Traditional grammar is not well suited to such mastery. It does not adequately
meet the need of teachers or students for a means of analyzing and understanding
language because it is based on the structure of Latin rather than English. The one
important feature of traditional grammar is its terminology. Developed in ancient
Greece and Rome, the names of the various components of language provide the
vocabulary we must use to talk about language in general and writing in particu-
lar. Traditional grammar, on this account, always will play a role—albeit a lim-
ited one—in the study of language. Learning the names of the various consti-
tuents that make up sentences undeniably remains an important part of language
study, and the rest of this chapter takes up this task, setting the groundwork for
more interesting analyses to follow. This chapter, in other words, provides an in-
troduction to and an explanation of grammar’s basic terminology.
We must keep in mind at all times that people judge one another on the basis of
language. As speakers of American English, we have a prestige dialect that to one
degree or another accepts certain conventions and rejects others. These conven-
tions usually don’t involve grammar, but they do involve usage.^1 Wemaywishthat
language prejudice were not so intense, but simple denial does not provide a solu-
tion. For this reason, regular discussions of usage conventions appear throughout
much of this text. They are designed to examine the nuances of usage rather than to
be prescriptive, but it goes without saying that any notion of a standard presup-
poses some level of prescription. To reduce the inconsistency inherent in develop-
ing a text that focuses on description rather than prescription, discussions of
standard usage conventions should be understood in terms of appropriateness.
Form and Function in Grammar
Grammar deals with the structure and analysis of sentences. Any discussion of
grammar, therefore, must address language on two levels, which we may think
of asformandfunction. Sentences are made up of individual words, and these
words fall into certain grammatical categories. This is their form. A word like
Macarena,for example, is anoun—this is itsform.A word likejumpis averb,a
word likeredis anadjective,and so on.
The form of a word is generally independent of a sentence. Dictionaries are
an exploration not only of meaning but also of form because they describe the
grammatical category or categories of each entry. But language exists primarily
as sentences, not individual words, and as soon as we put words into sentences
they work together in various ways—this isfunction.For example, nouns can
TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR 53
(^1) Of course, Black English and Chicano English do vary grammatically from Standard English. Both
dialects are considered in chapter 7.