The New, New Grammar
Robert Oliphant · The Antioch Review · 1967
U To most of us, is something our children need more of: we see it, for most part, a set of wholesome verbal habits to be acquired by young through exposure to polite discourse and stern pedagogy. As pedagogy itself has become less stern, we have seen over past few years study of more and more characterized by an emphasis upon description of actual verbal behavior. Linguists and lexicographers have prided themselves on studying as she is spoke, and they have been quick to point out that our notions of grammatical propriety must in time defer to inexorable facts of linguistic change. The pedagogical translation of their efforts has often employed such terms language arts, communication skills, and the grammar. As creature of contemporary linguist, has been widely discussed-and widely castigated: Dwight Macdonald, for example, held linguists responsible for descriptive permissiveness of third edition of Webstee's; and humanists like Jacques Barzun have charged new grammar with debasing verbal coin of English-speaking realm. To complicate matters further-for ourselves and for our children-recent research in machine translation and information retrieval has focused attention upon artificial languages and upon formal properties of natural language. Much of this work has employed a very special way of talking about and our use of language-a way of talking termed variously generative grammar, transformational gram-