How is it that a five-year-old can construct a perfectly understandable sentence, yet many adults would struggle to explain its grammatical structure?
It’s an intriguing question, and one that gets to the heart of something I’ve been thinking about recently. We learn to speak long before anyone teaches us the formal rules of grammar. We instinctively recognise how words fit together, how sentences should sound and how meaning is conveyed. Yet when we attempt to explain these same processes, things suddenly become remarkably complicated.
Language is, in a very real sense, infinite. We can always construct a sentence that nobody has ever heard before. And somehow, without consciously consulting a rulebook, we know how to do it.
That is quite extraordinary when you think about it.
Linguists, rather like scientists studying the natural world, observe patterns and develop rules to explain them. These are models of how language works, rather than instructions handed down from some higher authority. And just as scientific theories can be challenged by new evidence, our explanations of language should remain open to question.
The difficulty is that language is endlessly inventive. Just when we think we have established a reliable grammatical rule, along comes an example that challenges it. It’s rather like peering into a distant mist, hoping nothing emerges to overturn what we thought we understood.
When we learn our native language, we are constantly making unconscious connections. We listen, recognise patterns and gradually develop an understanding of how words and sentences work together. This continues throughout our lives as our language adapts to the people and world around us.
Yet ask someone to explain precisely what constitutes a sentence, and the difficulty becomes apparent.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a sentence as “a group of words, usually containing a verb, that expresses a thought in the form of a statement, question, instruction, or exclamation and starts with a capital letter when written”.
That’s a perfectly reasonable attempt. But what exactly constitutes a ‘group’? And what do we mean by a ‘thought’?
Consider this: Dang diddly fi po wum.
Is that a group of words? Is it a thought? Could it be a statement?
This illustrates how difficult it can be to explain something we use effortlessly every day. A sentence cannot necessarily be adequately explained in a single sentence. Sometimes we need to examine its underlying structure in greater detail.
And that is where I believe we need to rethink our approach.
For generations, we have accepted established grammatical terminology with remarkably little questioning. We learn about subjects, objects, verbs, complements, adverbials and indirect objects, often without asking whether these are the clearest possible descriptions of what happens within a sentence.
I believe we can do better.
There are two changes that could make grammar considerably easier to understand. First, we should use terminology that is clearer and more intuitive. Words ought to illuminate a concept, not create another layer of difficulty around it.
Second, we need to distinguish between grammatical patterns that are different, rather than treating them as the same in ways that create confusion. As I like to put it, fusing is confusing.
When writing my book, Organic Grammar, I wanted to develop an approach that made immediate sense to the reader.
I was happy to retain the terms subject and object. The subject is the topic of a sentence, while the object is the focus of an action or thought. But I found other traditional terms less satisfactory.
Take the word verb. We use it when discussing types of words, alongside nouns and adjectives, but also when explaining sentence structure. I believe that distinction deserves greater clarity. So, in my approach, I use verbal to describe the sentence component expressing an action, state or process.
Other changes are more straightforward.
Consider the term complement. It hardly tells the average person what it does within a sentence. I prefer describer, because that is precisely its function in the examples I’m discussing.
Take the sentence: She is a good friend.
Here, ‘she’ is the subject, while ‘a good friend’ describes that subject. Why not call it a describer?
Similarly, I replace adverbial with clarifier, because it helps clarify the information being conveyed.
Consider: Jack accidentally kicked the ball into the neighbour’s garden.
Here, ‘Jack’ is the subject, ‘accidentally kicked’ is the verbal, and ‘into the neighbour’s garden’ clarifies where the ball went.
And then there is the indirect object. In the sentence I sent her a letter, ‘her’ identifies the person receiving the letter. So why not call that person the receiver?
These may seem like small changes, but I believe they make a considerable difference. Rather than asking learners to memorise terminology that may initially mean very little, we can offer descriptions that make their functions immediately apparent.
A loop-back sentence is one in which part of the sentence returns to describe the subject. Take our earlier example: She is a good friend. The words ‘a good friend’ refer back to ‘she’, characterising the person introduced at the beginning.
A linear sentence works differently. Each component adds information to what has come before, allowing the meaning to develop progressively.
Consider again: Jack accidentally kicked the ball into the neighbour’s garden. We begin with Jack, discover what he did, learn what he kicked and finally find out where the ball went. Each element moves the information forward.
For me, distinguishing between these patterns offers a more intuitive way of understanding how sentences are constructed. It is not simply a matter of replacing one set of grammatical labels with another, but of finding clearer ways to explain how language works.
None of this suggests that generations of grammarians have been foolish or that traditional grammar has no value. Our understanding of language has developed through centuries of careful observation and debate. But that does not mean every established explanation should remain beyond question.
If children can learn to construct increasingly sophisticated sentences without consciously understanding grammatical terminology, perhaps we should ask whether our explanations could be made more accessible.
I also believe we should distinguish more clearly between two patterns of sentence construction. In Organic Grammar, I call these linear sentences and loop-back sentences.
Shouldn’t the purpose of teaching grammar be to illuminate how language works, rather than make something so natural appear unnecessarily complicated?
That is what I have set out to explore in Organic Grammar: a clearer, more intuitive approach to understanding the language we use every day.
Because if we want people to feel more confident about reading, writing and expressing themselves, surely the language we use to explain language ought to be as straightforward as possible.
David Lott is a British author and former publishing editor and manager whose work explores language, literacy, grammar and creative writing. Born in Finland, he spent his early childhood in India before moving to England, where he attended school in Dorset and later studied English at university. Following a career in publishing and a period living in Italy, he turned to writing, producing poetry, children’s stories and works examining literacy and grammar. His latest book, Organic Grammar, challenges conventional approaches to grammar and proposes a clearer, more accessible system for understanding how sentences work. It is available to purchase on Amazon and in all good bookstores.
