Early Pre-Normative Grammars

1. Periods of the development of English Grammar.

Early pre-normative grammars

Until the 17th century the term grammar in English was applied only to the study of Latin, because Latin grammar was the only one studied in school. One of the earliest and most popular Latin grammars written in English by William Lily was published in the first half of the 16th century and went through many additions. W. Lily presented standards for similar arrangement of the English grammatical material proceeding from Latin paradigms and using the same terminology as in Latin grammar. Lily’s Latin grammar may be considered the precursor of the earliest English grammars.Attempts to break with Latin grammatical tradition characterise the treatment of the structure of English in Bullokar's and Ch. Butler's grammars but in many cases they still follow the Latin pattern.

The early prenormative grammars of English reproduced the Latin classification of the word-classes which included eight parts of speech. Substantives and adjectives were grouped together as two kinds of nouns, the participle was considered as a separate part of speech.In the earliest English grammars the parts of speech were divided dichotomically into declinable and indeclinable parts of speech or words with number and words without number (Ben Jonson), or words with number and case and words without number and case (Ch. Butler).

Ben Johnson’s and Charles Butler’s English grammars pointed out two cases of the English noun, while in Wallace’s grammar (1653), which was written in Latin, the category of cases is said to be nonexistent, and the ‘s form is defined as a possessive adjective. This view was supported by an early 18th century grammar, attributed to John Brightland, who preferred also the two-case system.In J. Brightland's grammar the number of partsof speech was reduced to four. These were: names (nouns), qualities (adjectives), affirmations (verbs) and particles.

Prescriptive grammar

The age of prescriptive grammar began in the second half of the 18th century. The most influential grammar at that period was R.Lowth’s grammar, which was called Short introduction to English grammar. It was published in 1762, and its aim was to reduce the English language to rules and to set up a standard of correct usage. The grammar settled most disputed points of usage by appealing to reason, to the laws of thought or logic, which were considered to be universal; hence another name of this grammar is Universal grammar.

The historical comparative method

The relations between the languages of the Indoeuropean family were studies systematically at the beginning of the 19th century by Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm and A. Vostokov. These scholars not only made comparative and historical observations of the kindred languages, but defined the fundamental conception of linguistic kinship or relationship. In fact, they created the method.

This was the time when linguistics appeared as a science. The historical and comparative study of the Indoeuropean languages became the principal line of European linguistics for many years to come. This method was further developed in the works of such scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries, as Buslaev, Fortunatov and Meillet and others.

The historical comparative method is used to analyze and discover relationship between the different languages and groups of languages to reconstruct prehistoric lingual elements. By means of this method scholars collected vast material for studying general laws of language development. The actual process of language division is very complex. It is connected with repeated mixings and redivision of tribes and nationalities throughout centuries and millennia. This process is accompanied by appearances and disappearances of some languages, it deals with dialects of a language, which may grow into different languages. There are such features of resemblance between different languages that clearly prove that they have the same origin.

Classical Scientific Grammar

The end of the 19th century brought a grammar of a higher type, a descriptive grammar intended to give scientific explanation to the grammatical phenomena.

This was H. Sweet'sNew English Grammar, Logical and Historical (1891).

Instead of serving as a guide to what should be said or written, Sweet's explanatory grammar aims at finding out what is actually said and written by the speakers of the language investigated. Scientific grammar was thus understood to be a combination of both descriptive and explanatory grammar. Sweet describes the three main features characterising the parts of speech: meaning, form and function. The purely synchronic approach towards the description of modern languages.The idea that language is primarily what is said and only secondarily what is written, i. e. the priority of oral speech over written.

Nesfield's grammar. The author chose a system, according to which the sentence has four distinct parts: (1) the Subject; (2) Adjuncts to the Subject (Attributive Adjuncts, sometimes called the Enlargement of the Subject); (3) the Predicate; and (4) Adjuncts of the Predicate (Adverbial Adjuncts); the object and the complement (i. e. the predicative) with their qualifying words, however, are not treated as distinct parts of the sentence.

The 19th century method, valuable as it was for the study of languages, gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. Logical, psychological and sociological considerations were involved in linguistic studies, thus obscuring linguistics proper. As Lewis Hjelmslev rightly points out, the linguistics of the part has concerned itself with a physical, physiological, psychological, sociological and historical aspects of language not in the language itself.The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected, the research being limited to the group of Indo-European language (the drawback of comparative method). It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied (another drawback).

All this led to atomistic approach to language. The new method was seeking to grasp linguistic events in their mutual interconnection and interdependence, to understand and describe language as a system.

