The development of grammatical studies
Lecture 1.1
Language as it works. Early English Grammars
What is Language? It is not only the means of our communication and the
instrument with which we have preserved our civilization, but that it is also the
instrument with which our brains work. With language man became human.
People have been using language for hundreds of thousand years. During
most of this time they did not think much about language; they just used language
mainly unconsciously. When people did start to study language, to find out what it
is and how it works, they knew so little about it that they made unreliable,
erroneous assumptions.
If we are to study language, what information do we need in order to start?
We should be able to assemble a few fundamental principles and selected enough
data to see how these principles reveal language. The following are certainly
among these principles:
 All languages seem to have been always changing
 When language changes it does so in accordance with tendencies having a
considerable degree of regularity, tendencies which can be described
psychologically, sociologically, and linguistically.
 Language seems to have grown by language families and by dialects within
languages. Back of the changes incident to this growth stands the idiolect,
the individual's way of speaking, which will differ at least slightly from the
idiolect of every other speaker.
Grammar in the systematic conception of language
There are in fact, a lot of interpretation of language and no less definitions.
It is certainly is true that Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse. This
definition given by professor M.Y. Blokh lays the stress on the communicative
function of Language which is social by nature; it grows and develops together
with the development of society.
Language incorporates the three constituent parts ("sides"). These parts are
 the phonological system,

the lexical system,
 the grammatical system.
And each of the three constituent parts of language is studied by a particular
linguistic discipline. Practical English Grammar teaches how to use the language
correctly while Theoretical Grammar aims at showing how the language works.
Prescriptive grammar and usage problems
The word grammar has many uses, some of them now obsolete. It formerly
referred to the whole body of writing, particularly the classical writing in Latin and
Greek; this meaning survives in the phrase grammar school, a school where the
curriculum includes elements of everything. From early times, also, it was the
name for the way language works; in this it was used in the concept of Universal
Grammar. The notion was that since grammar had come from God, it was
everywhere the same, at least in its fundamental principles.
Modern linguists no longer believe in universal grammar in this sense, but
they do use the word grammar to comprise the way a language works, the way the
semantic units (which may or may not be words) are handled so that connected
discourse becomes possible. Accordingly, a book which contains such a statement
about a language is called a grammar. Such a book is likely to attempt a
description of the language and to provide paradigms of the forms to be learned in
order to read, write, and speak the language.
In the western European tradition, the grammar books were mainly
grammars of Latin. Since they were intended as textbooks they informed the
student how to use a foreign language correctly and warned him how to avoid
using it incorrectly. In this sense, he doesn't is grammatical, he don't is
ungrammatical, or “bad” grammar." But careful thinkers and writers about English
do not usually use the word in this sense. To describe the problem of the rightness
or wrongness of a locution they prefer word usage.
Here we might distinguish between use and usage. The use of the language
readily becomes the language itself. Language probably got started by use;
certainly it grew by use. Whatever was said consistently was imitated by others,
was learned by children, and was eventually elevated into the standard speech.
Thus all languages grow by use and are determined by use. But at any one
time there may be locutions for which there is no such agreement in use. Most of
these variations pass unnoticed; for instance, a word like mother may be
pronounced with or without the sound of r at the end. The differences, when they
are observed at all, are thought of as dialectal, and few people would call either
pronunciation "wrong. But some locutions may be branded either wrong or right.
In grammar there are a lot of troublesome cases such as, for example, as it’s I/ it’s
me or it’s she/ it’s her. Confusion of the words like and as can also be a matter of
discussion. Thus usage, as a modern student of language employs the word,
concerns the questions of appropriateness or inappropriateness rather than right
and wrong in language.
In the course of history of linguistics many different views of language and
languages have been put forward. There is no such thing as a single, homogenous
approach either to grammar or to the language study as a whole. The phrase
‘traditional grammar’ attempts to summarize a spectrum of methods and
principles which appear in various combinations and are associated with many
schools of thought. There are ideas about sentence structure deriving from
Aristotle to Plato, ideas about parts of speech deriving from Stoic grammarians,
ideas about the nature of meaning stemming from the scholastic debates of the
Middle Ages, ideas about the relationship between language and mind deriving
from the 17-th century philosophical controversies between rationalists and
empiricists, ideas about correctness in language, coming from 18-century
grammars of English and ideas about the history of language deriving from the 19century emphasis on comparative philology.
Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics devoted a great deal of time to the
development of sometimes quite specific ideas about language. Plato was called by
a later Greek writer ‘the first to discover the potentialities of grammar’. And his
conception of speech (logos) as being basically composed of the logically
determined categories of noun and verb (the thing predicated and its predicator)
produced a dichotomous sentence analysis which has triggered most grammatical
analysis since.
Aristotle and later the Stoics examined the structure of Greek very carefully
and investigated parts of speech, many of the so-called categories of grammar, e.g.
case, number, gender, and tense.
Latin became the medium of educational discourse and communication
throughout Europe by the end of the first millennium. As a result of this, the
emphasis in language study was almost exclusively concerned with description of
the Latin language in the context of language teaching. This approach was used
right into the Middle Ages. Throughout this period, a high standard of correctness
in learning was maintained, especially in pronunciation.
By the Middle Ages, when it had come to be recognized that Latin was no
longer a native language for the majority of its prospective users, the grammar
books became less sets of facts and more sets of rules, and the concept of
correctness became even more dominant. One particular definition of Grammar
was – ‘the art of speaking and writing well’.
The 16-th century provided the peak period of prestige for Latin, and other
languages suffered accordingly. The preservation of the classical tongues was the
main task of the literate.
The Latin grammars were to be used as models for the descriptions of all
new languages. In the 18-th century, the authors of English grammars produced
‘rules’ of correct usage (normative rules – hence the name of the grammar:
“Normative Grammar’), which bore little relation to the facts of everyday speech.
The rules were derived from Latin into which the features of English structures
were forced (for example, case system or nouns).
Throughout this whole period there was a serious movement of
philosophical thought which stemmed from early Greek speculation about the
subject/predicate distinction, fundamental distinctions in logic, regularity in
language structure and so on.
The philosophical motivation of the early period persisted through the
Middle Ages until well after the Renaissance. Scholars were primarily interested in
establishing philosophical explanation for the rules of grammar. The assumption
was that there was one common, or universal, Grammar underlying the structure of
all languages, which was based, not on language forms, but on the laws of reason.
Many grammar rules of that period applied only to the written language, and
could not be meaningful in terms of spoken language. Large areas of syntax were
not covered at all, such as the elliptical sentence-types. There was little attention
paid to the complexity and flexibility of word-order in language. In traditional
grammar the ways in which sentences follow each other in a dialogue (or indeed in
a written paragraph) were not made clear either. Most authors did not even realize
that that was a problem.
The two reasons why the written language was studied, not a spoken one,
are:
1) Latin was a written language;
2) There were no technical means to study spoken language.
In fact, writing is a later and more sophisticated process than speech. Speech
is the primary medium of linguistic expression; we begin to speak before we write,
most of us speak far more than we write in everyday life. All natural languages
were spoken before they were written, and there are languages in the world today
which have never been written down.
Certainly the study of language cannot and should not be divorced from the
study of other aspects of human behaviour, psychology and sociology in particular.
This point was made clear long ago by Edward Sapir, one of the founders of
modern linguistics.
Linguistics need to extract information from other subjects for its own
theoretical development; and it also contributes to them. But the point is that any
contribution it makes must be formulated in terms of independence and autonomy.
In the midst of the last century, linguistics was at a point where it was no longer
necessary to emphasize this concern for autonomy. For some linguists, linguistics
has become one branch of science of human mind, an aspect of cognitive
psychology; for others, linguistics is one branch of the more general study of
human communication (semiotics) or pragmatics (semantics of human intercourse
involving psychology and sociology). But the integration of language study and
other fields now is of a totally different kind from that conceived of in earlier
centuries. It now has a body of independently derived techniques and theory at its
disposal.
The development of linguistics before the 19th century. The Historical
Comparative Method. The main schools of the 20th century linguistics
In European tradition, the beginning of linguistics as a purposeful and
systematic study of language is ascribed to Ancient Greece. In their study of
language, the Ancient Greeks considered the four main ranges of questions:
1. The most general, philosophical questions of language, such as the origin
of human speech.
2. Questions concerning structural categories in language, including
phonetics.
3. Questions concerning usage, i.e. selection of words and constructions
from the point of view of their 'correctness'.
4. Linguistic questions connected with the study of literary forms and
rhetoric.
