intend to say.
      - bradleyland 16y ago
        It's a quote from Idiocracy; a Mike Judge film from 2006.
      - jeebusroxors 16y ago
        His comment is a quote from the movie Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/). Of course I can't speak for him, but the premise of the movie is a slow steady decline in education leading to the above quote, which is given to the protagonist (after he wakes up in the future) by a doctor as a diagnosis.
    - shawndumas 16y ago
      http://vimeo.com/3829682 http://vimeo.com/3829682
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
For years advertisers have known that active sentences and imperatives work better: "Buy Now", "Visit us at ..." and so on. This article suggests that passive forms might simply not be understood as well. "Our results show that a proportion of people with low educational attainment make errors with understanding the passive, ..." Perhaps the active forms are more effective in advertising (and elsewhere) simply because more people understand them.
yanowitz 16y ago
I think the study to which the article refers can be found here http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/ewadabrowska.html http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/ewadabrows... (http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/Ind_diffs_review.pdf http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/Ind_diffs_r... and http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/More%20individual%20differences.pdf http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/More%20indi...) I find these results fascinating. Are they any linguistic folks reading this discussion? I'd love to hear from them in more detail about what this implies for Chomsky's work.
- asolove 16y ago
  Agreed. The neurological basis for the relationship between what English grammar calls subject and predicate is a really interesting subject, and verb voice is obviously very related. My background in all this comes from a few classes in Chinese linguistics. Chinese, like many East Asian languages, divides sentences into "topic" and "comment" rather than "subject" and "predicate," so that the topic can be what we would consider the verb's object even without the verb being explicitly marked as passive. Yet modern Mandarin does have something like the passive with the modifier "bei-" which, when put before a verb, indicates the passive. This has a somewhat literary or ironic tone and is almost always used for negative actions like "he was hit" or "she was criticized." My favorite usage: When the Chinese government blocks website in the name of "social harmony", you say the site "bei-harmony," or "been harmonized."
asolove 16y ago
What is "basic" grammar? The only details provided in this article discuss active v. passive constructions. An excellent question then is: does "basic" English grammar include passive constructions? Certainly we all expect that children speak in the active, pass through a period of school where they heavily adopt the passive as part of a larger attempt to "sound smart" while writing, and then eventually make it to the goal of writing fluently with the simplest language possible. Is it possible that the passive is in some sense less basic to the brain's language processing than the active? The research seems to have shown we should simply change the definition of "basic" rather than conclude that the Chomsky model is wrong.
- hugh3 16y ago
  How many languages actually have a passive voice? Wikipedia says that passive voices are common in many languages, but it doesn't give any examples of languages which lack passive voices. It would be interesting if any languages lacked an active voice. I have my doubts. And of course, there are plenty of other possible constructions we don't get in English, like the zillions of possibilities presented by Latin. Wikipedia also notes the existence of an "adversative passive" voice in some Asian languages, only used when the action had adverse consequences. Weird. But really, maybe Microsoft Word grammar check was right all along: unnecessary use of the passive voice is confusing. The example "The sailor was hit by the soldier" really is a little more confusing than its active equivalent in which the soldier hits the sailor. The passive construction may be less confusing in the kinds of situations where it's actually used: ie where the actual hitter is not named "The sailor got hit".
a-priori 16y ago
I bet if you transcribed normal, everyday speech you wouldn't find too many instances of passive voice, even by well-educated people who can understand it (i.e, not the group they're talking about). It's just not something you encounter most of the time as an English speaker. Everyone finds passive voice harder to understand. I wouldn't be surprised if people learn to parse the passive voice by first transforming it into its equivalent in the active voice.
- kscaldef 16y ago
  "My brother was hit by a car." "My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer." "The US was robbed of a goal in their match versus Slovenia." "I was spellbound by the movie."
  - a-priori 16y ago
    You're right, I take back what I said. There are everyday uses of the passive voice. Thanks for correcting me.
zokier 16y ago
Are examples of sentences with "basic grammar" available somewhere?
tzs 16y ago
I have never really understood why passive voice gets a bad rap. Consider these two sentences: The sailor hit the soldier. The soldier was hit by the sailor. If I was writing primarily about the sailor, I'd choose the first. If I was writing primarily about the soldier, I'd choose the second. That way, the person I'm focusing on is mentioned first. For instance, if I was writing about the soldier's day: The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor. seems better to me than: The solder woke up. He had breakfast. The sailor hit him. The latter seems to shift the emphasis to the sailor, whereas using passive voice puts the soldier first in every sentence, providing a unifying structure to the paragraph.
- Darmani 16y ago
  This is largely from advice given in The Elements of Style. You are not alone in disliking it. http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549... is a good article attacking this and other bad advice given in that book.
- Gormo 16y ago
  The "bad rap" is due to the the fact that the passive voice does not require the subject of the sentence to be explicitly stated, and so is commonly used as a means of being evasive and misleading. "The soldier was hit by the sailor" vs. "the sailor hit the soldier" are both clear and descriptive, and effectively shift the emphasis between the soldier and sailor as you described. But it's more common to see examples like this: "Unfortunately, your funds have been misplaced. The cause of the problem is currently being researched. You will be informed as soon as the situation has been resolved." ...which deliberately avoids informing the recipient as to who is responsible for the problem, who is attempting to fix it, and who will inform them of the resolution.
  - swombat 16y ago
    No, actually the bad rap is due to the fact that the passive voice sounds, well, more passive. "The sailor hit the solider" inherently sounds more dynamic and active than "The soldier was hit by the sailor." Taking the GP's example: "The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor." sounds only marginally worse than the active version, but that's in great part because that's a lousy paragraph to begin with. If you actually write it with some sort of flair for interesting rhythm and verbs, it might become: "The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn, devouring some eggs and bacon that would give him strength for the hard day ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, the sailor bashed him on the side of the head with an oar." This is no great artistic creation, but it is at least a passably decent paragraph. Now turn the verbs into passive mode and see how it falls apart and becomes bland and, well, passive: "The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn. Eggs and bacon were devoured that would give him strength for the hard day ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, he was bashed on the side of the head by the sailor, with an oar." The second version is distinctly worse, and that's all because of the passive voice. Note: Before you respond to explain how the passive voice is appropriate in many situations, yes, I do acknowledge that. The passive voice is great when you know how to use it. Hell, it's as essential to pacing the english language as short-selling is essential to maintaining healthy markets. In most cases, though people use too much passive voice and too little active voice.
kevinpet 16y ago
"The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar." Clearly the author of this article does not understand the basics of linguistics. I suspect that he or she does no better than chance in summarizing the results of research.
- dmlorenzetti 16y ago
  Not to mention the fact that the title is wrong. "Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar" should read "do not"-- as evidenced by the statement "Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly."

