A Way out of Trouble with Grammar
(First published in The Island/24th September 2010)
Probably, it isn’t much of a problem to use classical grammatical labels to identify words in English sentences. But it’s a different matter when, even today, some grammarians claim, as those of the eighteenth century did, that the English sentence structure should faithfully follow the Classical Latin sentence structure. They will insist, for example, that it is not correct or proper to say “The girl speaks better than him” (which is more usual among today’s English speakers) and that the sentence should be “corrected” to read “The girl speaks better than he (does)”, or that to say “The manager asked the secretary to carefully re-draft the letter” is wrong, because of the “split infinitive”, and that it should be amended as “The manager asked the secretary to re-draft the letter carefully”. This is what is known as the prescriptive approach.
With the realization that the classical model of grammatical analysis would not fit every language, linguists started adopting a different approach which has prevailed for most of the past one hundred years: they collect samples of the language they want to analyse (called ‘corpora’, the plural form of ‘corpus’ meaning a collection of information about a language in the form of transcripts of speech recorded or written texts in that language), and study these to establish regular patterns of structures of the language in actual use. This descriptive approach is the basis of various modern analyses of language structure.
Structural analysis represents one type of descriptive grammar. Its main purpose is to study the distribution of forms in a language. The usual method is to set ‘test-frames’ such as sentences with slots in them.
The …………… makes a lot of noise.
I heard a …………… yesterday.
We can suggest a lot of forms that will fit into these slots (e.g. dog, parrot, beggar, radio, train). Because they go into the same test-frame we can say that they are probably examples of the same grammatical category. This is the category we label as “nouns”. But there are many other forms that do not fit these test-frames (e.g. George, a train, an engine). Different test-frames are needed for these.
…………… makes a lot of noise.
I heard …………… yesterday.
Among forms that occupy these slots are the engine, a train, the vendor with a megaphone, and an ambulance. They can be said to belong to another grammatical category. The label given to such forms is “noun phrases”. (The example test-frames are from George Yule’s “The Study of Language”, Cambridge University Press, 1997).
As suggested in the barest outline above, a lot of well founded criticism was made against traditional English grammar, and more accurate models of grammatical analysis were proposed instead. However, students of English and teachers the world over still depend on a common core of traditional grammar (prescriptive generalizations about the form and usage of varieties such as British Printed English (i.e. written variety). The main reason for this is that the terms of traditional grammar, notwithstanding their impreciseness and lack of accuracy, help the average users of English to easily identify and understand most forms in the language. The terms provide the metalanguage necessary for dealing with those concepts. The plethora of ‘grammars’ available in the market testifies to the popularity of traditional grammar, which has enjoyed revived pedagogical attention at least for the past twenty years.
I’ll mention the titles of just three grammar books that happen to be on my table at this moment: 1) A Communicative Grammar of English by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvick. Second Edition, 1994. Reprinted by Pearson Education Asia Pte. Ltd. 2000; 2) Collins Cobuild English Grammar edited by John Sinclair et al. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Glasgow. 1990. Reprint 2000; 3) Practical English Usage by Michael Swan. International student’s edition. Oxford University Press. New Delhi. 2006. There are hundreds of such grammar books designed for use by English learners at all levels from the beginning to the advanced.
They present what may be taken as the ’common core’ grammar (touched on above) that marks all varieties of English in the world. The existence of a grammatical ‘common core’ is actually a very good thing for learners of English, for it helps them make sense of English in whatever form it manifests itself .
‘Usage’ provides the basis for determining the correctness or acceptability of grammatical constructions. The compilers of the modern grammars rely on corpora (mentioned above) for their examples. Stored on computers these corpora contain many millions of words of spoken and written English as it is used today. Earlier grammarians had to make up their own examples to illustrate grammar points, and unsurprisingly, these examples seemed stilted, and hence rarely approximated real live usage. By way of example, we may take a look at the Bank of English at the Birmingham University which had collected 20 million words of the English language in the 1980’s; the 1987 first edition of the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary was based on this corpus. The 1995 edition of the same dictionary includes patterns of use identified and explained by its editorial team ( headed by Professor John Sinclair) in 200 million words of spoken and written English across the world. To suggest another example, the Cambridge Grammar of English (2006) edited by Professors Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy claim to have skimmed a corpus of “800 million words of real spoken and written English”.
