JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #48
April 15, 2021
This week I want to talk about an esoteric bit of English grammar and then connect it to the writing advice to "write what you know." You’ll see. In any case, I’ll give it a shot.
I separate grammar from style in the following way. Grammar is a matter of mental faculties, the productive capacity of a human mind that has learned a language to generate a sentence in that language, while Style is a domain-specific prescription on the form language "ought" to adhere to, sometimes without reference to the underlying grammar of the language. Grammar is correct when it adheres to the generative computations within the mind of a speaker, while style is correct when it coheres with the expectations of a specific literary community. Despite anything your English teacher might have told you, what they generally teach is Style, not Grammar, as nearly every child internalizes the grammar of their language or languages within the first decade of their life. Within a speech community, these internalized rules generally align.
When we listen to the way people speak naturally, we can get a sense of their internalized grammar. One interesting case is the apparent "error" when someone says, "me and her are heading to the mall." Our educated reaction is to offer a correction: it should be "She and I are heading to the mall." However, English is an analytic language. That is, the grammatical structure of a phrase or sentence in English is attached to word-order. A synthetic language, on the other hand, uses inflections such as word endings to indicate grammatical structure. English was once upon a time a synthetic language, but because of the Viking conquest and various other power struggles in history, it has gradually become analytic. This is why there are a scattered few inflectional changes that survive today, as in distinctions among pronouns such as "I" and "me" or "she" and "her." But notice that we’ve lost the "thou"-"thee" distinction and have almost lost the "who"-"whom" distinction.
Anyway, the phrase "me and her" in the sentence above gains grammatical case by its position in the sentence rather than inflectional form, so there is no need for the speaker to mark either word in the subject case. (Technical specifics: the NP is headless because it’s composed of two conjoined NPs, and a headless NP does not express case, as there is no head to express it.) Because we do still have case distinctions among English pronouns, when pronouns are used by themselves (i.e., not as part of a compound or phrase), we often use the inflected form in subject position, but this is wearing away in certain dialects. (Notice that the object form is the "natural" form of each pronoun, and the subject form is the inflected form. If I ask "who went to the mall?" we answer, "me!", not "I!", unless it’s part of a phrase that requires a subject case: "I did!")
On the other hand, it is a Stylistic convention to change "me and her" to "She and I" in subject position, and this stylistic convention will sometimes override the natural grammar for some speakers. Most style guides and stylistic insistence on particular forms stem from English grammarians who were influenced by Latin, a synthetic language, and insisted that English should behave in the same way, calling the copious examples of ordinary language-use that suggested otherwise flagrant errors according to their idiosyncratic prescriptions. This is why there is so much consternation over what should be the so-called "correct" form of a phrase like "between you and me."
So what does any of this have to do with "Write what you know"? I’m glad you asked. Style and Grammar, as I’ve outlined them here, are two different kinds of knowledge, and when we create characters, we can help depict them by making how they speak reflect the kind of person they are. A lawyer character who uses "pleaded" instead of "pled" is following a style guide that marks her as part of a particular community. A young person who doesn’t read a lot will be happy to say, "Me and her are headed to the mall" or "Us from the team are celebrating tonight." A professor character might say, "She and I discussed whom to nominate for the award."
As writers, we don’t necessarily need to study the intricacies of every style guide or description of generative grammar for every speech community, but because grammar and style comprise what we know about people, and if we "write what we know," that knowledge can help inform the way we depict characters in their speech.
Well, this wound up being much longer than I thought it would be, but I hope it makes sense anyway. Next week: something shorter!
Next: On Beverly Cleary