Grammar is the art of speaking and writing correctly and of the interpretation of the great authors, which Quintilian calls the reading of the poets. Its matter is significant speech, that is, speech that signifies something, and the arrangement of parts as words and phrases and clauses, so that what we mean can actually be communicated.
What grammar studies
Grammar treats the word as a conventional sign and asks how such signs are put together in a given language. A Semitic language like Hebrew where most words are formed from a three-letter root will take its conventional shape differently from a language like English that has a great deal of variety in word formation. Grammar studies letters and sounds, the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, preposition, and so on), and how words are joined into sentences.
Grammar and logic
A sentence can be grammatically correct and false, and it can be incorrect and true. Walshe gives a pair of examples: the grammarian judges “man is stone” correct and “man are animal” incorrect, while the logician judges the first false and the second true, though badly expressed (Commentary on the Categories, “What is Logic About?”). So grammar asks whether something is correctly said; logic asks whether what is said is true.
For the same reason, the parts of speech are not the same as the categories. “Man” and “humanity” differ in grammatical form, but both fall under the logical category of substance. “Blue triangle” and “equilateral triangle” have the same grammatical form, adjective and noun, but the first joins something that only happens to be in its subject (i.e., triangles only happen to be blue) and the second joins two aspects of what makes a thing to be what it is, its essence. Grammar and logic consider the same words in different ways.
Why grammar comes first
Logic works on statements, and a statement is made of words. Rhetoric directs a speech to an intended audience, but there is nothing to direct if the speaker has not said or communicated anything. So, the classical tradition begins with grammar: the words must be correctly joined before anything can follow logically from them or be communicated to an audience.
Does Grammar Improve Writing?
Starting in 1963, a number of studies (for example, those by Braddock and later Hillocks) show that students do not learn to write better by studying and drilling grammar. Other research, such as the work Daniel Willingham summarizes, indicates that explicit instruction in thinking skills of various kinds does not actually have much effect on a student’s ability to study at the higher level across disciplines: students trained in a thinking skill in one discipline see little noticeable change in their abilities in other disciplines. If all this is true, one might ask what the value of the explicit study of grammar is, and so whether grammar should really be where a course of higher studies begins.
What these studies considered, however, was chiefly the drilling of particular grammar rules for constructions and usage. And what they found was that drilling of this kind does not necessarily mean that students will improve their command of the language or even stop making the mistakes in question. What improves student writing, for example on the narrow task of teaching students how to use subordinate clauses, is explicit practice in combining sentences to form more complex sentences with subordinate clauses.
The classical art of grammar is rather different from instruction in particular rules for use and construction, since it includes the interpretation of the great authors and is not the study of grammar in isolation. To be clear, the classical art of grammar does include such explicit consideration. The difference, however, is that in the classical art of grammar particular rules and directions for grammatical construction are part of a much larger art that considers everything from the purposes of language and how words signify through the study of authors and passages in multiple languages, all as part (and only part) of a course that emphasizes reading and writing for their own sake, not just reading and writing in so far as they can teach us grammar or academic writing.
One key here is that grammar, understood as a liberal art, is also not primarily a study of random language samples that happen to speak or write correctly in a given case. Grammar, in the larger part that includes reading and writing, is aimed at good writers and good books, and secondarily at literary criticism. Students learn by reading and considering models that are enjoyable and upbuilding to read and models that are about interesting things or great moments, or works that are excellent poems or important speeches. To study a model in the best classical grammar course is primarily to read and enjoy the text, since that is the purpose of the text, and only secondarily to consider in that text certain features or aspects of its style or construction and to form the student’s capacity for criticism. Analogously, painters do consider how important paintings were made and what the technical effects are of certain choices and designs of the painter, but this is clearly subordinate both to learning the art of painting itself and also to critiquing paintings and pictures in general.
The aim of the classical liberal art of grammar and the means of reaching it are, therefore, not centered primarily on drilling rules of grammar.
Sources:
- Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria I.4 (grammar as the knowledge of speaking correctly and the interpretation of the poets).
- Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, Research in Written Composition (Champaign, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963).
- George Hillocks Jr., Research on Written Composition: New Directions for Teaching (Urbana, Ill.: National Conference on Research in English and ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication Skills, 1986).
- Daniel T. Willingham, “Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?” American Educator 31, no. 2 (Summer 2007).
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