The grammar books I have referred to above can be taken as random examples of commonly available grammars that are more suitable for advanced learners of English who seek a theoretical knowledge of English grammar, especially teachers. For the use of learners of English at the school level there are similarly tailor-made practice grammar books even in greater abundance in the local bookshops {e.g. Essential English Grammar by Raymond Murphy, Advanced English Grammar by Martin Hewings (both available in special low priced South Asian editions), and The Complete Grammar by Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas. The last is by American authors; it is a kind of question-answer compendium of English grammar for the average learner of the language without any practice exercises; a low priced Indian reprint of this book is also available.}
All these grammar guides and practice books are written by authors who are from among English speakers of the two main national varieties, British and American. There can’t be any better exponents of common core English grammar than those, in my opinion. Some Sri Lankan authors too have produced very good grammar books. Two examples that come to mind are the latest editions of W.H. Samaranayake’s Practical English (first pub. 1940), and Bertram Chinnaiyah’s Steps to Mastery of English Grammar (first pub. 1985?). There are also cheap, low quality, ersatz English teaching manuals which are mere rehashes of material pilfered from other sources, or which are put together by persons with a smattering knowledge of English in order to make some quick money. It’s up to the teachers, students, and their parents to be discriminating when they shop for good grammar books.
Modern grammar books reflect a sensitivity to both prescriptive and descriptive approaches. Particularly at the beginning levels, prescriptive grammar is a practical necessity: students must be taught the basic rules of the great game of language that is played inside one’s head (thinking), between two people or among many users as the case may be. But all that is said here should be qualified by the principle of unstoppable change that all languages are subject to. All aspects of a language – pronunciation, forms of words, their meanings, even grammar – undergo change over time. It should also be borne in mind that absolutely faultless grammar, either in speech or in writing, is rarely achieved, and that perfect grammatical accuracy is less important than successful communication.
Explicit grammar teaching or learning should not be done as an end in itself. It can only be a necessary initial step towards the gradual development of communicative capacity in the individual learner. In the traditional prescriptive grammar direct explanations are the norm. Language learning is viewed as a linear process; a language is believed to be constituted of discrete entities, and learning it is assumed to involve the gradual accumulation of these distinct items. This is a wrong position to adopt. There is empirical evidence to suggest that language learning is an organic, rather than linear, process. That is, in learning a language there is regression or backsliding, sudden advances in competence, and interaction between grammatical competence and performance; the grammatical forms are not learned in isolation, but in relation to the global context of a meaningful text.
Such a view of language learning supports the idea of grammatical instruction as Consciousness Raising (CR), which may be roughly defined as encouraging learners to focus on a text in order to discover for themselves the grammatical rules in operation there. CR requires learners to think creatively. Explicit grammar instruction can reinforce such independent discovery. Advocates of CR reject the alleged dichotomy between conscious learning and subconscious acquisition (a la Krashen, 1982). Unlike traditional grammar teaching, CR devotes greater attention to the form-function relationship (i.e. how a particular structure expresses meaning). Another speciality of CR is that it focuses on the grammatical structures and elements in relation to a broader discourse context. The rather naïve traditional assumption that once a grammar point has been taught it necessarily becomes a part of a learner’s existing knowledge is alien to CR.
Apart from explicit grammar instruction in the second language classroom, especially at the beginning stages, teachers need to provide for self-learning among their students. There are good grammar books available for this purpose. The Internet provides even better resources for multimodal (not only written) grammar practice. There are hundreds of free websites that offer grammar explanations and exercises at different levels of difficulty. Below are just a few examples of such websites for the interested readers to explore:
http://www.eslgold.com/grammar.html/ (for elementary to advanced), http:www.tu-chemnitz.de/phil/English/chairs/linguist/real/index/html/
(for intermediate to advanced),
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc (for high intermediate to advanced).
From a strictly linguistics point of view, it may even be a laughable matter to be talking about this very complex subject of grammar in this manner. But teachers are bound to be more practical than theoretical by the very nature of their metier. At no time in the history of English language teaching has grammar been ignored as irrelevant or dispensable, though the necessity of teaching it has received varying degrees of attention from time to time. Today it is generally agreed that the mastery of grammar along with that of vocabulary plays a central role in language development. Though ordinarily it is possible for most people to attain an acceptable level of proficiency in English without a serious enough formal grounding in its grammar, the ability to speak and write English correctly and coherently is considered one of the most important attributes of an educated person. The lack of such an ability may reveal a poor educational background.
