Lecture 1

The Subject Matter of Grammar 

          Grammar  - is the study of the structure of human language.

     Grammar studies the formal properties of words and sentences. It cosists of morphology and syntax. Morphology describes how words are structured and formed, how their  constituents (morphemes) are classified and combined. Syntax  describes how words are arranged and combined into phrases and sentences, how  phrases and sentences are classified and combined into larger structures.

The Evolution of English Grammars

     In the development of English grammars there have been several  grammars: prescientific normative (from the XVI-th century till the beginning of the XX ^- th century)  grammar; 2. scientific explanatory grammar. (from the turn-of-the century up to the middle of the 20^th century) .

     Prescriptive Normative grammars prescribed and proscribed. They prohibited wrong, improper constructions and forms. They set up (postulated) standards of correctness. They made use of the rules of ancient Latin grammars which served as a model for almost all European grammars.  They used the same terminology and distinguished the same word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, etc.

       1891 can be counted as the beginning of the classical scientific grammar, which is represented by the names of Henry Sweet and Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), The Great Dane. My Fair Lady, There is a motion-picture musical My Fair Lady about a linguist who wagers that he can transform the diction of a Cockney-accented flower seller to that of an upper-class lady,  from the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Professor Henry Sweet served as the prototype for B. Shaw’s Professor Higgins . Scientific grammars did not proscribe anything.   That was a new  approach. This grammar defined general  grammatical  categories. It anticipated Ferdinand de Saussure’s  synchronic approach. It proposed new techniques of linguistic description.

    The epoch of these scholars is now called Traditional 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. 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 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. A paradigm is a vertical set of all possible forms of a word ( a girl, girls, a girl’s hat, girls’ hats). The relations between these forms are invariable. Speech is a horizontal linear syntagmatic aspect of language. A  syntagm is a linear sequence of elements (He disliked the enthusiasms of American girls).. The relations wthin a syntagm are variable. 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 historic 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 broadly used in the XXth century humanities (linguistics,  literary studies, sociology,  philosophy), arts, etc.

     The ideas of F. de Saussure affected highly the Prague linguistic school, which created functional linguistics. Under his influence 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. 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).

     The Asymmetry of a Linguistic Sign

      Under it we understand the absence of  one-to-one relationship between meaning and form. One form can express several meanings, one meaning can be expressed by several forms. This asymmetry of the relations between form and meaning manifests itself in synonymy, polysemy, homonymy, syncretism, ambiguity, different semantic  complications on the syntagmatic level.

     Polysemy: to speculate - 1. to think over the idea without having reliable facts;  2. to sell smth hoping to receive more.

     Homonymy: 1.Catholic - referring to Catholic church; learned, knowledgeable.

     Ambiguity: He left the car with the girl ( We can put several questions to the element underlined: Whom did he leave  the car with? What car did he leave? How did he leave the car?).

     Syncretism means combining  two or more functions or meanings in one form.  It was raining and foggy again (was combines the properties of the past continuous auxiliary and of the link verb).

       Semantic complications arise syntagmatically, in discourse. Affected by the context, grammatical forms develop newer, connotational meanings ( of emotiveness, expressiveness, intensiveness, positive or negative evaluation):He disliked  the  girls.  He disliked  the enthusiasms of American girls (The former plural is customary. The latter plural  indicates  the character’s ironic (negative) attitude to  the girls].

American Descriptive Linguistics

      Its main representatives are Leonard Bloomfield (the head),   Charles Fries, Zelic Harris, Charles Hockett, etc. They rejected the traditional techniques of linguistic analysis.  They studied the non-alphabetical incorporative languages of Indian tribes which differ considerably from Indo-European languages. These linguists offered new procedures of description (arrangement, position, co-occurrence of linguistic elements) without resorting to meaning. Hence this school is called, at times,  Behaviorist Structural Grammar (L. Bloomfield). According to behaviorists, language is just a form of behavior. Linguistics should focus on linguistic performance, it should study the behavior, distribution, arrangement, co-occurrence, structural characteristics of elements disregarding their meaning.

Transformational and Transformational Generative Grammar

     There are two periods in the development of  transformational grammar: Transformational Grammar and Transformational Generative Grammar.

