- •The Subject Matter of Grammar
- •The Evolution of English Grammars
- •The XX th Century Linguistic Schools
- •Prague Linguistic School (Functional Linguistics)
- •American Descriptive Linguistics
- •Transformational and Transformational Generative Grammar
- •Semantic Syntax
- •Methods of Linguistic Analysis
- •Parsing (Traditional Syntactic Analysis)
- •The Oppositional Method
- •The Distributional method
- •The ic Method (method of immediate constituents)
- •The Transformational Method
- •The Method of Deep and Surface Structures
- •The Functional Sentence Perspective Method (fsp)
- •The Componential Method
- •The Contextual Method
- •The Levels of Language
- •The Morphological Structure of me
- •The Classifications of Morphemes
- •Paradigmatics and Syntagmatics
- •The Asymmetry of a Linguistic Sign
- •Parts of Speech Classifications of Parts of Speech.
- •Notionals and Functionals
- •Heterogeneity
- •Field and Periphery
- •Subcategorization
- •Onomaseological approach
- •The Noun The General Properties of a Noun
- •The Category of Gender.
- •The Category of Number
- •The Category of Case
- •Debated Problems within the Category of Case
- •Genitive Constructions (n’s n)
- •The Article Debated Problems
- •The Functions of Articles in a Sentence
- •The Verb The General Properties of a Verb
- •The Category of Tense
- •Classifications of Tenses
- •The Future Tense
- •The Present Tense
- •The Past Tense
- •The Future-in-the-Past Tense
- •The Category of Aspect
- •The Category of Time Relation (or Correlation)
- •The Category of Voice
- •The Category of Mood
- •The Indicative Mood
- •The Imperative Mood
- •The Subjunctive Mood
- •Points of Similarities with the Finites
- •Points of Differences with the Finites
- •Debated Problems within The Verbals
- •The Functions of Non-Finites
- •Types of Syntax
- •The theory of the phrase
- •Devices of Connecting Words in a Phrase
- •Debated Problems within the Theory of the Phrase
- •Classifications of Phrases
- •The theory of the simple sentence
- •The Definition of a Sentence
- •Syntactic Modelling of the Sentence
- •Semantic Modelling of the Sentence
- •The Notion of a Syntactic Paradigm
- •Structural Classification of Simple Sentences
- •Predicative Constructions Within a simple sentence we distinguish primary and secondary (independent/ dependent) elements, the structural nucleus and its adjuncts.
- •Syntactic Processes
- •The Principal Parts of a Simple Sentence
- •The Secondary Parts of a Simple Sentence
- •An Object
- •An Adverbial Modifier
- •An Attribute
- •Debated Problems within a Simple Sentence
- •A composite sentence
- •A Compound Sentence
- •I. The General Notion of a Complex Sentence.
- •2. The Status of the Subordinate Clause.
- •3.1. Classifications of Subordinate Clauses.
- •3.2. Types of Subordinate Clauses.
- •4. Connections between the Principal and the Subordinate Clause.
- •5. Neutralization between Subordination and Coordination.
- •6. The Character of the Subordinating Conjunction
- •7. Levels of Subordination
- •Syntactic Processes in the Complex Sentence.
- •9. Communicative Dynamism within a Composite Sentence( Compound and Complex) and a Supra-phrasal Unit.
The Subject Matter of Grammar
Grammar - is the study of the structure of human language. The term is also applied to books that set out rules governing language’s use.
Grammar includes morphology (principles of word formation) and syntax ( principles of sentence structuring). Grammar studies the formal properties of words and sentences. Morphology describes how words are structured and formed, how their constituents (morphemes) are classified and combined. Syntax describes how words are arranged and combined into phrases and sentences, how phrases and sentences are classified and combined into larger structures.
The Evolution of English Grammars
In the development of English grammar two basic periods are distinguished: 1. prescientific period ( from the end of the XVI th century till the beginning of the XX th century) with prenormative (descriptive) grammar and normative (prescriptive, demanding) grammar; 2. scientific period ( from the turn-of-the century up to the middle of the 20th century) with scientific explanatory grammar.
