How Do We Learn to Speak Correctly?
Introduction
You know more about good grammar than you may think. To illustrate, choose the right word in the following statement:
Yesterday I (go, went) to the store.
The correct choice is “went.” Almost everybody who grew up speaking English will get that right. But why did you get it right? If you are a native English speaker, you didn’t need the official grammar rule: To express the indicative past tense in the first person, use the indicative first person past tense of the verb with the first-person pronoun. “Went” just “sounded” correct.
But that didn’t happen by magic. You learned this grammatical principle a long time ago, and you learned it the natural way: by repetition. The adults around you spoke ...
Get When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
