In America They Haven Used It for Years”: What Is Grammar?
“In America They Haven’t Used It for Years”: What Is Grammar? Thursday March 1, 2007 #spacer{clear:left}#abc #sidebar{margin-top:1.5em}zSB(3,3) “I don’t want to talk grammar,” Liza says in Shaw’s beloved play Pygmalion. “I want to talk like a lady.” Miss Eliza Doolittle (you might know her from the musical version, My Fair Lady) may not want to talk about grammar, but if she wishes to speak (or write) at all she certainly must use grammar. At least that’s the case if we accept the linguistic definition of grammar as a system of sentence patterns and words that every unimpaired person acquires from infancy when learning a language. But that’s not the only definition of grammar. It may also refer to the systematic study and description of a language or a group of languages. Eliza’s mentor, Dr. Henry Higgins, is primarily conce
