The Evolution of English Grammars

In the development of English grammar two basic periods are distinguished: 1. prescientific period (from the end of the XVI ^th century till the beginning of the XX th century) with prenormative (descriptive) grammar and normative (prescriptive, demanding) grammar; 2. s cientific period (from the turn-of-the century up to the middle of the 20^th century) with scientific explanatory grammar.

Prescriptive Normative grammars prescribed, stated rules of grammatical usage. They prohibited wrong, improper constructions and forms. They set up (postulated) standards of correctness. Prescriptivists made use of the rules of ancient Latin grammars. Latin grammar served as a model for almost all European grammars. Long after Latin has ceased to be spoken, scholars copied the Latin grammar while composing grammars of their own languages. They used the same terminology and the same word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

Continually grammars came to be more sophisticated, descriptive and explanatory, that is, scientific. 1891 can be counted as the beginning of the classical scientific grammar. Henry Sweet did not proscribe anything. He found what was widely used to be grammatically correct. That was a new approach. He defined general grammatical concepts, grammatical categories. He anticipated Ferdinand de Saussure’s synchronic approach. He proclaimed the priority of oral speech over written one.

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), the Great Dane, emphasized the correspondence of grammatical and logical categories. He rejected the traditional syntactic analysis and proposed a symbolic representation of the structure of English. He proposed new techniques of linguistic description. He was a forerunner of structural grammar. He advanced the theory ofranks: instead of dividing a sentence into a subject and a predicate he distinguished primaries, secondaries and tertiaries.

The epoch of these scholars is now called T raditional grammar.

The XX th Century Linguistic Schools

Traditional grammar is criticized by newer grammars for: 1. its obscuring (ignoring) language itself as an intra-linguistic phenomenon; 2.its focusing on logical and psychological (extra-linguistic) considerations; that is, for its being meaning-oriented; 3. its being atomistic.

Newer grammars of the XX century came to describe language as a system where all elements are interdependent and interconnected. This approach was initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), a Swiss linguist, a pioneer in structuralism and semiotics. He profoundly contributed to the theoretical foundations of language studies. His great work “The General Course of Linguistics” (1916) is the starting point for the XX th century linguistics.

The most important structural and semiotic postulates which underlie the leading linguistic theories of the XX th century:

1. Language is a social phenomenon;

2. Language is a structured system of signals or a sign system, consisting of linguistic signs, which are interdependent and interconnected.

3. Language has two aspects: the system of language “ la langue ” and the actual linguistic behaviour or manifestation of this system “ la parole ” (speech). The system of language is a paradigmatic, vertical aspect. Speech is a horizontal linear syntagmatic aspect of language. Paradigmatic relations are based on substitution, syntagmatic relations are based on co-occurrence (совместная встречаемость.)

4. A study of language (la langue) can be diachronic or historical, focusing on historic change or synchronic (descriptive) treating language as a self-contained system at a given moment of its existence. F. De Saussure preferred the synchronic descriptive approach to the study of language.

5. A linguistic sign is bilateral, that is, it has two aspects: form and meaning. The relations between them are asymmetrical.

6. Language is a system, the elements of which are related by means of similarities and differences, i.e. (id est lat. – то есть) oppositions. We find oppositions on all linguistic levels. So, language can be studied on the basis of oppositions. On the phonological level: long vowels are opposed to short vowels, voiced consonants are opposed to voiceless consonants. On the morphological level: the plural number of nouns is opposed to the singular On the syntactical level: composite sentences are opposed to simple ones. On the lexico-semantic level words are opposed to each other: male:: female; man:: woman; God:: Satan, angel:: devil, etc.

F. de Saussure revolutionised linguistics. He introduced structuralism as a method of analysis which was being broadly used in the XXth humanities (linguistics, literary studies, sociology, philosophy), arts, etc. As a method structuralism analyzes systems by examining the relations and functions of the constituents of these systems, be it a human language or a cultural process. Thus Modernism is opposed to Postmodernism as a system on the basis of following structural points: decentralization – centralization; changeability – steadiness; shifting time – linear time, etc.

The ideas of F. de Saussure affected highly the Prague linguistic school, which created functional linguistics.American linguists introduced Structural descriptive grammar, Transformational and Transformational generative grammar.

Prague Linguistic School (Functional Linguistics)

The Prague school of linguistics is represented by the names of Vilem Mathesius, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetskoy, et al. The group favored the synchronic, or descriptive, approach to linguistics over the diachronic, or historical approach. It defined the phoneme -- the smallest unit of speech that can distinguish one word from another -- in terms of distinctive features. For instance, b and p are English phonemes, distinguishing such words as bin and pin, because voicing is a distinctive feature of English: b is voiced, p is voiceless. The basic contributions of this linguistic school are 1. The theory of the phoneme, 2.The theory of oppositions and the oppositional method (N.Trubetskoy), 3. The functional sentence perspective (or the theory of communicative dynamism), 4. The theory of the asymmetry of a linguistic sign (S. Karčevsky).

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