Session 1: Lecture
Purpose:
This course is about the structure of English, a description of English
as we know it. I need to point out that this is not specifically
a course on how to teach English, although we will touch on that aspect
often and your texts do discuss it frequently. The main purpose of
the course is to provide you with insight into the language so that you
will be better equipped to teach and to answer students' questions.
Another purpose of the course is to give you the tools to find answers
when they are not conveniently present in your memory. (It's okay
for teachers not to actively know everything!) You may see similarities
in how we approach grammar in this course with how it is approached when
you study a foreign language. As native speakers of English some
of you have probably never studied English from this perspective.
Descriptive and prescriptive:
These terms are often used in linguistics to refer to different approaches
to grammar. For a descriptive linguist,
the question is, 'What are the rules that people follow when speaking naturally
in this language?' How does the language work for the native speakers?
The descriptive linguist, then, describes the language according to natural
usage of native speakers. Some English grammar books are written
from this point of view. Note that from this approach language is
rule governed, but the rules are those that the speakers follow naturally,
NOT rules that have been imposed on them by so-called 'grammar experts'.
The term prescriptive essentially means,
'what should be done'. A good prescriptive approach is based
on the natural rules of a language that the descriptivists have noted.
The term prescriptive has acquired a bad name because of things like this:
Who did you see?
What should I write with?
Those of you who know prescriptive grammar rules will recognize that the first is considered 'incorrect' because the word 'who' should be 'whom', since it is the object of 'see'. The second one ends in a preposition, and we have all learned that you can't do that, right? The problem that this illustrates for us is that, based on a descriptive grammar of what people actually say in natural conversation, these two items are 'correct'. Yet we are taught, prescriptively, that they are not. I could go off on a tangent here about different levels of formality and dialectal variations in English. These are relevant topics to the course and we will discuss them throughout, so I won't go into detail at this time.
Pedagogical grammar, by nature, is prescriptive. When we teach, we tell people 'what should be done'.
Short history of prescriptive grammar:
Although some English grammar books were written quite early in history, it was not a subject that interested most educated people, since education at the time was conducted primarily in Latin with some Greek. With the rise of the merchant class in the 18th century, ordinary people became interested in their own language. They were aware that people who were higher on the social ladder spoke differently and they equated that difference with 'better'. They wanted to know how to speak 'correct, proper' English. Several educated people at the time were happy to oblige and wrote prescriptive grammar books of English. Two of the better known authors were Bishop William Lowth and Joseph Priestley (of scientific fame). The two differed in their approaches, with Priestley being a bit more open to variation and Lowth being more dogmatic. Several of the authors of the time included rules that were not natural rules of English but rather were 'borrowed' from Latin (and Greek). This is where the "Never end a sentence with a preposition" rule and the "Never split an infinitive" rule entered the grammar books. Since they weren't done in Latin, we shouldn't do them in English. Today we understand that the rules of Latin are not the same as the rules of English, and there is no reason why they should be.
Prescriptive:
A good prescriptive grammar book is necessary when you're telling someone
what to do. And good prescriptive grammar books are based on good
descriptive grammars. So we need the description of what's going
on first, in order to tell other people what to do.
Grammar books for non-native speakers are by nature prescriptive. Also, grammar books for non-native speakers should be different from those for native speakers because each group has different types of problems.
Grammar books used for teaching native speakers are also prescriptive. This category includes the books used in middle school and high school English classes.
Another category of prescriptive grammar books is the handbook. The purpose of handbooks is to clarify the rules of writing, which may include grammar but also includes writing conventions, such as when to use commas and periods.
Descriptive:
Descriptive grammar books are meant to describe the rules of the language.
They are not necessarily meant to be used as a teaching tool.
Types of grammar books (somewhat simplified): Now you can identify whether a grammar is descriptive or prescriptive. Now I'd like to talk about types of descriptive grammars that you will find, just by looking in the library. There are three basic types, based on theoretical frameworks, and there are good grammars available in each type.
(1) TRADITIONAL
Most written before 20th century, but some still published up
to 1940.
Broad in coverage, cover a wide range of topics and language.
Examples are taken from literary sources.
Not very rigorous or scientific. Choice of categories
and terminology is difficult to follow and not consistent.
Language is not presented as a coherent system.
Cover all aspects, including insights not always found in modern
grammars.
Often quote examples from literature, e.g., Shakespeare, Milton,
Dickens, or the Bible
There are many traditional grammar books out there. One
name in particular that you might look for is Otto Jespersen.
(2) STRUCTURALIST
The structuralists published mostly from the early 1920's to
1950's. However, even today there are some published.
Preoccupied with classifying things, with motivating categories.
Rigorous in classification of grammatical categories.
System very much language specific; categories motivated by
structure of the language in question, not by structure of Latin
or Greek.
Not as broad in coverage as a traditional grammar book.
You may find certain topics not covered.
Structuralists were most interested in structure and form, thus
their books will reflect this, ignoring aspects of meaning.
Some authors: Leonard Bloomfield, Fries (there are many
others).
(3) GENERATIVE (TRANSFORMATIONAL)
From 1957 on.
Rigorous.
Language as a coherent system; how things relate to each
other.
Try to account for meaning.
Not as broad in coverage as traditional grammars.
Finding rules from which you can produce sentences.
These books are quite easy to identify by the grammar 'trees'
developed within this framework.
Some authors: Radford, Baker.
Some grammar books appear to be eclectic, in that they show characteristics
of more than one tradition. The books written by Quirk, Greenbaum,
Leech, Svartvik fall into this category. There are several books
out there written by two or more of these men.
If you find this assignment frustrating, this is not unusual.
Don't be afraid to let me know about it. I'll be glad to answer your
questions. Again, discuss it under the item 'grammar books'.
And feel free to vent.
We tend to divide words into classes: parts of speech or lexical categories (noun, verb, adjective). This notion of parts of speech goes back to the Greeks (500B.C.). It is a useful concept but sometimes difficult to define.
Structuralists saw the inconsistencies in this concept when comparing languages. They experimented with other ways of looking at word classes and used distribution in the sentence as a way of distinguishing words. They put 'slots' in a sentence, examining which words could go where: _____ _____ _____ . Fries (a structuralist) made classes rather than parts of speech, on the basis of distribution. In his later works he even radically relabeled things in some interesting ways. The labels themselves didn't catch on, but the idea of looking at slots in a sentence did.
Generative grammar brought back the noun, verb, adjective labels, but also added some new ones, based on patterning in a sentence. Some of you may not be familiar with these labels, but since we will be using them in this class, I would like to introduce them to you. As an example, traditional grammar did not refer to determiners. When you look at the following list of words, you see that all these words can all occur in the same spot in this sentence:
The young woman put her hat on the chair.
A
This
One
My
Mary's
Because these words can all occur in the first position of this sentence, i.e. before a noun or before an adjective and a noun, we should be able to give them a common label. Thus the cover term DETERMINER has come to be used, which includes a number of subcategories that you may be familiar with, such as articles, possessives, and demonstratives.
We can also talk about phrases as constituents: units formed within a sentence.
[the young woman] put her hat [on the chair]
NP (noun phrase)
PP (prepositional phrase)
Each phrasal unit functions as a single unit in its slot in the sentence. You are no doubt familiar with prepositional phrases, but we now also refer to noun phrases (NP), verb phrases (VP), even adjective phrases and adverbial phrases. These terms were not normally used in traditional grammar.
You may now return to the Overview 1 to check your assignments.