The central philosophical problem of language in Ancient Greece was the
problem of the relation between the words and the things they signify. The
discussion of this problem took the form of the controversy about the origin of
names.
The two philosophers are commonly named as the main figures at the outset
of the dispute: Heraclitus (ab. 544-ab. 483 В. C.) and Democritus (ab. 460-370 В.
C).
According to Heraclitus and his followers, there is a natural connection
between words and the things they signify: the nature of things predetermines the
form of their names. Hence, language is inherent in nature, and is given to people
by nature. According to the great philosopher Democritus and his followers, the
connection between words and the things they signify is the result of human
convention. Hence, language was created by the people themselves.
The first explicit grammatical teaching was propounded by Plato's disciple,
the great Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-11 В. C). Aristotle developed the theory
of the sentence and the theory of word classes as notional and functional parts of
speech. But, being the founder of logic, Aristotle identified the relation of ideas in
human thought with the relation of words in speech, and stated grammatical
categories in terms of logic. This confusion is considered to be one of the main
faults of the Greek grammarians.
English grammars before 1900. Early Prenortmative Grammars.
Until the 17th century the term ‘grammar’ in English was applied only to the
study of Latin. This usage was a result of the fact that Latin grammar was the only
grammar learned in schools (grammar schools)
One of the earliest and most popular Latin grammars written in English, by
William Lily, was published in the first half of the 16th century and went through
many editions. This work was very important as
it set a standard for the
arrangement of material and thus Latin paradigms with their English equivalents
easily suggested the possibility of presenting English forms in a similar way, using
the terminology as in Latin grammar. Lily's Latin grammar may be considered the
precursor of the earliest English grammars; in most grammars the arrangement of
the material was similar to that of Lily's Latin grammar. But in spite of this
adherence to the structure of Latin grammar, even early grammarians could not
help noticing some typical features which made the structure of English different
from that of such a highly inflectional language as Latin.
Thus Ben Jonson’s and Ch. Butler’s English grammars point out two cases
of the English noun while in earlier grammars the category of case is said to be
non-existent and the 's form is defined as a possessive adjective. The authors of the
second half of the 18th century seemed to prefer the two-case system, which was
revived at the end of the 19th century in scientific grammar.
The treatment of the problem of case shows that even in the early period of
the development of English grammars the views of grammarians were widely
divergent. The grammarians who desired to break with Latin grammatical tradition
were not always consistent and still followed the Latin pattern in some of the chapters of their grammars.
Prescriptive grammars
The age of Prescriptive grammar began in the second half of the 18 th
century. The most influential grammar of the period was R.Lowth’s ‘Short
Introduction to English Grammar’, first published in 1762. The aim of Prescriptive
grammar was to reduce the English language to rules and to set up a standard of
correct usage. The grammarians settled most disputed points of usage by appealing
to reason, to the laws of thought or logic, which were considered to be universal
and to be reflected in the Universal grammar.
The Historical Comparative Method
The historical comparative method is a system of analytical procedures
applied to the study of languages in their historical development. The historical
comparative method is used to analyse and discover the relationship of different
languages and groups of languages, to reconstruct pre-historic lingual elements, to
reveal the course of historical development of lingual elements in their complex
interrelations; by means of the historical comparative scholars collects materials
for studying general laws of language development.
The historical comparative method proceeds from the possibility for
different languages to have been originated from the same source. The division of
one language into two or more languages is brought about by the division of the
language-speaking community due to political and economic factors. Since
language is always changing historically, the isolation (full or partial) of daughter
communities can lead to the growing differences in their language, to the rise of
dialects, which, in the process of further change, can develop into totally different
(though related) languages.
There are features of resemblance between languages that clearly prove their
common origin. These features belong to the most stable component parts of
language – to the basic word stock, to the fund of grammatical affixes, because
grammatical forms, as a rule, are never borrowed by one language from another.
Russian: брат, мать, ты
English: brother, mother, thou
German: Bruder, Mutter, du
French: frėre, mėre, tu
Latin: frater, mater, tu
The relations between the languages of the Indo-European family were
studied systematically at the beginning of the 19th century by Franz Bopp (17911867), Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832), Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), and A. Ch.
Vostokov (1781-1864). These scientists not only made comparative and historical
observations of the kindred languages, but defined the fundamental conception of
linguistic 'kinship' ('relationship'), and created the historical comparative method in
linguistics. The rise of this method marks the appearance of linguistics as a science
in the strict sense of the word.