For the average Sri Lankan learners of English the ability to express themselves in good spoken and written English, particularly in education and job situations, is the ultimate goal. For achieving this target, a good practical knowledge of grammar is essential. Though grammar is a very complex affair, its teaching and learning can be simplified through the judicious use of prescriptive as well as descriptive grammar. Explicit teaching of grammar should be backed by copious practice in multifarious, meaningful contexts.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Friday, October 15, 2010
Talking about Grammar without Grumbling
Talking about Grammar without Grumbling
(First published in The Island/17th September 2010)
A fairly widely held belief among learners of English as a second language is that the study of grammar is a major stumbling block to their making any headway. They seem to view grammar as esoteric and abstruse; their attitude is: ‘Why should we bother about something which only a few specialists understand and which many ordinary people would have a hard time grappling with if they wanted to learn it?’ Such an outlook is both erroneous and harmful, because the truth is that a sound knowledge of any language is not possible without a proper grounding in its grammar. But learning it by rote is equally unhelpful. When properly approached, grammar will prove that, after all, it is not such a bugbear as some people make it out to be.
The two most important aspects of a language that a language learner must tackle are its vocabulary and its grammar. Learning a language entails fleshing out the skeleton of grammar in words and phrases; in other words, it basically involves the internalizing of grammatical rules and the learning of vocabulary items which are adequate for effective communication in that language in a particular context. Therefore a course of language instruction needs to focus on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, while maximizing the communicative use of the target language; the latter (i.e. the communicative use of the target language) may be regarded as the mainstay of language instruction.
When Communicative Language Teaching came into general acceptance, the previous insistence on the mechanical mastery of structure under the so-called audio-lingual approach was abandoned in favour of an emphasis on the importance of learning to communicate as the main goal of language learning. However, as before, grammatical rules were left to be inductively learned by the students; in other words, explicit explanation of grammatical points was avoided. Later, this attitude was relaxed, and whatever technique seemed to help the learners to communicate through the target language was accepted depending on the age, the proficiency level, and the needs, etc. of the students. More modern research has revealed that no efficient language learning results from exclusive reliance on discovery learning alone, and that explicit teaching of grammar is necessary. We need to recognize the usefulness of mother tongue/first language translations (a pragmatic throwback, on occasion, to the traditionally discredited Grammar Translation technique, which, however, refuses to be completely banished wherever English is taught in the world); similarly, the usefulness of accommodating in our methods other devices such as mechanical drills on a peripheral basis perhaps, though these may run counter to commonly accepted practice in the field, shouldn’t be lost sight of.
A word of caution will not be out of place here: such strategies should not be resorted to as a means of camouflaging the teachers’ own ignorance, ill-preparedness or plain incompetence. A well conceived methodology makes for efficiency in the long run. But the practical teacher is not averse to trying out even old fashioned techniques that prove handy as short cuts in certain classroom situations.
In spite of the beliefs of teachers and researchers, there are many English language learners who believe that they need to be taught grammar, and that the majority of language teaching experts agree that they are right. However, no explicit teaching should be done for its own sake, but only as ancillary to the more productive autonomous efforts of students who rely, for their progress, on a sense of language awareness driven by an inquiring mind.
By ‘language awareness’ is meant a motivated language learner’s sensitivity to the way a language operates, including a desire to discover structural patterns and relationships that underlie its expressive potential. This is especially important for second language learners. Human babies are born with an innate capacity for acquiring the language that surrounds them. Second language learners have already internalized the grammar of their mother tongue. Their familiarity with how people learn a language enables them to make a conscious effort to make sense of a second language, which is facilitated by language awareness.
Traditional grammar came in for criticism with the advent of the ‘science’ of linguistics at the beginning of the previous century. Later in the same century formal grammar teaching fell into disrepute because of at least four reasons: 1) the traditional Grammar Translation technique focused on the mere teaching of grammar rules, without paying attention to the vital need for speaking and using the language; 2) all structural approaches including the audiolingual method had little to do with real communication which was later identified as the main purpose of language learning; 3) contemporary English language teaching often insisted on grammar teaching that emphasized usage rules or rules of language etiquette; such rules, while containing mere do’s and don’ts, were found to be inadequate to account for the deep structural patterns in the language; and 4) traditional English grammar is modelled on analytical frames applied to the study of classical Latin and Greek, and it does not reveal the truth about the structure of English which is a very different language from them.
