McWhorter Blog 2: Structure & Grammar

In the section “One Last Assumption: Where Are the Celtic Words?” in Chapter One of McWhorters’ Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, the author begins by asserting that aside from the Normans and the Vikings, the Celts left no English words except for “a dozen-odd words that have been traditionally traced to Celtic, and most of them are arcane, obsolete ones introduced by Christian missionaries from Ireland” (45).  Regarding grammar, Russian, for example was spoken by plenty of people who used it as a second language and because of that the Russian language changed.  In the middle of the section is about how folks during Old English times used going or go as a verb in the future, referring to distance as “going somewhere” (McWhorter, 53) and not for the intent of doing something.  McWhorter ties up the section by finishing off with a story about the Robinsons and the Joneses.  Both of these families can play the piano with their feet but the question was who started using their toes to tickle the ivory first.  Turns out, the fact is, the Robinsons learned from the Joneses and thus, the analogy is that the Celts did have an impact on English.   

McWhorter offers in Chapter Two the notion that grammatical errors appear in all languages and English is not immune.  He adds that “one does not ‘like’ the use of structure as in I structured the test to be as brief as possible” (McWhorter, 67).  This mention of structure reminded me of structural analysis and structural ambiguity in George Yule’s The Study of Language, 4^th ed.  Structural analysis is a type of descriptive approach where the priority is to “investigate the distribution of forms in a language” (Yule, 87) which is different from structural ambiguity.  Structural ambiguity means that a sentence has “two distinct underlying interpretations that have to be represented differently in deep structure” (Yule, 98).  There is also deep and surface structures which are “two superficially different sentences” (Yule, 97).    For example, an active sentence would be Charlie broke the window and a passive sentence would be The window was broken by Charlie; according to traditional grammar (Yule, 97).

Speaking of structure, something I would like to be more clear about is McWhorter’s use of structure in the sentence I structured the test to be as brief as possible.  This sentence sounds right to me, but is that because I’m using Modern English instead of Old English?