ABSTRACT
Traditional grammars are unreal. Since ancient times, treatises and teachings on the subject of grammar have consisted of formal descriptions and prescriptions of sentence structure formulated to maintain a conservative, standardized register of language in close alignment with the written form (Crystal, 1995, p. 192). As part of this long-standing tradition, grammars of English (and other languages of Europe) have been built around sentence structures abstracted from an artificially standardized Latin model as applied to written language (Lyons, 1969, sec. 1.2). Traditional grammars have thus evolved as idealized, static, abstract, and artificial impositions that bear a distant relationship at best to the structure of the languages they purport to describe. They are therefore entirely inappropriate to the practical communicative needs of today’s language students.
