The Role of Grammar

Lexicographers and grammarians of English – ne'er the twain doth meet. Each coterie inhabits its own world, assuredly self-contained. But lexicon and grammar are intertwined in the assemblage of language; lexicographers and grammarians need to fully appreciate each other's endeavours, and to integrate these. Think of language as like a feast. Lexical words are the ingredients – fruits and vegetables, fish and meat. They are dissected, blended, shaped, baked, garnished, and daintily served; these processes are akin to grammar. Most of the ingredients are of little use on their own. And the bakery whisks, dishes, stove and plates require an input. Taken as a whole they create a meal; separated, each is simply a curiosity. The short grammar which Samuel Johnson attached to his 1755 dictionary was a kind-of afterthought, something he considered should be there but attached only minor importance to. As shown on pages 99–100, there was no cohesion between grammar and lexicon. In 1828, Noah Webster included a fuller prefatory grammar, with a number of astute insights, but it was still on a Latinate model and essentially a thing apart. Subsequent dictionaries have generally left grammar alone, contenting themselves with stating the word class for each entry and a little morphological information, such as whether an adjective takes - er and - est , and the forms of irregular verbs. Grammar deals with types of constructions – frames whose slots are filled by phrases and words – and with grammatical words and affixes which mark function (like possessive ‘s ) and derive one type of word from another (as in de-class-ify ). Modern dictionaries try to do too much, in one direction, and fail to specify information which is needed, in another. Lexical words belong to large open classes – nouns, verbs, adjectives. In contrast, grammatical elements constitute small closed systems – articles, demonstratives, pronouns, and affixes such as un- , in- , dis- , mis- , -ify , and - ise . Dictionaries list these as if they were a deviant type of lexeme, treating each as a singleton, and attempting (typically without success) a ‘definition’. Here they try to do too much, in a misguided and non-useful way. Information which the user of a dictionary does need supplied – if they are to learn how to speak the language effectively – concerns which syntactic slots a given word may relate to.