RELATED MATERIAL OF POTENTIAL INTEREST

A short overview of English syntax based on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Rodney Huddleston.

Background An attempt to provide a very brief survey of the main outlines of English syntax as conceptualized in The Cambridge Grammar (Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum et al., Cambridge University Press 2002) and A Student's Introduction to English Grammar (Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum, and Brett Reynolds, Cambridge University Press 2022). Since The Cambridge Grammar is about 85 times as long as this article, the survey provided here understandably terse, and the exemplification very limited. This initial version of the Overview was written primarily for the English Teachers' Association of Queensland website, offering an alternative account of the grammar to that provided by the `Grammar at the coalface' articles mentioned above, but it might also be useful as a more general web-accessible orientation guide, similar in purpose to those provided in Chapter 2 of The Cambridge Grammar and Chapter 2 of A Student's Introduction.

Ideology, power, and linguistic theory.

Background This unpublished paper is the written form of a talk that was given by invitation at a session of the Modern Language Association in December 2004. It deals with various issues relating to the forces that appear to motivate prescriptive grammarians.

Prescriptive grammar in America: The land of the free and The Elements of Style.

Background This paper is a rewritten and expanded version of a talk given at a workshop on Normative Grammar at ISLE 1, the first conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English, University of Freiburg, Germany, 8-11 October 2008. It addresses the many shortcomings of a frighteningly popular book, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White. It is recommended to hundreds of thousands of American students as a guide to grammatical writing, but its grasp of grammar is truly dire. For a shorter discussion of the same book, see 50 years of stupid grammar advice by Geoffrey K. Pullum The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32), 17 April 2009, Chronicle Review section, B15 (print-ready 3-page version here).

The Queensland "Coalface" Grammar Dispute

Background In 2007 the English Teachers Association of Queensland (ETAQ) published in their journal Words'Worth a series of eight articles with the general title `Grammar at the coal-face', presented as a `teaching resource'. Two of the articles, `The structural basics' and `Functional elements in a clause', by Dr Lenore Ferguson, give an account of aspects of English grammar concerning the parts of speech, group and phrase classes, and clause structure: These two papers together are here referred to as `the Coalface Grammar'. Unfortunately, the Coalface Grammar contains an extraordinarily large number of errors — over sixty in fifteen and a half pages of relevant text. The author refused to acknowledge more than half a dozen. This gave rise to a serious dispute (a defamation lawsuit was brought by Dr Ferguson against Professor Huddleston, but since it was ultimately dropped the relevant materials are not reproduced here). A number of documents relating to this dispute are posted here, together with one by Professor Randy LaPolla. The main lesson to be learned is that it is extraordinarily difficult to correct the misinformation that is rife on the topic of English grammar: the subject is simply not treated as if evidence could be brought to bear and basic scientific standards need to be observed.
It is relevant to what follows that the Coalface Grammar is claimed to have been written primarily from the perspective of Hallidayan functional grammar, but theoretical framework disputes are not in general relevant to the nature of the errors; and in any case a significant number of the errors involve misinterpretations or misrepresentations of functional grammar.

The main part of this document is devoted to a detailed catalogue of sixty-five errors in the Coalface Grammar. It works through the latter page by page, citing pages from the text and explaining the errors in them. It urges that the work should be revised and corrected, or at least withdrawn.

Part 1 of this document is a letter written by the then President of the Australian Linguistics Society, Professor Randy LaPolla, to Dr Ferguson, endorsing the criticisms made by Rodney Huddleston in item [8] below. The letter was summarily dismissed by Dr Ferguson and the ETAQ President, Garry Collins, without any discussion of the criticisms; part 2 of the present document, by Rodney Huddleston, deals with these responses.

Following the refusal by Dr Ferguson and ETAQ to acknowledge and correct most of the errors, Rodney Huddleston wrote to principals of secondary schools in Queensland, warning them that the Coalface Grammar contains a great many errors and providing a link to this website.

Dr Ferguson's response to `Errors' (item 1 above) was posted on the ETAQ website (http://www.etaq.org.au) in January 2010 for about three months. The ETAQ executive declared that they will not publish any further material on the Coalface dispute, so Huddleston's reply appears here instead.

A summary account of the main events in the dispute from the initial contact in July 2007 to the posting of `Errors' and Dr Ferguson's response on the ETAQ website in January 2010.

This is a set of comments on a first draft of Dr Ferguson's response to `Errors'. She removed a number of personal comments as a result, but the main substance of the final version of her paper remained the same: a refusal to acknowledge more than a few errors and a refusal to consider the evidence presented in `Errors'. The letter also contained an eleventh-hour appeal to the ETAQ Management Committee to withdraw the Coalface Grammar if it was not revised and corrected.

The September 2008 issue of ETAQ's journal Words'Worth included a piece entitled `Reflections on Grammar at the Coalface', containing statements by the Management Committee and the author on what they called the `media attack' in The Australian. The approach to The Australian was said to have been unnecessary and unproductive, and there were critical remarks on the unnamed retired academic responsible — Rodney Huddleston. He in due course submitted a response, but it was rejected without explanation, so it appears here instead.

This was the first published survey of the errors in the Coalface Grammar, uploaded to the ETAQ website in April 2008, but subsequently removed. The Coalface Grammar was said to be written predominantly from the perspective of Hallidayan functional grammar, though many of the errors involve misrepresentations of the latter. The present paper is divided into three parts: the main focus was on inconsistency, error and confusion in the Coalface Grammar itself, with shorter sections on `Problems with functional grammar' and `Simplifying functional grammar'.