17 points by fogus 16y ago

This is going to get worse. Walk into a high school classroom, write a sentence on the board, and ask the students to label the parts of speech. Don't be too surprised when only two or three students even bother to raise their hands.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
While I have sympathy with this comment, it's not the same thing. Knowing the names for bits of a sentence is different from being able to comprehend a sentence. You might know what an adverbal phrase is, without knowing the name for it. To say otherwise suggests the strong form of Sapir-Worf, which is generally discredited (while still actually being contentious). This article isn't even talking about the ability to name the different grammatical components, though. It seems to be talking about comprehension of sentence forms. There is a hint that using "every" can sometimes be misinterpreted. But we see that linguistic shift anyway. Things like "I could care less" are regarded as conveying the speaker's meaning, while the linguistic analysis of the form suggests a meaning opposite to that normally inferred, or implied. "Every" is frequently misplaced, and people seem to assume they know what the speaker means. Following logical analyses we often find that the speaker didn't actually say what they meant, and the listener understood something different again.
- kenj0418 16y ago
  Right, kick ass. Well, don't want to sound like a dXXX or nothin', but, ah... it says on your chart that you're fXXXed up. Ah, you talk like a fag, and your sXXX's all retarded. What I'd do, is just like... like... you know, like, you know what I mean, like...
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Not sure if that's supposed to be informative, clever, funny, or something else. It's certainly not communicating anything to me, except something about you - something I'm sure you didn't intend to say.
    - bradleyland 16y ago
      It's a quote from Idiocracy; a Mike Judge film from 2006.
    - jeebusroxors 16y ago
      His comment is a quote from the movie Idiocracy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/). Of course I can't speak for him, but the premise of the movie is a slow steady decline in education leading to the above quote, which is given to the protagonist (after he wakes up in the future) by a doctor as a diagnosis.
  - shawndumas 16y ago
    http://vimeo.com/3829682 http://vimeo.com/3829682

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

For years advertisers have known that active sentences and imperatives work better: "Buy Now", "Visit us at ..." and so on. This article suggests that passive forms might simply not be understood as well. "Our results show that a proportion of people with low educational attainment make errors with understanding the passive, ..." Perhaps the active forms are more effective in advertising (and elsewhere) simply because more people understand them.

yanowitz 16y ago

I think the study to which the article refers can be found here http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/ewadabrowska.html http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/staff/profiles/ewadabrows... (http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/Ind_diffs_review.pdf http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/Ind_diffs_r... and http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/More%20individual%20differences.pdf http://www.cogling.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/More%20indi...) I find these results fascinating. Are they any linguistic folks reading this discussion? I'd love to hear from them in more detail about what this implies for Chomsky's work.

asolove 16y ago
Agreed. The neurological basis for the relationship between what English grammar calls subject and predicate is a really interesting subject, and verb voice is obviously very related. My background in all this comes from a few classes in Chinese linguistics. Chinese, like many East Asian languages, divides sentences into "topic" and "comment" rather than "subject" and "predicate," so that the topic can be what we would consider the verb's object even without the verb being explicitly marked as passive. Yet modern Mandarin does have something like the passive with the modifier "bei-" which, when put before a verb, indicates the passive. This has a somewhat literary or ironic tone and is almost always used for negative actions like "he was hit" or "she was criticized." My favorite usage: When the Chinese government blocks website in the name of "social harmony", you say the site "bei-harmony," or "been harmonized."

