Introducing English Linguistics

tional grammar
is based. Thus, many of the modern, more scholarly
grammars of English, such as Randolph Quirk et al.’s (1985) A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language; Rodney Huddleston and
Geoffrey Pullum’s (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language;
and Douglas Biber et al.’s (1999) The Longman Grammar of Spoken and
Written English, will contain a mixture of more traditional and more
recent terminology.
Advances in linguistics, however, have led to the development of a fairly
extensive and sophisticated vocabulary of linguistic terms – terms that
are far too advanced for the potential audience for discussions of English
grammar. Hence, notional definitions persist in many school grammars.
School grammars are different from scholarly grammars in that they are
written for school-age children and young adults. They contain primarily
notional definitions because it is thought that more formally based defi-
nitions are too advanced for students at this level: simple and straight-
forward definitions are more important than those that are theoretically
more accurate. This trade-off has led to considerable controversy among
educators, since there is extensive evidence that students taught purely
notional definitions never fully learn grammar. Moreover, in the study
of foreign languages, notional definitions become even less valuable: to
learn how gender is marked in Spanish or French, for instance, one
needs formal knowledge of articles and of gender endings for nouns.
Notional definitions of gender will not suffice in this instance, since
beginning learners of languages do not know enough vocabulary to be
able to determine, for instance, whether something is a person, place,
thing, or idea.
English has constraints on both the linear ordering of constituents and on
their hierarchical groupings. As an illustration of the difference between
the