V Classical English grammar

The most outstanding works of scholars belonging to the classical scientific tradition, some of them non-English by origin, appeared during the first half of the XX^th century. Classical English grammar was represented by Henry Poutsma, Otto Jespersen, Eugene Kruisinga, George O. Curme, Michael Bryant, C.T. Onions. English scientific grammar inherited the grammatical system evolved by the prescriptive grammarians who forced the laws and the peculiarities of the description of Latin onto English. But unlike prescriptive grammar which aimed at prescribing strict rules of language use, English scientific grammar turned to the observation and description of what speakers of English tended to say. Scientific grammar was understood to be a combination of both descriptive and explanatory grammar. For instance, Henry Sweet claimed that a grammatical rule without an example was of no practical use. He stated that “the rules are mere stepping stones to the understanding of the examples”. The aim of the grammarian is the elaboration of such a grammar which gives a learner “the really useful residue which, when once learnt, is not and cannot be forgotten” (H. Sweet [Блох 2004: 14-15]).

Nevertheless, the development of linguistic theory of the time could not provide grammarians with the methodology they needed to make their analysis completely substantiated. In this grammar the word, although important in so far as other linguistic units are defined in terms of it, is in fact rarely given any definition. It is simply assumed that everyone knows what a word is, so that one conveniently goes on to define the sentence as a combination of words, and the parts of speech as classes of words. Of the grammatical categories of traditional grammar, some are thought to be categories applicable to the noun, others to the verb, and the inflections which affect the forms of the words derive from the categories.

The only method of analysis employed within classical English grammar was that of observation. The object of analysis was studied as an inseparable whole, without analyzing it into further parts or constituents. Linguists identified certain linguistic facts, classified them on the basis of this or that criterion and observed their functioning in speech. Grammatical theory of that time was primarily interested in the meaning of facts of language which was the only criterion for various classifications. But it led to the overlap of different strata of language in linguistic description.

Classical English grammar is criticized for a number of weak points. Its main deficiency is considered to be the inconsistence in research methods as the traditional approach was based primarily on logic and Latin grammar. Another factor which caused linguists to become disenchanted with traditional grammar was its inadequacy when it came to the description of other languages, the structure of which was incompatible with traditional classifications.

Nevertheless Classical English grammar was a step forward in grammar theory. First of all, grammarians belonging to this trend saw the main antithesis “grammar, like all the other divisions in the study of language has to deal with the antithesis between form and meaning” (H. Sweet, cited from [Блох 2004: 12]). They made an attempt to elaborate strict (in their opinion) methods of linguistic analysis, they emphasized the difference between spoken and written language, between prescriptive grammar and explanatory grammar, the difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches to language study, the difference between Latin and English as an independent language which should be analyzed on its own. As L.S. Barkhudarov puts it, they accumulated linguistic material of considerable volume, made a great many insightful observations about it, approached language from the semantic side which made the strongest point of traditional grammar [Бархударов 1983: 6-8].

Now, however, the era of classical grammar (otherwise known as traditional scholarly grammar) seems to be over. Other approaches have been elaborated since then and linguists use the tools and procedures of the linguistic analysis worked out throughout the XX^th century. Needless to say, there have been important and exciting developments in linguistics since Classical English grammar, which have recast many of the problems of the field and offered new and promising ways to address many of them.

v Structural descriptive grammar

The body of work published in the USA mainly in the 40s and 50s of the XX^th century by Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, Charles Hockett, Georges Trager, Henry Lee Smith, Eugene Nida, which was heavily influenced by Leonard Bloomfield ’s book, Language (1933), is invariably referred to as Bloomfieldian, Post-Bloomfieldian, taxonomic, descriptivist, structural. Structural linguistics is understood as “any school or theory in which language is conceived as a self-regulating system, whose elements are defined by their relationships to other elements” [Matthews 1997: 356].

Bloomfield’s Language (1933) is considered a milestone in linguistics, the foundation of American structuralist linguistic thinking. The main claim of structuralists is that language is characterized by a strict empiricism. If linguistics was to be scientific, then it must confine itself to statements about observables, and this empiricism characterizes all post-Bloomfieldian, American structural linguistics. Therefore a post-Bloomfieldian arises out of direct observation. Discovery procedures are performed on a corpus of data and consist “in search for contrast and complementary distribution in the data recorded by linguists” [Handbook of Linguistics 2004: 99]. But structuralists did not go further and denied generalizations, i.e. overall theory. Thus they were left with no means validating a description.

Structural grammar is defined broadly as “any grammar in which there is an attempt to describe the structure of the grammatical sentence…”[3]. A structure is understood as a network of relationships between elements (units) of language which constitute paradigms, oppositions, semantic fields (paradigmatic structures), as well as an aggregate of relationships between elements (units) in linear sequences (syntagmatic structures) [Васильева et al: 2003: 144]. Hence, the analysis is structural in the sense that the language is simply thought to consist of a string of phonemes which are further grouped as morphemes. This provides a top-down approach to linguistic phenomena and enables a linguist to go down to smallest units.

Structuralists were after the elaboration of strict methods of the analysis of linguistic data. Distribution analysis, IC analysis, transformation analysis, and, later, componential analysis were major tools for structuralists to deal with linguistic material. In addition to it, structuralists were consistent in their use of a morpheme as the basic unit of linguistic description. The major procedures they employed were distribution and immediate constituent analysis [Алпатов 1999:201]. Distribution was understood as the sum of all the different environments or positions of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements [Иофик et al 1981: 35]. IC analysis boiled down to the segmentation of syntactic units into ultimate elements. What structuralists totally ignored in their analysis was semantics. The argument provided was that meaning cannot be observed as it is in the head of the speaker. Moreover, it is vague and elusive and too difficult to describe. Hence the description of meaning was considered a vulnerable procedure due to the insufficiency of linguistic methodology for the task.

The achievements of structuralism are quite considerable and the procedures they worked out were innovative at that stage of the development of linguistic ideas. In grammar, the notion of the form- class was developed by Charles Fries (1952-57) who described English as having 4 major form-classes defined according to the kinds of frames words of a class could enter into. Because of the emphasis on classes, this kind of grammar is often labeled taxonomic.

Another example of descriptive syntactic studies is immediate constituent analysis (Wells, 1947), the so-called top-down analysis. It begins with a sentence and works gradually down through its constituent parts until the smallest units that the grammar deals with, which will be the ultimate constituents of a sentence, are reached. This gives a complete description of the forms that make up sentence structure.

E.g. Poor John ran away (Bloomfield).

Constituents may be represented in different ways: rectangular boxes (Allen and Widowson):

E.g. Harry enjoyed his first visit

enjoyed his first visit

his first visit

first visit

or a Chinese box arrangement (Francis):

E.g. Harry enjoyed his first visit

or lines between the constituents may be used (Palmer):

E.g. A

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