Graciela Palacio1

2012 (revised 2015)

Grammar I
LV/JVG
LESSON 1:
WHAT IS GRAMMAR?

Today we will look at a passage taken from a storybook for children called Mr. Funny, by
Roger Hargreaves. The passage reads as follows:
Mr. Funny lived in a teapot!
It had two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen and a living room, and it suited Mr. Funny very
nicely.
One day, Mr. Funny was having lunch.
He wasnt very hungry, so he only had a daisy sandwich and a glass of toast!
Delicious, he murmured to himself as he finished his funny lunch.
After lunch Mr. Funny decided to go for a drive in his car.
Mr. Funnys car was a shoe!
Have you ever seen a car that looks like a shoe?
It looks very funny!
As he drove along, everybody who saw him laughed to see such a funny sight.

This passage is part of a longer text. Now what is a text? According to Quirk et al 2 (1985) a
text is:
1. a semantic unit and
2. a pragmatic unit
A text constitutes a semantic unit in the sense that it must be internally coherent (i.e. it must
make sense). If you look at the passage given above closely, you will see that there are words
that help to create some kind of internal unity. For example, the use of the word he to refer
back to Mr. Funny, the repetition of the word lunch, the use of the word funny, with its two
senses or meanings (Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar), and even the use of tenses.
A text constitutes a pragmatic unit in the sense that it has to be coherent in actual use. This
paragraph is part of a story for children so it would be appropriate in a bedtime situation. A
sign with the word danger on it at the side of a road where there is some kind of danger
constitutes a text if it makes sense in the context where it has been placed.
According to Quirk et al (1985) a text may be spoken (as are the vast majority) or it may be
in writing. It may be the product of a single speaker (as with an announcement on an airport
public-address system) or of several speakers engaged in conversation. And it may be long or
short (i.e. its length is irrelevant, it can even be made up of one word as in the example of the
road sign danger mentioned above).
Semantics is the discipline which deals with the study of meaning. When dealing with
meaning we might say, for example, that the word funny is ambiguous.

This lesson was partly modified thanks to comments made by Sergio Rodriguez Ramos.
et al. abbreviation for: et alii [Latin: and others]. It is used especially in writing, after a name or list of names:
Quirk wrote A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language together with three other writers. Their names
are listed in the references.
2

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Pragmatics is the discipline which deals with the study of language use. From a pragmatic
point of view, we might point out that this text would also be appropriate in a classroom
situation where the nature of texts is being discussed.
Now this is a grammar course, so the next question we need to address is how to define the
term grammar.
In a narrow sense, grammar is that part of linguistics which studies the internal structure of
words, i.e. morphology, and the way in which words combine to form sentences, i.e. syntax.
Therefore, in this course, we will concentrate on morphology and syntax.
Notice that in the text given above the expressions a daisy sandwich and a glass of toast are
semantically odd but still syntactically perfect, i.e. they are possible grammatical
combinations that the brain of a native speaker can produce. The author breaks semantic rules
to cause a certain effect.
The study of texts presupposes the grammar of the sentence, so it is logical to begin with the
study of the sentence. As was said above, a text is a semantic and a pragmatic unit, not a
grammatical unit. Which are the grammatical units, then?
Lesson 1 Activity 1: (To be handed in as Assignment 1)
Answer the following questions and hand them in:
1.
2.
3.
4.

What is a text according to Quirk et al. (1985)?

What is semantics?
What is pragmatics?
How can we define grammar in a narrow sense?

REFERENCES:
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the
English Language. Longman.
Hargreaves, R. (1990) Mr. Funny. Egmont World Limited.

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