THEORETICAL

GRAMMAR
Lecture 1
*The term grammar is derived from the
Greek word grammatikē, where gram
meant something written. The part
tikē derives from technē and meant
art.
*Hence grammatikē is the art of
writing.
Grammar: the origin of the term
 GRAMMAR

THEORETICAL PRACTICAL
GRAMMAR GRAMMAR
*Practical grammar gives practical rules
of the use of linguistic structures.
*Theoretical grammar gives an analysis
of the structures in the light of general
principles of linguistics and the existing
schools and approaches.

Theoretical and Practical Grammar

Any course of theoretical grammar
today serves to describe the
grammatical structure of language as
a system where all parts are
interconnected.

THE AIM OF THEORETICAL

GRAMMAR
THEORETICAL DESCRIPTIVE
GRAMMAR GRAMMAR

PRACTICAL PRESCRIPTIVE
GRAMMAR GRAMMAR
Practical grammar prescribes certain rules of usage and
teaches to speak or write correctly.
Theoretical grammar presents facts of language while
analyzing them and gives no prescriptions.
To a prescriptive grammarian, grammar is rules of correct
usage; its aim is to prescribe what is judged to be correct
rather than to describe actual usage.
To a descriptive grammarian (descriptivist), grammar is a
systematic description of the structure of a language.

Prescriptive and Descriptive

Grammar
traditional (prescriptive and
non-structural descriptive)

structural descriptive

transformational-generative

Historical Types of
Grammars
* Pāṇini (4th century BCE) is known for his
Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his
formulation of the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit
morphology, syntax and semantics, in the
grammar known as Aṣṭādhyāyī, meaning "eight
chapters".
* His theory of morphological analysis was more
advanced than any equivalent Western theory
before the mid 20th century.
A 17th century birch bark manuscript of Panini’s
grammar treatise from Kashmir
* In ancient Greece and ancient Rome the term
‘grammar’ denoted the whole apparatus of
literary study.
Traditional grammar has its origins in the principles
formulated by the scholars of Ancient Greece – in
the works of Dionysius Thrax, Protagoras, Plato, and
Aristotle.
Dionysius Thrax (c. 100 BCE)
was the first to present a
comprehensive grammar of Greek.
His grammar remained a
standard work for thirteen centuries.

Traditional Grammar in Ancient

Greece
*Thrax distinguishes two basic units of
description – the sentence (logos), which is
the upper limit of grammatical description,
and the word, which is the minimal unit of
grammatical description.
*The sentence is defined notionally as
“expressing a complete thought”.

Thrax’s Grammar
 onoma (noun)

rhema (verb)

sentence (class words)

Constituents of the
metochē (participle)

arthron (article)

antonymia (pronoun)

próthesis (preposition)

epirrhēma (adverb

syndesmos (conjunctions)
* The first Latin grammar was written by Varro (116–27 B.C.). One of
Varro’s merits is the distinction between derivation and inflection.
Varro set up the following system of four inflexionally contrasting
classes:
1) those with case inflexion (nouns
including adjectives);
2) those with tense inflexion (verbs);
3) those with case and tense inflexion
(participles);
4) those with neither (adverb).

* Traditional Grammar in Ancient

Rome
*The Latin grammars of the present
day are the direct descendants of
the works written by late
grammarians, Priscian (c. A.D. 500)
in particular.
*Their aim was to transfer as far as
possible the grammatical system of
Thrax’s grammar.

From Antiquity to the

Present Day
* In the middle ages, grammar was the study of
Latin.
Until the end of the sixteenth century, the
only grammars used in English schools
were Latin grammars.
The aim was to teach the English to read,
write and sometimes converse in this
lingua franca of Western Europe.

Latin Grammars in English Schools

One of the earliest and most popular Latin
grammars written in English was William Lily’s
grammar, published in the first half of the 16th
century. It was an aid to learning Latin, and it
rigorously followed Latin models.
* The Renaissance widened linguistic horizons. Scholars
turned their attention to the living languages of Europe.
* Although the study of Greek and Latin grammar
continued, they were not the only languages scholars
became interested in.
* The first grammars of English were closely related to
Latin, which scholars had treated as an ideal language.
* English, which replaced Latin, had to appear as perfect
as Latin. As a result, some English scholars were greatly
concerned with refining their language. Through the use
of logic they hoped to improve English.

Early English Grammars

* The first grammars of English were prescriptive, not
descriptive.
* The most influential grammar of this period was
R.Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar
(1762).