Prescriptive Normative grammars prescribed, stated rules of grammatical usage. They prohibited wrong, improper constructions and forms. They set up (postulated) standards of correctness. Prescriptivists made use of the rules of ancient Latin grammars. Latin grammar served as a model for almost all European grammars. Long after Latin has ceased to be spoken, scholars copied the Latin grammar while composing grammars of their own languages. They used the same terminology and the same word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.
Continually grammars came to be more sophisticated, descriptive and explanatory, that is, scientific. 1891 can be counted as the beginning of the classical scientific grammar. Henry Sweet did not proscribe anything. He found what was widely used to be grammatically correct. That was a new approach. He defined general grammatical concepts, grammatical categories. He anticipated Ferdinand de Saussure’s synchronic approach. He proclaimed the priority of oral speech over written one.
Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), the Great Dane, emphasized the correspondence of grammatical and logical categories. He rejected the traditional syntactic analysis and proposed a symbolic representation of the structure of English. He proposed new techniques of linguistic description. He was a forerunner of structural grammar. He advanced the theory of ranks: instead of dividing a sentence into a subject and a predicate he distinguished primaries, secondaries and tertiaries.
The epoch of these scholars is now called Traditional grammar.
The XX th Century Linguistic Schools
Traditional grammar is criticized by newer grammars for: 1. its obscuring (ignoring) language itself as an intra-linguistic phenomenon; 2.its focusing on logical and psychological (extra-linguistic) considerations; that is, for its being meaning-oriented; 3. its being atomistic.
Newer grammars of the XX century came to describe language as a system where all elements are interdependent and interconnected. This approach was initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist, a pioneer in structuralism and semiotics. He profoundly contributed to the theoretical foundations of language studies. His great work “The General Course of Linguistics” (1916) is the starting point for the XX th century linguistics.
The most important structural and semiotic postulates which underlie the leading linguistic theories of the XX th century:
1. Language is a social phenomenon;
2. Language is a structured system of signals or a sign system, consisting of linguistic signs, which are interdependent and interconnected.
3. Language has two aspects: the system of language “la langue” and the actual linguistic behaviour or manifestation of this system “la parole” (speech). The system of language is a paradigmatic, vertical aspect. Speech is a horizontal linear syntagmatic aspect of language. Paradigmatic relations are based on substitution, syntagmatic relations are based on co-occurrence (совместная встречаемость.)
4. A study of language (la langue) can be diachronic or historical, focusing on historic change or synchronic (descriptive) treating language as a self-contained system at a given moment of its existence. F. De Saussure preferred the synchronic descriptive approach to the study of language.
5. A linguistic sign is bilateral, that is, it has two aspects: form and meaning. The relations between them are asymmetrical.
6. Language is a system, the elements of which are related by means of similarities and differences, i.e. (id est lat. – то есть) oppositions. We find oppositions on all linguistic levels. So, language can be studied on the basis of oppositions. On the phonological level: long vowels are opposed to short vowels, voiced consonants are opposed to voiceless consonants. On the morphological level: the plural number of nouns is opposed to the singular On the syntactical level: composite sentences are opposed to simple ones. On the lexico-semantic level words are opposed to each other: male:: female; man :: woman; God :: Satan, angel :: devil, etc.
F. de Saussure revolutionised linguistics. He introduced structuralism as a method of analysis which was being broadly used in the XXth humanities (linguistics, literary studies, sociology, philosophy), arts, etc. As a method structuralism analyzes systems by examining the relations and functions of the constituents of these systems, be it a human language or a cultural process. Thus Modernism is opposed to Postmodernism as a system on the basis of following structural points: decentralization – centralization; changeability – steadiness; shifting time – linear time, etc.
The ideas of F. de Saussure affected highly the Prague linguistic school, which created functional linguistics.American linguists introduced Structural descriptive grammar, Transformational and Transformational generative grammar.