     Transformational grammar (Zelic Harris, Charles Hockett)  distinguishes kernels and transformational rules for expansion and rearrangement of kernels. Kernels are simple naked sentences: The sun shines;  She is beautiful; I have  a car; I read a book; There is a book on the table, etc. All possible sentences are derived from kernels

     Transformational Generative Grammar is primarily associated  with the name of N. Chomsky, USA, 1928 , linguist, philosopher and intellectualist, professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Chomsky  holds that humans are equipped at birth with innate language faculty to acquire language, which is a specific neurological system. Babies easily develop speech. These are rules that govern  sequencing sounds into words and words into  sentences. He initiated the shift from behaviorism and empiricism that dominated American linguistics to investigation into language and universal grammar. He criticized behaviorists. According to him,  language is  not a form of behavior. Generative grammar derives  a surface  structure  from an abstract deep (underlying) structure. Surface are observable structures,  deep are underlying structures, they are logical structures of our brain – subject and predicate structures.

     Harris and Chomsky developed ideas of transformation in different contexts and for different purposes. For Harris transformation relates to surface structure sentence forms: Jim drinks beer  =>  Beer is drunk by Jim. This transformation  relates both structures,  passive and active. For Chomsky transformation is a device to transform a deep structure into a surface structure, to show the generation of infinite living structures  out of a finite set of deep structures ( I have a car. She is nice.., etc,).  The theory of deep structures can serve as a method  of analyzing  and explaining the generation of surface structures. He married young is a surface structure with a double predicate, the nature of which can be explained transformationally =>He marries and =>He is young. The sentence with a simple nominal predicate  can be analyzed as comprising two deep structures : She a beauty?!  => She is a beauty. =>It is not true.

Semantic Syntax

     Semantic Syntax is represented by the names of Charles McCawley, W. Chafe, Russian linguists O.I.Moskalskaya and V.V.Bogdanov.

     Semantic syntax describes sentences in terms of propositions, semantic structures (= deep structures), predicates and arguments. Relations between predicates and arguments are analysed in terms of deep  cases: agentive case, objective case, instrumental case, locative case,  beneficiary case, etc.

     I open the door is a proposition. It’s semantic structure is as follows : the predicate is  open; arguments are I and the door. I and open are connected by the agentive case; open the door by objective case as the door is an object. In the proposition The door opened. the door  is logically an object, though grammatically it’s a subject, so that is an objective case. In the proposition The hammer broke the window   the  hammer    logically is an instrument, broke is the predicate, the window is an object.

     The present day trend is textual linguistics and intertextual linguistics. They  describe discourse, its generation and relations between sentences and texts The linguistic scene is dominated by traditionalism, structuralism, behaviorism, functionalism, transformationalism, generativism, poststructuralism, cognitivism.

     On the eve of the XXI- st  century linguistics is flourishing throughout the world, but  much is  in flux to predict  newer theories with any confidence.

Methods of Linguistic Analysis

     Modern grammar operates with a whole inventory of methods.

       

     Parsing (Traditional  Syntactic Analysis)

     Parsing  means dividing a sentence into the  main and secondary parts by putting questions. This long-standing procedure proves at times inadequate (powerless, ineffective). Putting questions to the sentence People hate unreasonably  we receive the following analysis Who? – people (the subject),What do they do? – hate  {the predicate}, How?  - unreasonably (an adverbial modifier of manner). Very often, in the  structures carrying ambiguous parts or elements of ambiguous reference  we can put more than one question to one and the same element. In the sentence He left the car with the girl. We can put 3 questions to the element underlined ( Whom did he leave the car with? What car did he leave? How did he leave the car?

     The Oppositional Method

     The oppositional method  was developed by N.Trubetskoy  to investigate  phonology. Comparing vowels and consonants in Russian and English, we see that they are contrasted to each other  as to their length. Hence they can be classified into short and long ones. This opposition within vowels does not exist in Russian, so Russian and English vowels do not correlate as to length.

     The oppositional method is based on discrepancy, antinomy or objective contrasts which are to be distinguished in objective reality between phenomena.