The first scholars, who were Baudouin de Courtenay, academician Fortunatov (1849-1914), the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The work that came to be the most widely-know is Saussure’s A course in general linguistics, which was posthumously compiled and published from his lectures between 1906 and 1911.

Saussure’s main ideas:

1. Language is a system of signals or linguistic signs interconnected and interdeveloped. Linguistic is an object, an independent science.
2. Language as a system may be compared to other systems of signals such as road signs, language of deaf and dumb. Language is an object of a more general science – semiology, which studies different systems of signals used in human society.
3. Language has 2 aspects: the system of language and its manifestation in social intercourse, that is speech (langue and parole).
4. Linguistic sign is bilateral, it has both form and meaning.
5. The language sign is “absolutely arbitrary” (if we take a word absolutely disregarding its connections with other linguistic units, we shall find nothing obligatory in the relation of its phonological form to the object it denotes), and “relatively motivated” (the linguistic sign taken in the system of language reveals connections with other linguistic signs both in form and meaning.
6. Language is to be studied as a system in a synchronic plane (at a given moment of its existence), in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of elements. Linear and vertical relations.
7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of the concrete units. The linguistic units can be found by means of segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments.

3 main linguistic schools:

1. The Prague School was founded in 1929 uniting Check and Russian linguists (Matiescous, Trnka, Trubetskoy, Jacobson, etc)

The main contribution to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the limits of phonological structure. The basic method is that of oppositions of speech sounds that change the meaning of the words in which they occur. Binary oppositions. This principle is especially suitable for describing morphological category.

Professor Hlebnikova: “Binary relations penetrate any plane of language: phonological, morphological, syntactical, but are especially evident on a morphological level.

Jacobson used this method for describing morphological categories of Russian language.

1. The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933 by Lewis Hjelmsliev. In the early 30’s the conception of this school was given the name of Glossematics (Greek “glos” - language) In 1943 Hjelmsliev published “Principles of linguistics”.

Glossematics sought to give a more exact definition of the subject of linguistics, that 2 sides of the linguistic sign recognized by Saussure are considered to have both form and substance: recognition of bilateral character of the plane of content and the plane of expression.

1. The Descriptive Linguistics (USA) from the necessity of studing half-known and unknown languages of the Indian tribes. At the beginning of the 20th century these languages were rapidly dying out. They had no writing and no history. As a result the historical-comparative method was of little use here, they belong to a type that has little in common with the indo-European languages. They are devoid of morphological forms of separate word and of corresponding grammar meanings. The DL had to give up analyzing sentences in terms of traditional parts of speech. It was more convenient to describe linguistic forms according to their position in sentences.

The DL began with the work of Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. Sapir’s main work is “Language and Introductory to the study of speech” (1921).

L. Bloomfield’s book is of the same title. It is a complete methodology of language study approaching the language as if it were unknown to the linguist. These ideas were later developed by S. Herros and Charles Fries.

Bloomfield showed a new approach to classes of words later developed by Ch. Fries.

According to O. Jespersen descriptive grammar instead of serving as a guide to what should be said or written, aims at finding out what is actually said and written by the speakers of the language investigated, and thus may lead to a scientific understanding of the rules followed instinctively by speakers and writers. Such a grammar should also be explanatory, giving the reasons why the usage is such and such. These reasons may, according to circumstances, be phonetic or psychological, or in some cases both combined. One of the most important contributions to linguistic study in the first half of the 20th century was O. Jespersen's The Philosophy of Grammar first published in 1924 where he presented his theory of three ranks (primaries, adjuncts,subjuncts) intended to provide a basis for understanding the hierarchy of syntactic relations hidden behind linear representation of elements in language structures. O. Jespersen's morphological system differs essentially from the traditional concepts. He recognises only the following word-classes grammatically distinct enough to recognise them as separate "parts of speech", viz.:

(1)Substantive (including proper names).

(2)Adjectives.

In some respects (1) and (2) may be classed together as "Nouns".

(3)Pronouns (including numerals and pronominal adverbs).

(4)Verbs (with doubts as to the inclusion of "Verbids").

Particles (comprising what are generally called adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions — coordinating and subordinating and interjections).

The peculiar views on accidence, e. g. the four-case system in G. Curme'sgrammar, are reflected in syntax. Curme discusses accusative objects, dative objects, etc.

Most grammarians retain the threefold classification of sentences into simple, compound and complex, as given in the prescriptive grammars of the mid-19th century. H. Poutsma introduces the term "composite sentence" as common for compound and complex sentences.

E. Kruisinga'sHandbook of Present-day English (1932) presents a new viewpoint on some parts of English structure suggesting interesting approaches to various disputable points in the treatment of phrase-structure, setting up two major types of syntactic structures: close and loose syntactic groups.

