Grammar

At my job now and in several past jobs, I have edited a lot of documents written by foreigners (mostly Russians) in English. There are many mistakes common to these documents. Some frustrate me. For example, I cannot believe how often capitalization is misused. Others are quite understandable; English grammar is subject to many rules and even more exceptions to these rules. These rules, as far as I can tell, share little with the grammatical rules of other languages. I know this to be true of Russian. One error I often note is in the usage of nouns as adjectives. This is really a common practice in English: to use a vulgar example, “that is a bitch thing to do” is something I often say when slighted. Here, “bitch”, which is a noun, is used as an adjective to modify “thing”. In nearly all of the non-native English writing I have edited, using nouns as adjectives is rarely done. I believe that this is because this usage is not clearly defined and that it is unique to English grammar.

I find the correct usage of this grammatical structure difficult to define and extremely difficult to teach. In Russian, this grammatical structure does not exist. There are nouns, and some nouns have adjectival form, but they are different words (in Russian ’sobaka’ = dog, ’sobachii’ = dog as an adjective; in English, ‘dog’ can be used an adjective such as in ‘dog hair’). What makes this more confusing is that there are often adjectival forms of nouns in English. To add another layer of perplexity, nouns as adjectives are easily confused with possessive nouns. What is the difference between ‘dogs’ hair’ and ‘dog hair’? Not much, yet the former is rarely used; I never say, “There is dogs’ hair all over the house.” In fact, I only rarely say, “The dog’s hair is all over the house”, in preference to the more general ‘dog hair’ despite the fact I own only one dog.

I’m not a linguist, so am making all of this up as I go along based solely on how I use the English language and the patterns I witness while editing non-native English speakers’ writing (see, why can’t that last clause read, “non-native English speaker writing”? It could, or at least I would have no problem with it.). English grammar is interesting to me, especially since I have seen and continue to see such poor usage. This is not the fault of the writers and I am not saying that I write flawless English. It is just an observation and an expression of my interest in grammar, both English and Russian.