What confuses me are the contradictory comments about this grammar stuff.
I am not sure what Pullum is up to in the final part of his essay. Most linguists I know, do not count punctuation as a part of grammar, and I agree with them. That you exclude something from grammar does not mean it is unimportant. I do not see orthography (basically punctuation and spelling) as a part of grammar, I see it as a part of how to commit a text in a language to some kind of permanence (that is how to write).
Likewise, I do not see usage and style to be a part of grammar. If you're going to be a writer though, they are very important topics to study and master.
Linguistics is an academic field, and as such, not all linguists agree with one another. Having read Pullum's piece, I notice that it kind of peters out towards the end. He may have just gotten confused about channeling his inner peever and not mentioned a caveat that this is not how he thinks, or he may believe that some punctuation is part of grammar. We'll never know short of asking him to clarify himself. Anyway we look at it, part (or all?) of a text are not exactly comprehensible at least to a couple of its readers. Again, I say that it has bugger all to do with grammar. I can find no solecisms in Pullum's piece. It has to do with how his argument (thesis) holds together as he writes about it. I know it has nothing to do with orthography even. It might be subsumed under usage, if one includes rhetoric and logic there.
OP
