Grammar and its types

The term “grammar” is used in linguistics in different ways:

In the wider sense – rules of all components of linguistic competence (usually with the exclusion of pragmatics, for which a separate term is used – pragmatic competence)

or in the narrow sense - morphological and syntactic rules only.

Types of grammars

· descriptive ( how it is) and prescriptive (how it should be, e.g. one should not say “I ain’t told nobody nothing”)

Scientific grammars are descriptive. Different dialectal varieties (standard and substandard) are described on equal terms.

· theoretical and applied grammar

Theoretical grammar is constructed with scientific motivation - to describe, understand and explain the linguistic phenomena. Applied grammar is written for practical purpose, e.g.

- pedagogical grammar- to facilitate learning of the language by non-native speakers) often simplified, informal, incomplete(fragmentary)- depends on the level of advancement.

- grammar used for machine translation – need not be psychologically real –e.g. might treat complex expressions as lexical units

· traditional grammar, school grammar -informal, not precise, intuitive,

may define a sentence as a “complete thought”, subjects as phrases referring to the performers of an action, etc

· generative grammar – concept introduced to linguistics by Noam Chomsky in mid 50ties.

Descriptive, theoretical, formal (explicit, precise) grammar that consist of a specifies (generates) all well-formed sentences and assigns to each of them a correct structure.

Many different theories of generative grammar have been proposed.

The most influential of them is Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar.Its name derives from the special type of rules (grammatical transformations) that it employed.

Our discussion of English syntax will be based mostly on elements of one of the variants of TGG.

· Universal grammar (UG)

These aspects of grammar which are claimed to be present in grammars of all natural languages and are assumed to relate to innate properties of human mind.

An example could be a restriction on the rule which forms wh- questions.

We can ask about an object of a sentence by placing an appropriate form of a wh- word at the front of the construction:

I saw a girl.

Whom did you see?

However, if the element that we want to ask about is a part of a conjoined construction, such an operation results in ungrammatical structure

I saw a girl and a boy.

*Whom did you see and a boy

This restriction applies in all known natural languages.

· Kogo widziałeś i chłopca.

DG – 2014/2015

SAN, Tadeusz Zabrocki

II. MORPHOLOGY

1. Words and morphemes

Words can be simple (work, book, relation) or complex (books, worked, relationships)

Complex words can be divided into smaller meaningful units

work+ed, book+s

work+er+s, relation+ship+s

un+gentle+man+li+ness

dis+establish+ment+arian+ism+s

The smallest, further indivisible, meaningful units which combine with each other to form words are called morphemes

ment – govern+ _, establish+ _, appease+ _, contain+ _, settle+ _

un - _ +happy, _ + fortunate, _ +likely, _ +tidy

Simple words consist each of a single morpheme.