Such a reasoned negative attitude to grammar is different from the uninformed cavilling at it that we sometimes hear today. But rejecting grammar teaching/learning even on such grounds as those just mentioned would be premature for learners of English who are still at a basic level of proficiency in the language.
The vast majority of our learners of English learn it as a second language. This means that they have already acquired their mother tongue and may even have had a formal training in the basic elements of its vocabulary and grammar at school, a situation that could facilitate the intellectual feat involved in the acquisition of a second language. To put it in different words, the experience of learning their mother tongue can help them to grasp the basic ideas about the vocabulary and the grammar of the English language.
Very often objections are raised against the learning of English grammar as difficult by students, and even by uninformed adults. Perhaps it is a bit too complicated, but it is not prohibitively so. And one reason for a feeling of relief on the part of the learners is that grammar rules are finite in number, as opposed to the infinity of correct sentences in the language that these few rules make it possible for a competent user of the language to construct. An English language course of more than ten years’ duration that is administered in our schools will be more than adequate for learners of English to learn all these rules, practise them thoroughly, and internalize them.
Then, what actually do we mean by ‘grammar’?
Combinatoriality is a distinguishing feature of human language. This is the principle by which linguistic rules combine elements of language to generate more complex structures. For example, phonemes are combined into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into clauses and sentences. In a very generalized sense, the study of these rules constitutes what is known as grammar.
There are at least three basic views of grammar. The first is a psychological view of grammar: each competent speaker of a language has a kind of ‘mental grammar’, an internalized linguistic knowledge which enables them to produce and to understand ‘correctly’ structured expressions in that language; this grammar knowledge cannot be taught; it is subconsciously acquired by individual speakers. (This was a notion identified as “competence” in Chomskyan linguistics.) The second looks at grammar from a sociological point of view, and represents a ‘prescriptive’ approach to grammar: it involves what are identified as the proper or best structures to be used in a language. A third concept of grammar (embodied in a ‘descriptive’ approach) involves the investigation of structures actually found in a language, usually for the purpose of describing the grammar of a particular language as distinct from the grammar of any other language. Modern grammatical analysis usually adopts this third view.
Further, grammar may be defined in two ways according to Dr David Crystal (The Penguin Dictionary of Language, 1998): 1) ‘A systematic analysis of the structure of a language’; in this sort of analysis a distinction is often drawn between a descriptive grammar and a prescriptive grammar. The same definition covers a number of other grammars such as a reference grammar, a performance grammar, a competence grammar, and so on; 2) ‘A level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics, generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology’; morphology studies the structure of words, and syntax the rules that govern the way words are combined to form sentences.
In traditional grammar, sentential analysis involves the use of such terms as the parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions); there are also terms that refer to other grammatical categories: person, number, tense, voice, gender, etc. These words actually originated in the grammatical analyses of the Classical Latin and Greek languages, which were the languages of learning, philosophy, science, and religion in Europe before ‘vernacular’ languages like English came into prominence. English grammarians since the Renaissance (14th to 16th century) considered it appropriate to subject English to the same sort of analysis as that applied to those ‘prestigious’ languages. It was not realized at the beginning that an established descriptive frame used for Latin, though probably suitable for other Romance languages like Spanish or Italian, would not be so useful for dealing with the grammar of a Germanic language such as English. That Classical Latin grammar based analytical concepts were even more unsatisfactory for describing non-European languages became clear when American scholars wanted to investigate North American Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century. And it was only after the emergence of the study of linguistics, usually associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), in the second decade of the twentieth century that terms used in traditional grammatical analysis were found inappropriate for representing the reality about the structure of the English language accurately.
The imprecision of simple definitions of the usual elements such as the parts of speech found in traditional English grammar is well known to those who are concerned with such matters. Nouns, for example, used to be defined as “names of persons, places, and things”; but this wouldn’t accommodate words such as “happiness”, “love” (as in “He sang about love”), “driving” (as in “His driving is awful”) in the category of nouns although they function like nouns; a more elaborate description of nouns is: “nouns are words that refer to people, creatures, objects, places, states (e.g. parenthood, childhood), phenomena, and abstract ideas as if they were things”. “As if they were things” doesn’t make for precision! Then there are other traditional categories such as person (First, Second, Third), number (singular, plural), tense, voice (active, passive), and gender. In English the gender relationship is in terms of natural gender (the biological distinction between male and female): In “The woman fed her child” the agreement between the ‘woman’ and ‘her’ is based on this biological distinction. In English gender does not have the significance that it has in French, Spanish or German in which languages gender distinctions are grammatically based.