Structural and Transformational Grammars

Structural grammarians have abandoned many of the commonly held views of grammar. Structural grammatical studies deal primarily with the "grammar of structure", and offer an approach to the problems of "sentence analysis" that differs in point of view and in emphasis from the usual treatment of syntax.

According to Ch. Fries, the new approach — the application of two of the methods of structural linguistics, distributional analysis and substitution makes it possible to dispense with the usual eight parts of speech. He classifies words into four "form-classes", designated by numbers, and fifteen groups of "function words", designated by letters. The four major parts of speech (Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb) set up by the process of substitution in Ch. Fries recorded material are thus given no names except numbers: class 1, class 2, class 3, class 4. Then come fifteen groups of so-called function-words which have certain characteristics in common.

3. Parts of speech. Various approaches to the problem.

Some scholars consider the term “part of speech” not a very happy one. Part of speech is a type of word, different from other types in some grammatical point or points. All the three criteria (form, meaning, function), are too vague to define them.

Henry Sweet

Henry Sweet in his book A NEW ENGLISH GRAMMAR wrote that, as regards their function in the sentence, words fall under certain classes, called parts of speech, all the members of each of these classes having certain formal characteristics in common, which distinguish them from the members of other classes. Each of these classes has a name of its own: noun, adjective, verb, etc. If we compare nouns such as snow, tree, man with adjectives, such as green, big, wide and verbs, such as melt, grow, speak, we shall find, that all nouns agree in having plural inflexions, generally formed by adding -s, that adjectives in English have no plural inflexions, but have degrees of comparison, which nouns and verbs have not, etc. So they are also united by means of form.

If we examine the meanings of the words belonging to the different parts of speech, we shall find, that such words as tree, snow, man, are all substance words, while adjectives and verbs are both attributes, the adjectives expressing permanent attributes, and the verbs changing attributes and phenomena.

We can easily see, that there’s a natural connection between the functions and meanings of these parts of speech. Hentry Sweet also considered that parts of speech are divided into two main groups: declinable (capable of inflexion) and indeclinable (incapable of inflexion).

Declinable, according to him, are nouns, adjectives and verbs. He considers pronouns as a special class of nouns and adjectives, and therefore they are also distinguished as noun-pronouns (they, she, I) and adjective-pronouns (my, her, that). Numerals are another special class of nouns and adjectives, also divided into noun-numerals (three of us) and adjective-numerals (three people). Verbals are a class of words, intermediate between verbs on the one hand and nouns and adjectives on the other.

Indeclinable words comprise adverbs, prepositions, particles and interjections. The main function of adverbs, according to Sweet, is to serve as an adjunct word to verbs. Prepositions, such as of, are joined to nouns to make them into adjunct words (e.g. man of honor). Conjunctions, such as if, are usually used to show the connection between sentences. Interjections, such as ah, oh, alas, are sentence words, expressing various emotions.

Otto Jesperson [je:]

Otto Jesperson expressed his point of view on the problem of parts of speech, writing that it is customary to begin teaching grammar by dividing words into certain classes and by giving definitions to these classes. Some scholars, he writes, feeling the failure of such definitions, have been trying to solve the difficulty by the methods of examining the meaning of words, belonging to various classes, and coming to the conclusion that the only criterion should be the form of words. If form in the strictest sense were taken as the only test, we should arrive at the absurd result that must in English, being indeclinable, belonged to the same class as enough, for, then, the. Our only criterion justification for classing the verb must is that we recognize its usage in combinations like “I must go”, which is parralel to “I shall go” (in modern English it would be “will” of course), in other words, we take into consideration its meaning and function in the sentence.

He distinguishes the following parts of speech:

1. substances (including proper names),
2. adjectives (then he adds that these classes can perhaps be put under the definitions of nouns),
3. pronouns,
4. verbids (he doubts whether to include verbals or not, he calls them verbids),
5. particles (constituted of all those classes which haven’t been included in the first four).

THE THREE-RANK THEORY

In any composite denomination of a thing or person we always find that there is one word of supreme importance to which the others are joined as subordinates. This chief word is defined (qualified, modified) by another word, which in its turn may be defined (qualified, modified) by a third word, etc. Distinction is thus made between different "ranks" of words according to their mutual relations as defined or defining. In the combination extremely hot weather the last word weather, which is evidently the chief idea, may be called primary; hot, which defines weather, secondary, and extremely, which defines hot, tertiary. Though a tertiary word may be further defined by a (quarternary) word, and this again by a (quinary) word, and so forth, it is needless to distinguish more than three ranks, as there are no formal or other traits that distinguish words of these lower orders from tertiary words.