The First English Grammar

*The aim of this grammar was “to teach us to express ourselves with propriety ...
and to enable us to judge of every phrase and form of construction, whether it
be right or not”.
*The criterion for the discrimination between right and wrong constructions was
Latin.
*As Latin appeared to conform best to their concept of ideal grammar, English
was described in terms of Latin forms and the same grammatical constraints
were imposed.
E.g,, a noun was presented in the form of the Latin noun paradigm:
*Nominative: the house Genitive: of the house Dative: to the house
Accusative: the house Ablative: in, at, from the house Vocative: house

English described through

Latin
To sum up, early prescriptive grammar could be
characterized by the following features:
1) patterning after Latin in classifying words into word
classes and establishing grammatical categories;
2) reliance on meaning and function in definitions;
3) approach to correctness: the standards of correctness
are logic, which was identified with Latin past;
4) emphasis on writing rather than speech.

The Features of Prescriptive

Grammar
Descriptive (non-structural)
grammar
Henry Sweet (1845–1912), “New English
Grammar, Logical and Historical “(1891):
“ As my exposition claims to be scientific,
I confine myself to the statement of facts,
without attempting to settle the relative
correctness of divergent usages. If an
‘ungrammatical’ expression such as it is ‘me’
is in general use among educated people, I
accept it as such, simply adding that it is
avoided in the literary language.”

Non-Structural Descriptive
Grammar
Unlike prescriptivists, descriptivists focus
their attention on actual usage without trying
“to settle the relative correctness of divergent
usages.”
Similar to prescriptivists, descriptivists use
meaning and function in their definition of
parts of speech.

Non-Structural Descriptive
Grammar in Summary
Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish
linguist, developed the theory of grammar
and the grammar of English. He proposes
three principles of classification – meaning,
form, and function. His theory is set out in
“The Philosophy of Grammar” (1924).
It removes the parts of speech from the
syntax, is based on the concepts of ranks and
brings the concept of context to the
forefront of the attention.
The Emergence of
Structuralism
As a reaction to the atomistic approach to
language a new theory appeared that was
seeking to grasp linguistic events in their
mutual interconnection and
interdependence, to understand and to
describe language as a system.
The first linguists to speak of language as a system or
a structure of smaller systems were Beaudouin de
Courtenay (1845-1929) and F.F.Fortunatov (1848-
1914) of Russia, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857-1913).
The American Descriptive
School
Frantz Boas, linguist and anthropologist (1858-1942) is
usually mentioned as the predecessor of American
Descriptivism.

His basic ideas were later developed by Edward Sapir (1884-

1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949).
Leonard Bloomfield:
”The study of language can be conducted...only
so long as we pay no attention to the meaning of
what is spoken” (“Language”,1933).
 The focus: to devise
formal methods of
The principal The analysis of analysis and replace
approach: to study the sentences collected meaning by form;
structure of a language from native speakers interest in what is
as objectively as of the language, observes, i.e.
possible, without giving preference to objective data
reference to meaning spoken language
and other languages

The American Descriptive

School
The chief contribution of the
American Descriptive School to
modern linguistics is the
elaboration of the techniques of
linguistic analysis.
The main methods are
(1) the Distributional Method and
(2) the Method of Immediate
Constituents.

The Descriptivist Methods

(1)The Distributional Analysis
is a method of linguistic research in which the
classification of linguistic units and the study of their
features are carried out on the basis of the distribution
of the units in question in the spoken chain, i.e. on the
basis of their combinability.
Context Unit Context
in
(unit 1) question
(unit 2)

The combinability (environment,

context)
 Linguistic units with
similar distributions have
similar meanings.

Distributional hypothesis
 2. The Method of Immediate
Constituents
The term immediate constituents (IC) was introduced by L.
Bloomfield as follows: “Any English-speaking person who
concerns himself with this matter is sure to tell us that the
immediate constituents of

Poor John ran away

are the two forms Poor John and ran away; that each of
these is, in turn, a complex form; that the immediate
constituents of ran away are ran and away, and that the
constituents of Poor John are poor and John”.
 Poor John ran away

Poor John ran away

Poor John ran away

Immediate Constituents
2. The Method of Immediate Constituents

* This method is based on the binary principle, i.e.

each stage of the procedure involves two
components the unit immediately breaks into.
* The analysis is completed when we arrive at
constituents incapable of further division.
DEFINITIONS for the
Method of Immediate
Constituents
 Definition 1
An immediate constituent is a word or a group of words
that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical
structure.
 Definition 2
The ultimate constituents are the smallest meaningful
units which any given construction can be broken down
to, consisting of a morpheme at the morphological level
and a word at the syntactic level.
 Definition 3
The linguistics procedure which divides sentences into
their component parts or constituents in this way is
known as constituent analysis.
 Definition 4
The segmentation of the sentence into its immediate
constituents by using binary cuttings until its ultimate
constituents are obtained is called Immediate Constituent
Analysis (IC Analysis).
TRANSFORMATIONAL
AGRAMMAR
The idea of the Transformational Grammar (TG)
was first suggested by Zellig S.Harris as a
method of analyzing the “raw material”
(concrete utterances) and was later(1957)
elaborated by Noam Chomsky as a synthetic
method of “generating”
(constructing) sentences.
TG is a system of grammatical
analysis that uses transformations
to express the relations between
elements in a sentence, clause, or
phrase, or between different forms
of a word, phrase, etc., as between
the passive and active forms of a verb.