     Things contrasted to each other always have something in common, they are comparable and have some basic likeness. Chinese philosophers before Christianity, Jordano Bruno … - they all believed that “Contraria sunt complementa”, i.e. contrary notions complete each other. This idea is aptly expressed by the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955):

     Things of opposite nature seem to depend on one another

      as a man depends on a woman,

            day on night, the imagined on the real.    

     The Czech scholars  understand language as a system of elements which are interrelated on the basis of their similarities and differences, that is oppositions.

     The main notions of the method are : opposition, the root of opposition, the marked member of the opposition, the unmarked member of the opposition, a distinctive feature, neutralization. Opposition is a relationship of partial differences  between partially similar elements. The root of opposition is the basis of an opposition. The distinctive feature  distinguishes the marked member of the opposition from the unmarked one. In the opposition table :: tables (-s is a distinctive element)

     As to the number of constituents oppositions differ into binary, ternary , multi-element ones. As to relations between constituents there are privative oppositions read :: is read (binary); equipollent oppositions (равноценные) - both elements are marked went :: go :: shall go (ternary), man :: woman; gradual oppositions (ternary) fine – finer – the finest(ternary);black :: grey :: dim :: vague :: clear :: bright :: radiant :: white (multi-element), which can be reduced to a binary privative opposition  black :: white.                                                                                                            

     The distinction between the marked and unmarked elements  can be neutralized when the unmarked element signifies what is meant by the marked element:  I hear that he came::                                I have heard that he came. Where have you been, what have you done, what brings you her.).

He left which shocked everybody :: He left and that shocked everybody (subordination :: coordination).

     N.Trubetskoy was right stressing that the oppositional method can be applied to all fields  of linguistics, but that it is especially suitable for the description of morphological categories. Binary relations are especially evident on the morphological level. Principles of privative opposition are easily applied to English morphology: common case :: genitive case; perfect :: non perfect ; active :: passive, etc.

     Grammatical categories in English are represented by at least 2 forms standing in opposition: read :: is read (voice); read :: is reading (aspect); read :: has read (correlation, perfect); boy :: boys (number); boy :: boy’s (case); fine :: finer :: the finest (degrees of comparison).

     Oppositions can be paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Paradigmatic oppositions on the lexico-semantic level are represented by  synonyms and antonyms which belong to the same   semantic field  (dawn :: sunset; left::right, etc.). Semantic fields can be subdivided into microfields (bedroom furniture and office furniture are microfields of the semantic field of furniture).

      N.A. Shekhtman elaborated the method of syntagmatic  oppositions studying  semantic relations between semantically reduplicated words in a context. Please :: delight  is a semantic reiteration based on the gradual semantic opposition. Syntagmatically opposed can be words which refer to antonymous semantic fields on the paradigmatic level ( Her hideous face  was unutterably beautiful with grief). Contextually opposed can be  words which belong to absolutely different semantic fields (How frail poems are in a world burning with flowers).

     The oppositional method can be amply  used to analyze linguistic facts paradigmatically and syntagmatically on all linguistic levels.On the phonological level  voiced consonants are opposed to devoiced consonants. On the morphological level the nouns in the singular are opposed to the nouns in the plural ( table:: tables). On the syntactical level  one-member sentences are opposed to two-member sentences,  coordination (parataxis) is opposed to subordination (hypotaxis), etc.

The  Distributional method

     Distributional method describes environments of  linguistic units ( morphemes, words,  phrases), representing them symbolically: N – noun, A– adjective, T – article,V – verb,                  D – adverb.

     Distribution is the total of all the environments in which an element can occur; all occurrences can be symbolized. The distribution of the verb to make can be presented in the following way: He makes me do it (NVNVtoN), He makes up for smth (Nvup for N), I make a present (NVTN), I make a bed (NVTN), etc.

     There are a number of postulates here to be observed:

if two or more distributional formulas are identical their meanings are identical;

if two or more distributional formulas are different their meanings are different.

     But in actual usage this method turns out to be too formalized, as one and the same distributional formula conceals different meanings. Semantically different structures I make a bed, I make a basket, I make a road, I make a promise are symbolized by one and the same formula  NVTN. The Distributional method doesn’t reveal any difference between the structures Napoleon’s victory and Napoleon’s defeat, though we feel intuitively that they are semantically different.