(First published in The Island/17th September 2010)
A fairly widely held belief among learners of English as a second language is that the study of grammar is a major stumbling block to their making any headway. They seem to view grammar as esoteric and abstruse; their attitude is: ‘Why should we bother about something which only a few specialists understand and which many ordinary people would have a hard time grappling with if they wanted to learn it?’ Such an outlook is both erroneous and harmful, because the truth is that a sound knowledge of any language is not possible without a proper grounding in its grammar. But learning it by rote is equally unhelpful. When properly approached, grammar will prove that, after all, it is not such a bugbear as some people make it out to be.
The two most important aspects of a language that a language learner must tackle are its vocabulary and its grammar. Learning a language entails fleshing out the skeleton of grammar in words and phrases; in other words, it basically involves the internalizing of grammatical rules and the learning of vocabulary items which are adequate for effective communication in that language in a particular context. Therefore a course of language instruction needs to focus on the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, while maximizing the communicative use of the target language; the latter (i.e. the communicative use of the target language) may be regarded as the mainstay of language instruction.
When Communicative Language Teaching came into general acceptance, the previous insistence on the mechanical mastery of structure under the so-called audio-lingual approach was abandoned in favour of an emphasis on the importance of learning to communicate as the main goal of language learning. However, as before, grammatical rules were left to be inductively learned by the students; in other words, explicit explanation of grammatical points was avoided. Later, this attitude was relaxed, and whatever technique seemed to help the learners to communicate through the target language was accepted depending on the age, the proficiency level, and the needs, etc. of the students. More modern research has revealed that no efficient language learning results from exclusive reliance on discovery learning alone, and that explicit teaching of grammar is necessary. We need to recognize the usefulness of mother tongue/first language translations (a pragmatic throwback, on occasion, to the traditionally discredited Grammar Translation technique, which, however, refuses to be completely banished wherever English is taught in the world); similarly, the usefulness of accommodating in our methods other devices such as mechanical drills on a peripheral basis perhaps, though these may run counter to commonly accepted practice in the field, shouldn’t be lost sight of.
A word of caution will not be out of place here: such strategies should not be resorted to as a means of camouflaging the teachers’ own ignorance, ill-preparedness or plain incompetence. A well conceived methodology makes for efficiency in the long run. But the practical teacher is not averse to trying out even old fashioned techniques that prove handy as short cuts in certain classroom situations.
In spite of the beliefs of teachers and researchers, there are many English language learners who believe that they need to be taught grammar, and that the majority of language teaching experts agree that they are right. However, no explicit teaching should be done for its own sake, but only as ancillary to the more productive autonomous efforts of students who rely, for their progress, on a sense of language awareness driven by an inquiring mind.
By ‘language awareness’ is meant a motivated language learner’s sensitivity to the way a language operates, including a desire to discover structural patterns and relationships that underlie its expressive potential. This is especially important for second language learners. Human babies are born with an innate capacity for acquiring the language that surrounds them. Second language learners have already internalized the grammar of their mother tongue. Their familiarity with how people learn a language enables them to make a conscious effort to make sense of a second language, which is facilitated by language awareness.
Traditional grammar came in for criticism with the advent of the ‘science’ of linguistics at the beginning of the previous century. Later in the same century formal grammar teaching fell into disrepute because of at least four reasons: 1) the traditional Grammar Translation technique focused on the mere teaching of grammar rules, without paying attention to the vital need for speaking and using the language; 2) all structural approaches including the audiolingual method had little to do with real communication which was later identified as the main purpose of language learning; 3) contemporary English language teaching often insisted on grammar teaching that emphasized usage rules or rules of language etiquette; such rules, while containing mere do’s and don’ts, were found to be inadequate to account for the deep structural patterns in the language; and 4) traditional English grammar is modelled on analytical frames applied to the study of classical Latin and Greek, and it does not reveal the truth about the structure of English which is a very different language from them.
Such a reasoned negative attitude to grammar is different from the uninformed cavilling at it that we sometimes hear today. But rejecting grammar teaching/learning even on such grounds as those just mentioned would be premature for learners of English who are still at a basic level of proficiency in the language.
