Exploring Grammaticality

This week, we’re going to go deeper into ideas about grammaticality, and look for patterns present in conventional language in memes and other linguistic forms.

As we’ve discussed, linguists draw a distinction between ‘descriptively’ and ‘prescriptively’ ungrammatical sentences.  Descriptively ungrammatical sentences are difficult to understand and structurally broken like ‘Brenda cat her park to walk took’.  Prescriptively ungrammatical sentences are perfectly understandable (like ‘Maria went to the park and me and my friend decided to boldly go with.’), but don’t follow the socially enforced (and largely made-up) ‘rules of proper grammar’ like ‘never end a sentence with a preposition’ or ‘never split an infinitive’. 

We’ve already shown that there are memes which are descriptively ‘ungrammatical’, and just ‘don’t work’ and don’t make any sense. This weekend, you’ll generate memes which are ‘grammatical’ and not in the classical, descriptive sense, but today, we’ll look with more nuance.

This means that the kinds of ‘grammar’ your English teachers or a style guide talk about, because that’s more about social status than language!

Today, we’re going to see whether this distinction applies to memes and other language forms. Discuss with your group:

1. Are there ‘prescriptively’ ungrammatical language forms?
   • These would be understandable and communicative forms, which are considered ‘wrong’ and ‘incorrect’ for other, non-linguistic reasons.
2. Are there forms which are ‘grammatical’ in one context or group, but not in another?
   • This could mean a usage of a template or element which is only understandable in one social group, situation, or otherwise
   • Note that ‘grammatical’ is not the same as ‘socially appropriate’, although they can share elements
   • Are there elements of a form (or types of form) that you would use in one type of interaction but which would be incorrect in another?
3. Is there an ‘authority’ on the correctness of forms?
   • Prescriptivists often cite books like Strunk and White’s ‘The elements of style’ (🤣 ) as defining ‘proper English’.
   • There exist field specific style manuals (e.g. APA, or MLA) which dictate what one can and cannot do in that format
   • People often cite ‘Shakespeare’ (or other old white men) when describing ‘English done properly’.
   • Who would you cite if somebody told you your meme or usage was improperly constructed?
4. Can you create prescriptive ‘rules’ which reflect your prescriptive intuitions from above?
   • You’re trying to mirror silly rules like ‘Never end a sentence with a preposition’ or ‘You should always put two spaces after a period’.
5. Can you create descriptive rules which reflect ways that the linguistic forms you’re looking at are used?
   • There will likely be many, but think of rules which, when violated, simply break the forms for linguistic or communicative use
6. Are there different registers of form use?
   • Do you have any evidence that ‘the rules change’ depending on the people you’re around or the situation?
   • Can you use these things more or less formally?
   • Are there forms you wouldn’t send to a professor, but might send to a friend?