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Classical Scientific Grammar

The end of the 19th century brought a grammar of a higher type, a descriptive grammar intended to give scientific explanation to the grammatical phenomena.

This was H. Sweet's New English Grammar, Logical and Historical (1891).

Instead of serving as a guide to what should be said or written, Sweet's explanatory grammar aims at finding out what is actually said and written by the speakers of the language investigated. Scientific grammar was thus understood to be a combination of both descriptive and explanatory grammar. Sweet describes the three main features characterising the parts of speech: meaning, form and function. The purely synchronic approach towards the description of modern languages. The idea that language is primarily what is said and only secondarily what is written, i. e. the priority of oral speech over written.

Nesfield's grammar. The author chose a system, according to which the sentence has four distinct parts: (1) the Subject; (2) Adjuncts to the Subject (Attributive Adjuncts, sometimes called the Enlargement of the Subject); (3) the Predicate; and (4) Adjuncts of the Predicate (Adverbial Adjuncts); the object and the complement (i. e. the predicative) with their qualifying words, however, are not treated as distinct parts of the sentence.

The 19th century method, valuable as it was for the study of languages, gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. Logical, psychological and sociological considerations were involved in linguistic studies, thus obscuring linguistics proper. As Lewis Hjelmslev rightly points out, the linguistics of the part has concerned itself with a physical, physiological, psychological, sociological and historical aspects of language not in the language itself. The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected, the research being limited to the group of Indo-European language (the drawback of comparative method). It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied (another drawback).

All this led to atomistic approach to language. The new method was seeking to grasp linguistic events in their mutual interconnection and interdependence, to understand and describe language as a system.

The first scholars, who were Baudouin de Courtenay, academician Fortunatov (1849-1914), the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The work that came to be the most widely-know is Saussure’s A course in general linguistics, which was posthumously compiled and published from his lectures between 1906 and 1911.

Saussure’s main ideas:

1. Language is a system of signals or linguistic signs interconnected and interdeveloped. Linguistic is an object, an independent science.

2. Language as a system may be compared to other systems of signals such as road signs, language of deaf and dumb. Language is an object of a more general science – semiology, which studies different systems of signals used in human society.

3. Language has 2 aspects: the system of language and its manifestation in social intercourse, that is speech (langue and parole).



4. Linguistic sign is bilateral, it has both form and meaning.

5. The language sign is “absolutely arbitrary” (if we take a word absolutely disregarding its connections with other linguistic units, we shall find nothing obligatory in the relation of its phonological form to the object it denotes), and “relatively motivated” (the linguistic sign taken in the system of language reveals connections with other linguistic signs both in form and meaning.

6. Language is to be studied as a system in a synchronic plane (at a given moment of its existence), in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of elements. Linear and vertical relations.

7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of the concrete units. The linguistic units can be found by means of segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments.

 

3 main linguistic schools:

1. The Prague School was founded in 1929 uniting Check and Russian linguists (Matiescous, Trnka, Trubetskoy, Jacobson, etc)

The main contribution to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the limits of phonological structure. The basic method is that of oppositions of speech sounds that change the meaning of the words in which they occur. Binary oppositions. This principle is especially suitable for describing morphological category.

Professor Hlebnikova: “Binary relations penetrate any plane of language: phonological, morphological, syntactical, but are especially evident on a morphological level.

Jacobson used this method for describing morphological categories of Russian language.

2. The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933 by Lewis Hjelmsliev. In the early 30’s the conception of this school was given the name of Glossematics (Greek “glos” - language) In 1943 Hjelmsliev published “Principles of linguistics”.

Glossematics sought to give a more exact definition of the subject of linguistics, that 2 sides of the linguistic sign recognized by Saussure are considered to have both form and substance: recognition of bilateral character of the plane of content and the plane of expression.

3. The Descriptive Linguistics (USA) from the necessity of studing half-known and unknown languages of the Indian tribes. At the beginning of the 20th century these languages were rapidly dying out. They had no writing and no history. As a result the historical-comparative method was of little use here, they belong to a type that has little in common with the indo-European languages. They are devoid of morphological forms of separate word and of corresponding grammar meanings. The DL had to give up analyzing sentences in terms of traditional parts of speech. It was more convenient to describe linguistic forms according to their position in sentences.

The DL began with the work of Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield. Sapir’s main work is “Language and Introductory to the study of speech” (1921).

L. Bloomfield’s book is of the same title. It is a complete methodology of language study approaching the language as if it were unknown to the linguist. These ideas were later developed by S. Herros and Charles Fries.

Bloomfield showed a new approach to classes of words later developed by Ch. Fries.

 

According to O. Jespersen descriptive grammar instead of serving as a guide to what should be said or written, aims at finding out what is actually said and written by the speakers of the language investigated, and thus may lead to a scientific understanding of the rules followed instinctively by speakers and writers. Such a grammar should also be explanatory, giving the reasons why the usage is such and such. These reasons may, according to circumstances, be phonetic or psychological, or in some cases both combined. One of the most important contributions to linguistic study in the first half of the 20th century was O. Jespersen's The Philosophy of Grammar first published in 1924 where he presented his theory of three ranks (primaries, adjuncts, subjuncts) intended to provide a basis for understanding the hierarchy of syntactic relations hidden behind linear representation of elements in language structures. O. Jespersen's morphological system differs essentially from the traditional concepts. He recognises only the following word-classes grammatically distinct enough to recognise them as separate "parts of speech", viz.:

(1) Substantive (including proper names).

(2) Adjectives.

In some respects (1) and (2) may be classed together as "Nouns".

(3) Pronouns (including numerals and pronominal adverbs).

(4) Verbs (with doubts as to the inclusion of "Verbids").

Particles (comprising what are generally called adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions — coordinating and subordinating and interjections).

The peculiar views on accidence, e. g. the four-case system in G. Curme'sgrammar, are reflected in syntax. Curme discusses accusative objects, dative objects, etc.

Most grammarians retain the threefold classification of sentences into simple, compound and complex, as given in the prescriptive grammars of the mid-19th century. H. Poutsma introduces the term "composite sentence" as common for compound and complex sentences.

E. Kruisinga's Handbook of Present-day English (1932) presents a new viewpoint on some parts of English structure suggesting interesting approaches to various disputable points in the treatment of phrase-structure, setting up two major types of syntactic structures: close and loose syntactic groups.


Date: 2016-03-03; view: 2699


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