Grammar
From Encyclopædia
{gram'-ur} Grammar is the study of the structure and meaning of human
language; the term is also applied to books that set out rules governing a
language's use. Grammar may be understood either in a traditional sense, designating an unbroken chain of theories about
language extending back to ancient Greece, or in a more modern way. In current
linguistics, grammar is defined as the body of tacit knowledge that constitutes a speaker's grasp of his
language. Grammar includes such specific subtopics as morphology (the principles of word formation; see
phonology and morphology),
syntax (the principles of sentence structure), and the PARTS OF
speech. Descriptive grammar is observational and attempts to characterize the principles of word and sentence formation that speakers actually follow in using their
language. On the other
hand, prescriptive grammar, also called normative grammar, formulates rules about how people ought to speak. The prescriptive grammarian necessarily has preconceived notions of what is supposed to be right and wrong.TRADITIONAL GRAMMARTraditional grammar isolates and identifies
language units of various sizes and develops rules for combining them into larger structures. A properly constituted structure--one formed according to the rules--is called grammatical; ungrammatical structures are those which violate the rules. For example, a morphological rule for English is that nouns but not verbs can end in the suffix -ness. Forms such as quickness, fastness, and presentness may or may not be nouns in English, but they cannot be verbs. A syntactic rule is that singular subjects take singular verbs. The sentence he runs is grammatical; he run is not. The root of a word is its core--a minimal meaningful unit to which prefixes and suffixes can be progressively added to create larger forms. Beat can be expanded into beatable, which in turn can be enlarged to unbeatable. In the domain of sentence structure, words are traditionally divided into classes--the parts of
speech--whose members perform similar grammatical functions. In accordance with rules specifying their order, form, and allowable combinations, words can be grouped into larger expressions, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences.LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCEFollowing the
lead of Noam CHOMSKY, modern linguists tend to emphasize the status of
language structure as a facet of human psychological organization. Linguistic competence is the subconscious ability to string words into grammatical sentences; linguistic performance can be measured by how grammatical the resulting spoken sentences are. To be understood, successful speakers must pair a meaning and a pronunciation. For example, to express the two different concepts, a speaker subconsciously learns to say he runs but they run.GRAMMAR BOOKSPANINI produced an elaborate grammar of Sanskrit about 400 BC. In the West, the SOPHISTS began their grammatical analysis of Greek at about the same time or a little earlier. Both
Plato and
Aristotle wrote on various aspects of
language--particularly phonetics and etymology--but a far more comprehensive grammar was that of DIONYSIUS THRAX, from about 100 BC. The Romans applied to their own
language the grammatical categories developed for Greek. Priscian wrote an exhaustive Latin grammar in the early 6th century AD, but much more popular both in classical times and throughout the
middle ages was the shorter grammar by Aelius DONATUS. The Anglo-Saxon monk AELFRIC compiled a Latin grammar about 1000, but the first analyses of the
English language date from almost 400 years later. Until the 20th century all English grammars were both prescriptive and heavily influenced by Latin. Probably the most important English grammarian was
bishop Robert Lowth (1710-87), who laid
Down the well-known rule that two negatives make a positive.Ronald W. LangackerBibliography: Bolinger, Dwight, and Sears, Donald Aspects of
language, 3d ed. (1981); Fernald, James, English Grammar Simplified, rev. ed. by Cedric Gale (1963); Jackson, H., ed., Discovering Grammar (1985); Langacker, Ronald W.,
language and Its Structure, 2d ed. (1973); Newmeyer, Frederick, Grammatical Theory (1983); Palmer, Frank, Grammar, 2d ed. (1989); Quirk, Randolph, and Greenbaum, Sydney, A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English (1973); Sapir, Edward,
language (1921).
