My talk today will focus mainly on restrictive and nonrestrictive elements but I want to set this topic in the context of the larger questions and issues about grammar that we have been considering. I see these as three.
The second general question is, of all the grammar that we do know, what portions do we teach to students? What do young writers need to know about grammar, and why, and how can we verify that we are coming up with sensible answers here? This is the general question that raises all the heat in discussions about grammar. My talk will illustrate this problem also, but I want to point out here that I think that one reason why we have difficulty getting a handle on it is that it involves more than the concerns with writing and language that are always brought up. Writing behavior is in part social behavior, and so grammar is a social issue, a matter of social class and even political orientation, and I think these are the aspects of grammar that we should not avoid if we are going to have thorough discussions about why we are teaching it.
The third and final question is that once we decide what portions of grammar our students can benefit from, how do we teach such grammar effectively? What strategies work, and which don’t? How might we deflect some of the enormous influence that the current grammar publishing establishment carries in order to open the way for new approaches? The question of teaching strategies has been dealt with in a number of presentations here.
The contrast between restrictive and nonrestrictive has historically been one of the most successful conceptualizations of recent grammar theory. It is relatively young as grammar terms go, dating back to Goold Brown’s first use of the term restrictive in 1823. The term emerged from discussions of the lightening of punctuation. That is, in the 17th and 18th centuries, ALL relative clauses were bordered by commas. An example from a 1785 book on punctuation: "Never open your heart to persons, whom you do not know." But ten years later, in 1795, Lindley Murray included in his great grammar text a mention of an exception in the changing practice of the time. ‘When two members are closely connected by a relative, restraining the general notion of the antecedent to a particular sense, the comma should be omitted." Murray’s word, restraining, was replaced by Brown’s use of restricting in his version of the rule shortly after, and the new term stuck. So the inconvenience of having a positive term, restrictive, refer to an absence of punctuation arose from the description of conditions under which certain traditional commas should be left out. Without shifting patterns of punctuation in the 18th century, we might not have the terms at all.
One sign of the success of the two terms is that they have spread from conventional grammar to linguistics, a field which has been very careful about its terminology. Linguistic grammars use the terms, as conventional grammars do, to describe not only relative clauses but modifiers of all kinds in their relation to the term they modify. The main idea is that all modifiers have one of two qualities--they are either essential, tightly bound, defining, and not separated by punctuation, or they are unessential, parenthetic, loosely bound, and separated by commas.
Let me give some examples. One type of amplifying clause is that which amplifies an adjective that precedes the antecedent noun. Such clauses are mildly redundant and are very common in speech and informal writing. Some examples from students:
We often have to find forgiving employers who will allow us to work unusual schedules so that we can met our nursing obligations. I have a strict schedule that does not allow many deviations.
More frequently, however, there is no preceding adjective, the antecedent itself is identified intrinsically or in context, and the amplifying clause makes an important comment about it. Some examples from The New York Times:
Now the prospect of housing them is looming in many more neighborhoods--some of them middle-class enclaves--under a new City Charter that requires that all city projects be spread equitably among its neighborhoods.
The committee continued several hours of open hearings today, followed by a closed session in which the panel’s members discussed a variety of classified intelligence matters.
They had their own little bottle of Ice-nine which kept them estranged from the rest of the world.
Every day in the newspapers one can read about the increasing number of homeless families, neglected children and poverty-plagued pockets of people who seem, by their continued existence, to represent a necessary condition in our otherwise affluent society.
The concept of the amplifying clause would not be interesting if the term non-restrictive meant just what it said--anything other than restrictive. But it is not defined that way; it means instead a modifier that is nonessential, and the reason it is defined in this somewhat extreme way has to do with punctuation: the term has its roots in, and has remained primarily, guidance about the use of the comma. If a clause is judged to be nonrestrictive, the practical consequence is that commas separate it from the antecedent. But as long as restrictive and nonrestrictive serve as punctuation guides, they are compromised as precise descriptions of the syntax or semantics of modifiers, which include gradations in the relationship to the antecedent. If we want to retain the present terminology as a guide to commas use, a concept such as the amplifying clause would be helpful to describe a great many sentences.
But such reexamination quickly leads us to the second question I raised at the beginning: Which topics of grammar do we pass along to students, and why do we choose those? The reconsideration of restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers that I have presented should lead us to consider not only their accuracy as grammatical concepts but also their pedagogical usefulness. Some might feel that the amplifying clause should be added to the mass of abstractions already heaped on some students. But I think that the practicalities of punctuation are the real writing issues here, and that we should consider telling students in writing classes to put commas around extra, nonessential information and letting it go at that, dropping from those classes and their textbooks the baggage of the restrictive and nonrestrictive concepts. We can retain them of course in grammar and linguistics courses, but we as grammarians perhaps need to become better than we sometimes are at distinguishing the grammar information that we could teach writers from the grammar information that writers really need.