OPINION & COMMENT
Cockatoos, cockroaches, and complement clauses
An extract from Working on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language in the deep north of Australia by Geoffrey K. Pullum
Cambridge prepares you for a life of scholarship, but not for life in Queensland. When cockroaches the size of mice begin swarming into the house, that's bad enough; discovering when you try to catch them that they can fly is worse than bad.
Yes, the balmy climate does make it a delight to sit outside under the glorious lavender-blue umbrellas of the blossoming jacaranda trees. But under the chairs and picnic tables lurk redback spiders, whose bite you treat the same as snakebite (discourage the victim from thrashing about while you drive them very fast to the hospital).
The more you know about Queensland the more terrifying it gets. Up north the cassowary roams in the rainforests — a six-foot flightless bird that can disembowel you with one toe. Highly territorial crocodiles lie by the muddy river banks, and kill intruding bathers just to teach them respect. Inland is the taipan, most venomous snake in the world. The silver beaches? A swimmer's dream, except for the box jellyfish, so poisonous that some victims of their sting die from the pain, and the others envy them.
I haven't mentioned the politics of Queensland. It is worse than the wildlife.
Why was I there, for months each year, five years in a row? When I told people, no one believed me.
"Grammar? Why come to Australia to study grammar?" asked the nurse who gave me my flu shot one winter day in June. "People speak so badly here."
A familiar reaction. Yes, the nonstandard dialects of Australian have the negative auxiliary "ain't", and often the second person plural pronoun "youse". But I wasn't there for colourful local dialect. My problem was that I was working on The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, with a senior coauthor who loves Queensland and refuses to work anywhere else — Rodney Huddleston (Corpus Christi, 1960).
My path had first crossed Rodney's not in Cambridge (where I arrived as a research student in Linguistics at King's in 1973), but a few years later in London, where I had taken a lectureship at University College and Rodney was visiting on a study leave. When his leave ended we went our separate ways for two decades, during which I emigrated to the USA, spending most of my career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I had been there fifteen years when a Cambridge University Press editor took me to dinner in San Diego and asked me if I would join a team of people who were trying to produce a truly complete and modern grammar of the whole of standard English.
"Not me," I thought. But it was Rodney Huddleston who was leading the team, and that did make a difference. When Rodney called me himself from Australia, I had to say I'd think about it. That was just stalling. My feelings were still well expressed by Sam Goldwyn's phrase: "Include me out." This project was too big. It could eat my life.
When Rodney phoned again, I tried to explain that my answer was no. I'm still not quite sure how it was that when I hung up that phone I had somehow committed myself to going to Brisbane for an exploratory month of work.
Five years later, a large part of my life had indeed been eaten. Five consecutive California summers were Australian winters for me. I woke at 4:30 a.m. with the first caws of the giant crows. I could tell a sulphur-crested cockatoo from a rainbow lorikeet from the pitch of the screech. I casually checked garden chairs for redbacks before sitting on them. I was familiar with possums and wallabies and blue-tongued skinks, and out of touch with everyone in Santa Cruz.
Intellectually it was worth it. No one else in the world has Rodney's disciplined command of the facts of English.
Rodney's brilliance and fanaticism has resulted in a grammar more exhaustive and theoretically coherent than English has ever previously had. Helping to create it — riding shotgun for Rodney while he brought this twelve-horse stagecoach of a project into town — was the most exciting and exacting task I have ever undertaken.
And the dawn cackle of a kookaburra will always remind me of long winter mornings of struggle with complex preposition phrases, working till the sun was in the north and it was time for the lunchtime conference with the world's greatest grammarian.
Geoffrey K. Pullum is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language was published by Cambridge University Press on 25 April 2002.
