An overview of English grammar

GRAMMAR IN THE SYSTEMIC CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE

1. An overview (обзор, общее представление) of English Grammar.

2. Three constituent parts of language.

3. Two planes of language.

4. Synchronic and diachronic approaches to language. Language and speech.

5. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language.

The term grammar is derived from the Greek word ‘grammatike’, where ‘gram’ means ‘something written’. The part ‘tike’ derives from ‘techne’ and means ‘art’. Hence ‘grammatike’ is the art of writing.

English grammatical theory has a long tradition going back to the earliest Latin grammars of the 17th century when "grammar" meant only the study of Latin. Until the end of the 16th century there were no grammars of English. One of the earliest Latin grammars written in English was W. Lily's work published in the first half of the 16th century. 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.

Grammar may be practical and theoretical. The aim of practical grammaris the description of grammar rules that are necessary to understand and formulate sentences. The aim of theoretical grammar is to offer explanation for these rules. Generally speaking, theoretical grammar deals with the language as a functional system.

Modern English is an analytical language, as distinct from Modern Russian, which is synthetical. Analytical language has the following features:

Ø comparatively few grammatical inflections (case inflections in nouns, adjectives, and pronouns, and personal inflections in verbs);

Ø a wide use of prepositions to denote relations between objects and to connect words in the sentence;

Ø use of word order to denote grammatical relations: a more or less fixed word order.

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