Grammar as Performance

There’s an age-old debate about whether grammatical rules are prescriptive or descriptive. “Myself and her went to dinner”; “He was very kind to my wife and I”; “definately”; “to all intensive purposes.” Are these usages incorrect in the way an arithmetic answer can be incorrect? Or are they increasingly common usages that will one day become “correct”?

Descriptive grammarians are fond of showing us how now-standard usages were, often, once non-standard. Words morph. When you wonder what a word means and you look in the dictionary, do you get a definition—a definitive answer? Or do you get something like, “This seems to be the function of this word at this time in this geographical area”?

Prescriptive grammarians, I assume, are fond of ironically quoting Lewis Carroll: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

Behaviorism and performance theory (as is so often the case) have no problem with this debate. Behaviorism teaches us that when we say that something is true or correct, what we really mean is that it will lead to, or constitutes, effective action: it works. That changes the question of usage from “Is it correct?” to “Is it effective?” Efficacy varies from situation to situation. How it varies in its effect among other people is the subject of performance theory.

We are all playing roles all the time, and the great concern, according to performance theory, is whether our performance will be credited or discredited. Will we pull it off or crash and burn? If you undertake the role of hip, friendly, humble hostess, don’t get caught saying things like, “Bring whomever you wish.” If you undertake the role of being a piercing analyst of statutory text in a legal brief, don’t get caught using a semicolon instead of a comma unless it divides two otherwise complete sentences (or segments a list whose members themselves contain commas).

The question of whether a usage is correct is thus, really, a question of whether it facilitates the performance of a given role in a given situation.

Code-switching was apparently a term that initially referred to bilingual people switching between languages depending on whom they were speaking to. My favorite example has to do with the fact that “gift” means “poison” in German, so you might want to nail down what language is being spoken before consuming a drink that was offered as a gift.

Code-switching has come to mean a set of expressions, language, and cultural appurtenances that allow Black people to pull off a different role among other Black people from the roles Black people might want to pull off in other situations not predominantly populated by Black people, such as their workplace.

A good example is John McWhorter’s (2021) compelling case that the N-word is not used differently in different situations, but instead, it is a different word in many dialects spoken primarily by Black people, meaning its function in different dialects is different enough to warrant considering it a false cognate (two words in separate languages that don’t have the same meaning but look and sound like they do). Performance theory would say (for example) that its use facilitates the role of Black comradeship in one situation and undermines the role of comradeship between White and Black people in others. There’s a sort of comradeship between Black people in which the N-word is a facilitator and, also, in which whiteness is a stigma—that is, in which looking White so completely undermines the performance of that sort of comradeship that no mastery of dialect can overcome it.

Structurally, emotional intensity aside, a White person attempting to speak Black English is not like an American trying to speak French, because the American can presumably, with practice, overcome the stigmas of dress and manner and accent and eventually pull off the role. Instead, it is more like a child trying to pull off the role of teacher: the disqualifying stigma cannot be removed in the current cultural setting.

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Everyone engages in some form of code-switching, in that everyone does and says things at home and among friends that would undermine the role they are trying to play at work or in public. Black code-switching is more like bilingualism than is the code-switching many White people do, because Black English is closer to being a distinct dialect and separate subculture than what many of us are shutting down on our way to work.

To my students, I want to say that when I correct your punctuation, I’m not saying there’s something wrong with you or that you are deficient in some way. I’m arguing that if you want to play the role of psychological expert, your comma usage is undermining your performance. Some of you have already received a comma bouquet from me, but here’s another:

,,,,,,

,,,,

,,

,

If you sprinkle these around your papers one of them just might land after an introductory clause.