Noam Chomsky
TG refers to syntax and presupposes the
recognition (identification) of such linguistic
units as phonemes, morphemes and form-
classes, the latter being stated according to
the distributional and the IC-analysis or
otherwise.
According to Chomsky, the central goal of
linguistic theory is to determine what it is
that people know if they know a particular
language.
Кnowing a language involves having the ability to
produce and understand an unlimited number of
utterances of that language that one may never have
heard or produced before.
А GM is a system of explicit rules that may apply
recursively to generate an indefinite number of
sentences that can be as long as you want them to
be.
John saw the picture of the baby on
the table in the attic.
S-sentence, N-noun, NP-noun phrase, V-verb, VP-
verb phrase, P-preposition, PP-prepositional phrase,
DP-determiner phrase, DET-determiner.
* In generative linguistics 'grammar' refers to the
implicit, totally unarticulated knowledge of rules and
principles of the language that people have in their
heads.

* This tacit knowledge enables them to distinguish

between well-formed and ill-formed words and
utterances in their language, e.g. it’s correct to say a
grain but 'incorrect' to say *a oat.
* In generative linguistics the term 'grammar' covers
not only morphology and syntax but also semantics,
the lexicon and phonology.

* Phonological rules, morphological rules, syntactic

rules and semantic rules are all regarded as rules of
grammar.
*Chomsky has shifted the focus of linguistic theory
from the study of observed behaviour to the
investigation of the knowledge that underlies that
behaviour.
* In generative linguistics, rules are intended to go
beyond accounting for patterns in the data to a
characterisation of speakers' linguistic knowledge.
* The primary objective of generative grammar is
to model a speaker's linguistic knowledge.
Chomsky characterises linguistic knowledge using the
concepts of competence and performance.
 COMPETENCE
LINGUISTIC
KNOWLEDGE
PERFORMANCE

Competence is a person's implicit knowledge of the rules of a

language that makes the production and understanding of an
indefinitely large number of new utterances possible.

Performance is the actual use of language in real situations.

Chomsky proposes that competence,
rather than performance, is the
primary object of linguistic inquiry.
* Chomsky contends that the linguistic capacity of
humans is innate. The general character of linguistic
knowledge is determined by the nature of the mind,
which has a specialized language faculty.

* This faculty is determined in turn by the biology of

the brain. The human child is born with a blueprint
of language that is called Universal Grammar.
According to Chomsky, Universal Grammar is the
faculty of the mind that determines the nature of
language acquisition in the infant and of linguistic
competence.
The properties that lie behind the
competence of speakers of various
languages are governed by restricted
and unified elementary principles
rooted in Universal Grammar.
This explains the striking similarity
between languages in their essential
structural properties. The structural
differences between languages occur
within the range sanctioned by
Universal Grammar.
TEST 1
1. The method based on the binary principle, which
breaks each unit into two components, is called the
(A)distributional analysis
(B)method of immediate constituents
(C)descriptive method
(D)method of structural oppositions

2. Panini wrote one of the first grammars of

(E) Latin
(F) Ancient Greek
(G) Sanskrit
(H) Old Italian
3-5. Add one word into each gap. The first letter is
given:
Practical grammar (3) p__________ certain rules of
usage and teaches to speak or write correctly rather
than to describe actual usage. (4) T_____________
grammar presents facts of language while analyzing
them and gives no prescriptions. To a (5)
d___________ grammarian, grammar is a
systematic account of the structure of a language.
6. Show the chronological order in which the four
great grammarians of the past lived and worked
(1 - the earliest one, …, 4 – the latest one):
Varro -
Lily –
Thrax –
Priscian -
7. Choose as many possible correct answers as
necessary: In the distributional analysis the
classification and the study of linguistic units are
carried out on the basis of their distribution in
the spoken chain, i.e. on the basis of their
_______________.
(A) combinability
(B) addition
(C) environment
(D) context
8. According to Chomsky, the central goal of
linguistic theory is to determine
(A) what the difference between competence is
performance is.
(B) what it is that people know if they know a
particular language.
(C) how languages differ from one another.
(D) what methods are used in linguistic
research.
9. According to Chomsky, the linguistic capacity of
humans is

(A) innate.
(B) determined by the nature of the mind, which
has a specialized language faculty.

(C) called Universal Grammar.

(D) dependent on the grammar of the specific
language the child is exposed to.