English Theoretical Grammar

Lecture-Notes in English Theoretical Grammar

Theme 1. INTRODUCTION.

Point 1. The subject of theoretical grammar and its difference from practical grammar.

The following course of theoretical grammar serves to describe the grammatical structure of the English language as a system where all parts are interconnected. The difference between theoretical and practical grammar lies in the fact that practical grammar prescribes certain rules of usage and teaches to speak (or write) correctly whereas theoretical grammar presents facts of language, while analyzing them, and gives no prescriptions.

Unlike school grammar, theoretical grammar does not always produce a ready-made decision. In language there are a number of phenomena interpreted differently by different linguists. To a great extent, these differences are due to the fact that there exist various directions in linguistics, each having its own method of analysis and, therefore, its own approach to the matter. But sometimes these differences arise because some facts of language are difficult to analyze, and in this case the only thing to offer is a possible way to solve the problem, instead of giving a final solution. It is due to this circumstance that there are different theories of the same language phenomenon, which is not the case with practical grammar.

Point 2. The main development stages of English theoretical grammar.

English theoretical grammar has naturally been developing in the mainstream of world linguistics. Observing the fact that some languages are very similar to one another in their forms, while others are quite dissimilar, scholars still long ago expressed the idea that languages revealing formal features of similarity have a common origin. Attempts to establish groups of kindred languages were repeatedly made from the 16^th century on. Among the scholars who developed the idea of language relationship and attempted to give the first schemes of their genealogical groupings we find the name of J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609).

But a consistently scientific proof and study of the actual relationship between languages became possible only when the historical comparative method of language study was created – in the first quarter of the 19^th century.

The historical comparative method developed in connection with the comparative observation of languages belonging to the Indo-European family, and its appearance was stimulated by the discovery of Sanskrit.

Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a prominent British orientalist and Sanskrit student, was the first to point out in the form of rigorously grounded scientific hypothesis that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and some other languages of India and Europe had sprung from the same source which no longer existed. He put forward this hypothesis in his famous report to the Calcutta Linguistic Society (1786), basing his views on an observation of verbal roots and certain grammatical forms in the languages compared.

The relations between the languages of the Indo-European family were studied systematically and scientifically at the beginning of the 19^th century by some European scholars, such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867), Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832), Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), and A. Ch. Vostokov (1781-1864). These scholars not only made comparative and historical observations of the kindred languages, but they defined the fundamental conception of linguistic ‘kinship’ (‘relationship’), and created the historical comparative method in linguistics. The rise of this method marks the appearance of linguistics as a science in the strict sense of the word.

After that the historical and comparative study of the Indo-European languages became the principal line of European linguistics for many years to come.

The historical comparative linguistics was further developed in the works of such scholars of the 19^th and 20^th centuries as F. Dietz (1794-1876), A. F. Pott (1802-1887), A.Schleicher (1821-1868) , F.I.Buslayev (1848-1897), F. F. Fortunatov (1848-1914), F. de Saussure (1857-1913), A.Meillet(1866-1936) and other linguists.

At the beginning of the 20^th century the science of linguistics went different ways and later formed into various trends or schools, each of them contributing greatly to English theoretical grammar. The process is still under way nowadays, and it is going to be considered in detail further on.

Thus, we may tentatively trace three main development stages of English theoretical grammar: first (the 16^th century - the first quarter of the 19^th century), second (the first quarter of the 19^th century - the 1930s) and third (the 1930s - present day).

Point 3. The classical scientific grammar of the late 19^th century and the first

half of the 20^th century.

As it has been stated above, the main method of the 19^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century was the historical comparative method. Valuable as it was for the scientific study of languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.

The historical comparative method did not give any exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. Logical, psychological, and sociological considerations were involved in linguistic studies to such an extent as to obscure linguistics proper.

The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected, the research being limited to the group of the Indo-European languages.

It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied; syntax hardly existed as an elaborate domain of linguistics alongside of phonology and morphology. The painstaking study of the evolution of sounds and morphemes led to an atomistic approach to language.

As a reaction to the atomistic approach to language a new theory appeared that was seeking to grasp linguistic events in their mutual interconnection and interdependence, to understand and to describe language as a system.

The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were Beaudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and Academician F.F.Fortunatov of Russia, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

There were three major linguistic schools that developed these new notions concerning language and linguistics as the science that studies it: the Prague School that created Functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created Glossematics, and the American School that created Descriptive linguistics. The Immediate Constituents Grammar was a further development of descriptive linguistics; the Transformational Grammar, the latest.

The Prague School was founded in 1929, uniting Czech and Russian linguists: Mathesius, Trnka, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jakobson, and others. The chief contribution of early Praguians to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the units of the phonological structure of languages. The basic method is the use of oppositions (contrasts) of speech sounds that change the meaning of the words in which they occur.

The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933 by Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1959) and Viggo Brondal (1887-1942). In 1939 the Prague and the Copenhagen Schools founded the journal ”Acta Linguistica” that had been for several years the international journal of Structural Linguistics. In the early 1930s the conception of the Copenhagen School was given the name of ’Glossematics’ (from Gk. ’glossa’ – language).

Point 4. The American Descriptive Linguistics of the 1940s-1950s.

 

Descriptive linguistics developed from the necessity of studying half-known and unknown languages of the Indian tribes. At the beginning of the 20^th century these languages were rapidly dying out under the conditions of that time. The study of these languages was undertaken out of purely scientific interest.

The Indian languages had no writing and, therefore, had no history. The historical comparative method was of little use there, and the first step of work was to be keen observation and rigid registration of linguistic forms.

Frantz Boas, linguist and anthropologist (1858-1942) is usually mentioned as the predesessor of American Descriptive Linguistics. His basic ideas were later developed by Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). Bloomfield’s main work ”Language” was published in 1933. All linguists of the USA at one time or other felt the influence of this book. It is a complete methodology of language study, approaching the language as if it were unknown to the linguist (student). The main concepts of Bloomfield’s book are: