My 1950s miseducation in English.

[Igel]

7. Grammars have functions and purposes.

I learned Russian as an L2. I learned formal Russian.

Later I learned colloquial Russian. Nearly every part of the grammar has some sharp divergences from the formal, prescriptive, normative grammar.

The grammar I learned was emigre grammar in the '70s, based on textbooks written in the '50s and '60s. They were based on an older norm, often pre-Revolutionary. The take-over of society by working class people--much of the reason for both the Soviet "reign of terror" and its sequelae--altered that to a large extent. But it makes Dostoevsky and Tolstoy sound "normal" to me, more normal than it does to a Russian 20-something these days, but certainly more like it would have been perceived when written.

Afterwards I become adept at more modern norms, good for the Interwar and post-war periods.

In the '90s there was another shift in norms, but while Russian linguists pitched a fit over them the norms didn't shift that radically.

These different sets of norms are best termed registers or styles. Every standard literary language has a well-developed set of styles. How you speak to your dog isn't how you speak to your wife, and those are different from how you speak to your professor in class or when giving a paper or at court or talking to a cab driver. In addition to how things vary in that regard, there are inevitably not just social dialects by age, class, education, context, but by geography. To some extent the variation by age recapitulates some recent linguistic history, but a detailed analysis of Queen EII's pronunciation and discourse shows that a person's language isn't static. In other words, she doesn't speak now like she did in 1950 but has incorporated some (few) more recent changes in the British variant of the language. In other words, RP's shifted over time.

Moreover, the formal grammar you learn for your native language is almost always precisely the *formal* grammar. You typically grow up speaking a variety of geographic and social registers, but need to learn academic registers. Some Canadian got his PhD and a lot of fame by pointing out that this is how language is structured, and so if you're learning an L2 you need to learn colloquial registers quickly, and typically do; but if you want more in society you get to learn formal or academic registers as well.

Sadly, this great novel insight was old-hat to the Prague Linguistic Circle folk in the 1920s, but they wrote in French and how could a Canadian researcher possibly be able to access that. (No, the problem is that people think that nothing older than their high-school career could possibly be relevant, so they refuse to learn stuff then take great pains to rediscover it and say, "I'm the first!"

The PLC went further, and broke language down not just into colloquial and academic/formal registers, but showed that typically different jobs or professions have different norms, as well. We discriminate by context in just that granular a way, at least if we're paying attention. This came up in code-switching research (again, rediscovered, with some people who know how to do research saying, "Um, that's not really new&quot where language seems often to be tied to context. You're speaking colloquial Russian with a friend and need to refer to something that happened at work in English--different set of norms--rather than recast things in Russian in the equivalent norm it's easier just to keep the norm from work and put it in English. (This is different from the "I insist on making sure that you know my identity because I am a token, not an individual" and "I insist in making sure you know we share an identity, making us on the same team and different from those people" varieties of code switching.)

Your '50s grammar was prescriptive to uphold formal and academic norms. It wasn't there to teach you something you already knew. In fact, grammars for native speakers make horrendously bad teaching grammars. (I also suspect that there's a bit of confusion--I know my high school teacher sometimes got the content seriously wrong.)

Diagraming sentences wasn't there to teach you grammar. It served to help you learn Latin; to understand structure; and to help make your prose a bit more clear, at least in theory, or help you to figure out how to clarify things that others didn't understand. I found that invaluable a few years later when I was taking formal syntax as part of a linguistics program and had to draw tree diagrams, identify phrase types, spot dislocations of phrases or constituents.

Probably the biggest mistake that is made in even teaching grammars of English is misunderstanding and misrepresenting verbal aspect. Note that those "particles" you point out have a lot of functions, and in some cases the difference is (nearly) purely aspectual.

Even something as useless for modern American usage as "shall" and "will" is still something a native speaker should know for reading older texts. That "should" is the past tense of "shall", and "would" the past tense of "will", doesn't come up very often; and, in fact, used as modals they're no longer past tense. The flip-flop rule on when to use will/shall ("I will, thou shalt, he/she/it shall&quot is a quick and dirty shorthand for dealing with different modalities, mostly for students who are too busy asking, "Why are we learning this?" and "When will I ever need this?" while eyeing up somebody who's especially sexually attractive, thinking about something they want to buy, pondering what they want to eat, or sorting through how they're going to hurt somebody.