Grammar and Lexicon

What is grammar:

(The study or use of) the rules about how words change their form and combine with other words to make sensible grammatical structures.The system of rules implicit in a language, viewed as a mechanism for generating all sentences possible in that language.If we talk about English then it also includes set of rules determined by prescriptive grammarians, how to use English language.

What is lexicon:1. The set of all the morphemes of a language; a dictionary.2. A list of terms relating to a particular subject or list of words explaining a particular idea.3. The vocabulary of a language or of an individual.4. The set of lexemes referring to the abstract ideas which come in our mind or set of words referring to abstract or conceptual ideas.

The lexicon is all about the words referring to the ideas in any language

And grammar is all about the art of using lexemes in particular order to produce meaningful sentences as the prime purpose of any language is to “communicate”.

Relation between lexicon and grammar

History of Grammar according to linguists:

19th century English grammarian, Henry Sweet drew a distinction between ‘full word’ and ‘form word’.

The full words are the words that have meanings, which we can find in the dictionary. i.e. tree, sing, blue, gently etc.

Full words:

Form words belong to the grammar and have only ‘grammatical’ meaning. Such meaning cannot be stated in isolation, but only in relation to other words and even sometimes to the whole sentence. i.e. to, be, at, for etc.

Form words:

Modern grammarian:

Fries recognized only four ‘parts of speech’ but fifteen sets of ‘function words’. parts of speech: noun, verb, adj, adverb. Function words: the, may not very, and, at, do ,there, why etc.

Frank palmer’s views on Grammar.

Grammar is not only the study of form or function words. It is concerned more widely with categories such as

tense, gender, number. Grammar also talks about syntactic functions such as

subject and object. But the question is what are the relevant grammatical

categories in any language. it is irrelevant for semantics whether a grammatical

category is indicated by a form word, a morpheme or the order of the word.

Problem of the distinction b/w grammar and lexicon:In modern linguistics the problem of distinction between the grammar and lexicon is often in term of the distinction between sentences that are unacceptable for grammatical reasons, and those that are excluded on lexicon grounds.

Example of grammatically deviant sentence: The boys is in the garden.

Two Kinds Of Restriction Grammatical Lexical

• Both Are Different in Principle. One Argument to sustain the difference is

that a sentence can be grammatically correct, yet at the asame time totally deviant in lexical terms.

Like Chomsky invent the sentence

colorless green ideas sleep furiously

seems impeccable grammatically but lexically it is completely unacceptable.

From the above example it is clear that grammar & lexicon are distinct.

Earlier Carnap had made same point by inventing a sentence that does not contain any English word at all, but seems to be quite grammatical in terms of English.

Pirots Karulize Elatically

Grammar could be wholly formal, we need not concern ourselves with meaning of any of our grammatical categories.

So too a total statement of all collocation categories of a word would be sufficient to characterize it linguistically.

Collocational possibilities of a word was essentially meaning of that word for linguist.

Like synonymy was defined in terms of total interchangeability.

Relation between semantics & collocation. Collocation determine meaning, meaning determine collocation

Chomsky attempted to handle collocation possibilities within grammar.

  He advocated a grammar that given a set

of appropriate rules would generate all and only grammatical sentences of a language.

  What is relevant to semantics is that he

was concerned with restrictions on co-occurrence of items within sentence.

So that we shall not permit.

Chosen items that do not fit the verbs

Last two are matter of grammar in frighten does not take any that CLAUSE .

Elapse is an intransitive verb that does not take any object at all.

Incompatibility of lexical items of certain nouns with certain verbs.

Chomsky proposed to deal with them in similar ways

Specification of the verbs

Elapse shown as not occurring with an object noun phrase.

Frighten not occurring with the following that clause.

Specification would state what is possible not what is not possible

Cut would be shown to need a concrete subject

Drink a liquid object This was achieve in terms of

components by stating that relevant subject and object must have the components concrete and liquid

These are selectional restriction.

Examples

1. The idea cut the tree.

2. I drank the bread.

3. He frightened that he was coming.

4. He elapsed the man.

The theory fail to account without considerable complications, for the many occasions in which selection restriction are legitimately broken. It is possible with verbs of saying, thinking etc. as in John thought we could drink water or negative e.g you can’t drink bread.Here we are concerned with making sense and that is matter of semantics rather than grammar.

Grammatical mistakes can be corrected easily by breaking a rule. e.g “the boys is in the garden.” “ the dog scattered”.It is wrong because ‘scattered’ use for things. Dog stand for whole family of dog so it should be “ the herd scattered”

ConclusionIn semantics we convey the sense though the sentence is grammatically incorrect.If the sentence is grammatically correct but it gives no sense it is of no use.In semantics sense should be clear not grammatical structure.Rules are related to grammar and we do not have any exact rule in English grammar which applies every time and every where in English.