5 - Issues in Grammatical Description

Summary

This chapter outlines a number of issues which are important in grammatical description (though they are often taken for granted) and which can affect readers’ understanding: the depth and refinement of the description, how to distinguish between different uses, and how to recognise and verbalise the concepts of formality and acceptability. Following this there is a consideration of three other important issues based on a research project (METALANG) using a corpus of grammatical description:

• personality – e.g. whether to use personal pronouns (we, you) to address the reader, or a passive, and the pros and cons of each;

• modality – the use of e.g. modal auxiliaries such as can and adverbs such as generally to indicate some form of hedging on statements, which is very common;

• sub-technical vocabulary – e.g. the use of words such as ‘state’, ‘action’, ‘event’ to describe the meaning of verbs.

Then there is a lengthy discussion of different approaches to exemplification, in particular the relative merits of contrived and ‘authentic’ examples. The chapter ends with a comparative analysis of two passages, one scientific and one pedagogic, on the same grammatical area using these criteria.