The vast majority of our learners of English learn it as a second language. This means that they have already acquired their mother tongue and may even have had a formal training in the basic elements of its vocabulary and grammar at school, a situation that could facilitate the intellectual feat involved in the acquisition of a second language. To put it in different words, the experience of learning their mother tongue can help them to grasp the basic ideas about the vocabulary and the grammar of the English language.
Very often objections are raised against the learning of English grammar as difficult by students, and even by uninformed adults. Perhaps it is a bit too complicated, but it is not prohibitively so. And one reason for a feeling of relief on the part of the learners is that grammar rules are finite in number, as opposed to the infinity of correct sentences in the language that these few rules make it possible for a competent user of the language to construct. An English language course of more than ten years’ duration that is administered in our schools will be more than adequate for learners of English to learn all these rules, practise them thoroughly, and internalize them.
Then, what actually do we mean by ‘grammar’?
Combinatoriality is a distinguishing feature of human language. This is the principle by which linguistic rules combine elements of language to generate more complex structures. For example, phonemes are combined into morphemes, morphemes into words, words into phrases, phrases into clauses and sentences. In a very generalized sense, the study of these rules constitutes what is known as grammar.
There are at least three basic views of grammar. The first is a psychological view of grammar: each competent speaker of a language has a kind of ‘mental grammar’, an internalized linguistic knowledge which enables them to produce and to understand ‘correctly’ structured expressions in that language; this grammar knowledge cannot be taught; it is subconsciously acquired by individual speakers. (This was a notion identified as “competence” in Chomskyan linguistics.) The second looks at grammar from a sociological point of view, and represents a ‘prescriptive’ approach to grammar: it involves what are identified as the proper or best structures to be used in a language. A third concept of grammar (embodied in a ‘descriptive’ approach) involves the investigation of structures actually found in a language, usually for the purpose of describing the grammar of a particular language as distinct from the grammar of any other language. Modern grammatical analysis usually adopts this third view.
Further, grammar may be defined in two ways according to Dr David Crystal (The Penguin Dictionary of Language, 1998): 1) ‘A systematic analysis of the structure of a language’; in this sort of analysis a distinction is often drawn between a descriptive grammar and a prescriptive grammar. The same definition covers a number of other grammars such as a reference grammar, a performance grammar, a competence grammar, and so on; 2) ‘A level of structural organization which can be studied independently of phonology and semantics, generally divided into the branches of syntax and morphology’; morphology studies the structure of words, and syntax the rules that govern the way words are combined to form sentences.
In traditional grammar, sentential analysis involves the use of such terms as the parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions); there are also terms that refer to other grammatical categories: person, number, tense, voice, gender, etc. These words actually originated in the grammatical analyses of the Classical Latin and Greek languages, which were the languages of learning, philosophy, science, and religion in Europe before ‘vernacular’ languages like English came into prominence. English grammarians since the Renaissance (14th to 16th century) considered it appropriate to subject English to the same sort of analysis as that applied to those ‘prestigious’ languages. It was not realized at the beginning that an established descriptive frame used for Latin, though probably suitable for other Romance languages like Spanish or Italian, would not be so useful for dealing with the grammar of a Germanic language such as English. That Classical Latin grammar based analytical concepts were even more unsatisfactory for describing non-European languages became clear when American scholars wanted to investigate North American Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century. And it was only after the emergence of the study of linguistics, usually associated with Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), in the second decade of the twentieth century that terms used in traditional grammatical analysis were found inappropriate for representing the reality about the structure of the English language accurately.
The imprecision of simple definitions of the usual elements such as the parts of speech found in traditional English grammar is well known to those who are concerned with such matters. Nouns, for example, used to be defined as “names of persons, places, and things”; but this wouldn’t accommodate words such as “happiness”, “love” (as in “He sang about love”), “driving” (as in “His driving is awful”) in the category of nouns although they function like nouns; a more elaborate description of nouns is: “nouns are words that refer to people, creatures, objects, places, states (e.g. parenthood, childhood), phenomena, and abstract ideas as if they were things”. “As if they were things” doesn’t make for precision! Then there are other traditional categories such as person (First, Second, Third), number (singular, plural), tense, voice (active, passive), and gender. In English the gender relationship is in terms of natural gender (the biological distinction between male and female): In “The woman fed her child” the agreement between the ‘woman’ and ‘her’ is based on this biological distinction. In English gender does not have the significance that it has in French, Spanish or German in which languages gender distinctions are grammatically based.
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