“Grammar” is how we think
When one of our nieces was a toddler, her mother stepped out of the room for a few moments only to hear a resounding crash. As my sister-in-law rushed back into the room, she saw a tableau: the lamp shattered on the floor; the cat on the other end of the couch, ears pulled back; the two-year-old, one hand still on the end table, arrested in midflight. With a stricken look on her face, the two-year-old said, “It was the cat.”
Now, such a story might well be used to illustrate how early it is that children can learn to dissemble. But what I found interesting was the sophisticated language use.
In English, sentences have what’s called end focus. This is the tendency, in English, for the point of emphasis to fall at the ends of phrases, clauses, and sentences. This is the focus that sentences, or clauses within them, following the straightforward structure “subject verb object” or “subject verb subject complement” naturally have.
Sentences like these, for example —
Call me Ishmael.
I am an invisible man.
You better not never tell nobody but God.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
In such sentences, sentences that spring so naturally to our lips, the words that fall at the ends of clauses are emphasized. Structure aligns with intent.
Of course, in longer sentences, there may be several points of emphasis, in the rising and falling cadence of the whole. Shorter sentences may rush to the end. Longer sentences sometimes meander there. Sometimes tease us there.
This natural point of focus is so important in English that we have several techniques for ensuring and enhancing it. Techniques of interruption and delay further heighten the drama of a natural endpoint. Techniques of permutation create a new endpoint, slotting the most important words, the “power” words of a particular thought, into that position. Questions, which naturally invite our attention, also thrust that endpoint further into the spotlight.
So, constructions like these, for example —
“Where’s papa going with that ax?”
But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction — what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
In such sentences, sentences which do tend to be more “writerly,” we’re able to more thoroughly align, or realign, structure with intent.
In her terror at the unexpected result of clambering about on the couch and end table — at having transgressed and now facing the unhappy consequences — our two-year-old niece shifted the blame away from herself using a constrution that emphasized the candidate she’d chosen as culprit. She didn’t say, “The cat did it,” which would have offered the requisite information. No, she said, “It was the cat.” She used what we call an it-shift to place the hapless cat in a position of emphasis in her accusation. She did this quite naturally, as do we all when we seek to explain, to blame, to exonerate — to communicate a thought or feeling urgently.
And she did this at two years old.
. . .
If you study these techniques that many of us adopt naturally in the moment, then the various ways of expressing a thought — the various ways of shifting rhythm and pacing, of controlling emphasis, of rearranging the pieces to say precisely what we’d like to say in the best way — become tools to be used as needed.
To work with a language in this way is to work with, and to deeply understand, the way that the language is organized, the way that it functions. In other words, to work with a language in this way is to understand its grammar.