asolove 16y ago

What is "basic" grammar? The only details provided in this article discuss active v. passive constructions. An excellent question then is: does "basic" English grammar include passive constructions? Certainly we all expect that children speak in the active, pass through a period of school where they heavily adopt the passive as part of a larger attempt to "sound smart" while writing, and then eventually make it to the goal of writing fluently with the simplest language possible. Is it possible that the passive is in some sense less basic to the brain's language processing than the active? The research seems to have shown we should simply change the definition of "basic" rather than conclude that the Chomsky model is wrong.

hugh3 16y ago
How many languages actually have a passive voice? Wikipedia says that passive voices are common in many languages, but it doesn't give any examples of languages which lack passive voices. It would be interesting if any languages lacked an active voice. I have my doubts. And of course, there are plenty of other possible constructions we don't get in English, like the zillions of possibilities presented by Latin. Wikipedia also notes the existence of an "adversative passive" voice in some Asian languages, only used when the action had adverse consequences. Weird. But really, maybe Microsoft Word grammar check was right all along: unnecessary use of the passive voice is confusing. The example "The sailor was hit by the soldier" really is a little more confusing than its active equivalent in which the soldier hits the sailor. The passive construction may be less confusing in the kinds of situations where it's actually used: ie where the actual hitter is not named "The sailor got hit".

a-priori 16y ago

I bet if you transcribed normal, everyday speech you wouldn't find too many instances of passive voice, even by well-educated people who can understand it (i.e, not the group they're talking about). It's just not something you encounter most of the time as an English speaker. Everyone finds passive voice harder to understand. I wouldn't be surprised if people learn to parse the passive voice by first transforming it into its equivalent in the active voice.

kscaldef 16y ago
"My brother was hit by a car." "My grandfather was diagnosed with cancer." "The US was robbed of a goal in their match versus Slovenia." "I was spellbound by the movie."
- a-priori 16y ago
  You're right, I take back what I said. There are everyday uses of the passive voice. Thanks for correcting me.

zokier 16y ago

Are examples of sentences with "basic grammar" available somewhere?

tzs 16y ago

I have never really understood why passive voice gets a bad rap. Consider these two sentences: The sailor hit the soldier. The soldier was hit by the sailor. If I was writing primarily about the sailor, I'd choose the first. If I was writing primarily about the soldier, I'd choose the second. That way, the person I'm focusing on is mentioned first. For instance, if I was writing about the soldier's day: The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor. seems better to me than: The solder woke up. He had breakfast. The sailor hit him. The latter seems to shift the emphasis to the sailor, whereas using passive voice puts the soldier first in every sentence, providing a unifying structure to the paragraph.

Darmani 16y ago
This is largely from advice given in The Elements of Style. You are not alone in disliking it. http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/25497 http://chronicle.com/article/50-Years-of-Stupid-Grammar/2549... is a good article attacking this and other bad advice given in that book.
Gormo 16y ago
The "bad rap" is due to the the fact that the passive voice does not require the subject of the sentence to be explicitly stated, and so is commonly used as a means of being evasive and misleading. "The soldier was hit by the sailor" vs. "the sailor hit the soldier" are both clear and descriptive, and effectively shift the emphasis between the soldier and sailor as you described. But it's more common to see examples like this: "Unfortunately, your funds have been misplaced. The cause of the problem is currently being researched. You will be informed as soon as the situation has been resolved." ...which deliberately avoids informing the recipient as to who is responsible for the problem, who is attempting to fix it, and who will inform them of the resolution.
- swombat 16y ago
  No, actually the bad rap is due to the fact that the passive voice sounds, well, more passive. "The sailor hit the solider" inherently sounds more dynamic and active than "The soldier was hit by the sailor." Taking the GP's example: "The soldier woke up. He had breakfast. He was hit by a sailor." sounds only marginally worse than the active version, but that's in great part because that's a lousy paragraph to begin with. If you actually write it with some sort of flair for interesting rhythm and verbs, it might become: "The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn, devouring some eggs and bacon that would give him strength for the hard day ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, the sailor bashed him on the side of the head with an oar." This is no great artistic creation, but it is at least a passably decent paragraph. Now turn the verbs into passive mode and see how it falls apart and becomes bland and, well, passive: "The soldier awoke in the early morning and had a hearty breakfast at the inn. Eggs and bacon were devoured that would give him strength for the hard day ahead. Then, as he stepped out of the inn, he was bashed on the side of the head by the sailor, with an oar." The second version is distinctly worse, and that's all because of the passive voice. Note: Before you respond to explain how the passive voice is appropriate in many situations, yes, I do acknowledge that. The passive voice is great when you know how to use it. Hell, it's as essential to pacing the english language as short-selling is essential to maintaining healthy markets. In most cases, though people use too much passive voice and too little active voice.

kevinpet 16y ago

"The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar." Clearly the author of this article does not understand the basics of linguistics. I suspect that he or she does no better than chance in summarizing the results of research.

dmlorenzetti 16y ago
Not to mention the fact that the title is wrong. "Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar" should read "do not"-- as evidenced by the statement "Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly."