HISTORY OF GRAMMAR

HISTORY OF GRAMMAR

There are three major branches in grammar, namely:

1) Traditional grammar

It originated in the Greece of Plato in the 5th century BC. It was not an independent discipline. Rather, it was part of philosophy. Tradtional grammarians used to think of the study of language as part of their inquiry into the nature of the world around them and of their social instituions.

There were many branches in this discipline. Those who claimed that language wasnatural, i.e.totally independent of man and his creations were called `naturalists. They claimed that the sound of a word must be correspondent with the meaning of the word. Even though their claim may sound too ambitious to us these days, they analysed different words and tried to figure out why they sounded that way. The opponents to this movement were the `conventionalists. For them, language was customary and depended more on tradition and man.In general, the study of language had a literary bias: it aimed at preserving and interpreting the text of the Classical Greek writers. It is their attempt to keep to the classic forms that turns them into prescriptive grammarians, since they prescribed what should(nt) be said to write in correct Greek. Their grammar ought to prevent language from change and corruption and condemn as incorrect more informal or colloquial usage. Therefore, it merely concentrated on the written language and ignored the difference between speech and writing.The written language was prior to the spoken one, which was sometimes regarded as an imperfect copy of the written language. 2) Structural grammar

Its founding father is considered to be Ferdinand de Saussure, who is its magnificent exponent in Europe. Even though de Saussure is rather a figure to devote a lot of lines to, we are going to reduce his works to his claim that language was full of signs, made up of two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the form of the word, its spoken realization, what we hear the speaker say. The signified is what the word denotes in the real world either an entity or an abstract notion. Another major figure was Roman Jakobson. He claimed that in every conversation, there is a speaker who will say a message, a medium through which he will send it and a receiver who gets the message and then replies in turn. This clearly shows the behaviouristic influences behind structuralism since there is a stimulus to which the listener has to respond.

In America, Sapir and Bloomfield were great exponents of it.

Structural grammarians aimed at making Linguistics scientific and autonomous.They tried to study language with precision and rigour, so they studied form and left out meaning, which was not directly observable or physically measurable.

They were interested in all languages and, therefore, tried to construct a more general theory of grammar.

It was descriptive rather than prescriptive, and it gave priority to the spoken language over the written one, since structuralists assumed that the natural medium of the expression of language is sound and that written languages are derived from speech.

3) Transformational grammar

It started in 1957 with Chomskys Syntactic Structures. Even though it has gone through a number of stages, it has always studied language as the ability of every human being to communicate through words. It claims that the ability to speak a language is in the human brain and that no human is deprived of it.

It studies language because it may give us an insight into the human mind. Linguistics can make an important contribution to the study of the human mind and,therefore, linguistics, psychology and phylosophy are no longer to be regarded as separate and autonomous disciplines.

Transformationalists try to search for the universal in language. Linguistics should determine the universal and essential properties of human language, and how the different languages that people speak around the world can come into shape by the setting of different mental parameters. That is to say that we are born or equiped with UG (Universal Grammar), a universal system of rules,and exposed to a particular language. It is through this exposure that the different parameters are set in our UG (if a language can have a tacit subject or PRO, for example) and we are able to acquire a language.

According to Stephen Pinker, another great transformationalist, language is no more than an instinct, like walking or flying for birds. In his view, people have an instinct to speak from their very early days, which can be seen in the gurgling or babbling of babies. People are prone to speaking most of the time, even when they are alone (examples of this are speaking to plants or to animals). The human being instinctively needs to communicate and, as any other instinct (walking, dodging a blow, urinating or having sex), is dependent on the brain in order to be performed.