National Grammar Day

The 4th of March was National Grammar Day (in the United States at least), and so I thought I would honour the occasion by talking a little about grammar.

Grammar is a slightly misunderstood concept in that it means different things to different people. To an average person, and indeed many books on the use of language, grammar mainly refers to spelling and punctuation. To linguists, however, it is a set of rules that governs how natural languages are structured and composed by native speakers.

I'm sure most of the people reading this have a memory of school English lessons where they were told about the use of "bad grammar" and, no doubt, reprimanded for it. This idea of "bad grammar" finds its roots in what is known as prescriptive grammar or a prescriptive approach to language. The term prescriptive refers to a way of looking at, and subsequently teaching, grammar that assumes that one particular type of grammar is superior to others and therefore should be aspired to.

The problem with this kind of prescriptive approach is that it does not represent real spoken language; the kind of language that you and I speak every day. We have to look to descriptive grammar for that.

Descriptive grammar, as the name suggests, attempts to describe the grammar of the language as it is used by native speakers, rather than attempting to determine a particular way of forming clauses and sentences according to rules that don't necessarily apply to the language use in question.

The Warrington dialect, just as any other dialect, is not Standard English. We have our own words, our own pronunciations, and indeed, our own grammar. And more importantly, the way we speak is not wrong or bad style, it simply has slightly different rules than the standard, and for that matter slightly different rules than other dialects. But, and this is the important part, there are rules! You cannot just say whatever, and call it grammatical.

Here are a few examples of Warrington grammar that are in every-day use, although you might not have noticed them:


Use of the past participle in place of the imperfect (past) tense:

• I run to t'bus this mornin' (I run to the bus this morning)

as opposed to the standard "I ran to the bus this morning."


Use of the imperfect tense in place of the perfect tense ("have done" something)

• 'ave y'et yer tea yet (Have you ate your tea yet?)

as opposed to the standard "Have you eaten your tea yet?"


Also with the imperative (giving an order)

• Gerrit et! (Get it ate!)

as opposed to the standard, "Eat it!"


We also use stative constructions in place of active present/past continuous verb forms (linguist-speak for the following):

• I am sat / I was sat

as opposed to the standard, "I am sitting" / "I was sitting".

However, this only works with certain stative verbs. As I said, you cannot simply say anything you like and call it grammatical (the asterix always denotes an ungrammatical example):

• *I am ran / *I was ran
• *I am ate/eaten / *I was ate/eaten

Spotting these features of a dialect can be tricky if you are not used to thinking about language in a particularly analytical way. But I would encourage everyone in Warrington to analyse the speech they hear around them every day. Especially if someone says something that you were told in school was wrong or bad grammar. It isn't necessarily, it's just the dialect obeying its own rules.

Does anyone have any pet hates that they think are just bad grammar?

Post them here or on the Facebook page, and we can analyse them together :-)
Wirelector

Mucker

There has been some discussion about this word on the "Your dialect words" page, so I thought I would bring it to the front page to give it a bit more publicity.

Mucker is a very common word in Warrington that means "friend" or "mate". It is, I think it's safe to say, exclusively used from men to men. I have never heard a woman referred to as mucker, not have I heard a woman refer to someone else as mucker. Please, correct me if I am wrong.

There were some suggestions that mucker is specific to Warrington, but that does not seem to hold true. A quick Google search shows that it is also used in the South, a fact that is confirmed by my Londoner friend being well aware of it. Interestingly, Wiktionary states that mucker is primarily used in the southern dialects, which is clearly not the case!

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mucker

To my mind, a strong contender for the origin of this dialect word would be the Irish mo chara, which means "my friend". The massive immigration from Ireland to Liverpool over the years would make this a feasible proposition, and presumably it would not take much for such a word to trickle down the Mersey to Warrington and other towns along the shoreline.

Another possibility that makes sense is the task of mucking out animals, where a worker would remove the animal faeces from the stalls in a barn. Anyone who has done this knows that it is a hard, dirty, thankless task.

To muck out is a phrasal verb and is no doubt related to another phrasal verb to muck in, which means to join in the work in order to share the tasks (and presumably get the job finished quicker). A common feature of many languages, especially English, is a phenomenon called conversion. This results in the change in function of a word. For example, the lexical verb to muck, from which the phrasal verbs are derived, changes function and word class to become a noun, mucker, that is, the person who does the mucking.

It is easy to imagine how any fellow worker involved in the mucking would be called a mucker, and subsequently how the use of this word could spread to other people involved in physical work, and eventually become synonymous with a workmate and/or friend.

What do you think? Do you use mucker where you live? Does it mean friend, or something completely different?