The New Grammar

A recent interaction at work brought to my attention how much modes of communication have changed. Digital devices have augmented our shared vocabulary and grammar and, as a result, our communicative expressiveness as well. Particularly flexible is the new grammar, which is distributed, collaborative, and highly contextual.

Perhaps nothing has changed the way we communicate more profoundly than the emoji. Once used merely to clarify the emotive quality of a word or phrase, these little pictographs have taken on the role of words or even full sentences.

Today we will examine one particular usage that exhibits all of these traits of the new grammar: emoji as answering pronoun.

But first, let’s review the traditional grammar, starting with pronouns. Pronouns are words that refer to a noun, either explicitly (“Dale said it’ll come down after it takes a shŏwshŏw.”) or implicitly (“Ugh-a-dugdug! It’s raining out.”). The word or phrase to which the pronoun refers is called the antecedent. Complex sentences can have multiple pronouns and multiple antecedents, which sometimes leads to confusion and anmbiguity.

Now let’s see what we can do with the new grammar. The other day I was in a meeting and time was about to run over. The facilitator asked, “Do we need to schedule another meeting to go over the remaining items, or do people want to finish the tasks asynchronously?”

A traditional approach to answering this question would be to explicitly state a preference, for example, “We don’t need another meeting.” This is in keeping with the reputation of English and English speakers as low context, that is, the context necessary to understand a statement is included, at the expense of brevity.

One of the traits of the new grammar is that it allows higher context communication. Going back to the example, an appropriate response might be, “👍.”

For those unfamiliar with the new grammar this may appear ambiguous (like when someone answers an open question with, “yes”), so let’s unpack it. The first thing we must understand is the part of speech. I already mentioned the trend toward using emojis as pronouns above, so it should not come as a surprise when I say that “👍” is acting as a pronoun in this instance. The real question is what is this pronoun’s antecedent. After all, in the traditional grammar it is entirely possible to have multiple candidate antecedents to which a pronoun can bind, and this case is no different: “👍” could refer to either option in this case. This is true of the new grammar as well, however there is a rule of thumb we can follow, which is that the pronoun always binds to the nearest antecedent. Unfortunately, the nearest antecedent is implicit in this sentence. We must use out knowledge of the context of this situation to infer the antecedent from our interlocutor’s previous statement. Luckily, that is easy: it’s just the last option. 👍 means that we should forgive the meeting and finish the work asychromously.

New grammarians understand the need for and benefits of consistent rules so, although we could infer other antecedents to do so would make us heretics and targets for righteous ridicule. Always use the nearest antecedent. If it is not possible to do so unambiguously, the the proper course of action is to break up the sentence into smaller parts.

Now, you may be thinking, you cannot do that! That sentence is that sentence, and this sentence is this sentence. You cannot mix the two!

Well, sure you can. I just did :)

Now that you know the new grammar, all that’s left is for you to share it with the world! Have fun!