The historical comparative linguistics was further developed in the works of
such scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries as F. I. Buslayev (1848-1897), F. F.
Fortunatov (1848-1914), A. Meillet (1866-1936) and other linguists.
The fundamental ideas and the main schools of the 20th
century linguistics
The main method of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century
was the historical comparative method. Valuable as it was for the study of
languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.
It gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent
science. Logical, psychological, and sociological considerations were involved in
linguistic studies to such an extent as to obscure linguistics proper.
The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected, the research
being limited to the group of the Indo-European languages. Then it was mainly the
historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied;
syntax hardly existed as an elaborate domain of linguistics alongside of phonology
and morphology.
As a reaction to this a new theory appeared that was seeking to grasp
linguistic events in their mutual interconnection and interdependence, to
understand and to describe language as a system.
The first linguists to speak of language as a structure of smaller systems
were Beaudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and Acad. F. F. Fortunatov (18481914) of Russia and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de-Saussure (1857- 1913)/
The work that came to be most widely known is de-Saussure’s «Cours de
linguistique generate » (A Course in General Linguistics), compiled from his
pupils’ lecture-notes between 1906 and 1911.
De-Saussure's main ideas are as follows:
1. Language is understood as a system of signals (linguistic signs),
interconnected and interdependent. It is this network of interdependent elements
that form the object of linguistics as an independent science.
2. Language as a system of signals may be compared to other systems of
signals, such as writing, alphabets for deaf-and-dumb, military signals, etc. Thus,
language may be considered as an object of a more general science—semasiology,
which studies different systems of signals used in human societies.
3. Language has two aspects: the system of language (French: langue) and
the manifestation of this system in social intercourse—speech (French: parole).
4. The linguistic sign is bilateral, i.e. it has both form and meaning. We
understand the meaning of the linguistic sign as reflecting the elements (objects,
events, situations) of the outside world.
5. The linguistic sign is 'absolutely arbitrary' and 'relatively motivated'. This
means that if we take a word 'absolutely' disregarding its connections to other
words in the system, we shall find nothing obligatory in the relation of its
phonological form to the object it denotes (according to the nature of the object).
This fact becomes evident when we compare the names of the same objects in
different languages, e.g.:
English:
ox
hand
winter
French:
boeuf
main
hiver
Russian:
бык
рука
зима
The 'relative motivation' means that the linguistic sign taken in the system of
language reveals connections with other linguistic signs of the system both in form
and meaning. These connections are different in different languages and show the
difference of 'the segmentation of the picture of the world'—difference in the
division of one and the same objective reality into parts reflected in the minds of
different nations, e.g.
English: arrow—shoot; apple—apple-tree
Russian: стрела — стрелять;
яблоко — яблоня.
6. Language is to be studied as a system in the 'synchronic plane', i.e. at a
given moment of its existence, in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of
elements. We understand the synchronic plane as a given moment of the historical
development of the language studied.
7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of
its concrete units. The linguistic elements (units) can be found by means of
segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments.
The Later development of the new approach to language
There were three main linguistic schools that developed these new notions
concerning language and linguistics as science that studies it: the Prague School
that created Functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created
Glossematics, and the American School that created Descriptive linguistics.
The Prague School
The Prague School was founded in 1929 uniting Czech and Russian
linguists: Mathesius, Trnka, Nikolay Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson and others.
The main contribution of this school to modern linguistics is the technique
for determining the units of phonological structure of languages. The basic method
is the use of oppositions (contrasts) of speech-sounds that change the meaning of
the words in which they occur.
The Copenhagen School
The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933 by Louis Hjelmslev. In the
early thirties the conception of the Copenhagen School was given the name of
"Glossematics" (from Gk. glossa—language).
In 1943 Hjelmslev published his main work ‘Principles of Linguistics’.
Glossematics sought to give a more exact definition of the object of
linguistics. The two sides of the linguistic sign recognized by de-Saussure are
considered by Hjelmslev to have both form and substance. This leads to the
recognition of a bilateral character of the two planes—'the plane of content' and
'the plane of expression'.
The form in the plane of content is the segmentation (the division) of the
picture of the world, which is different in different languages, e.g.
English: blue
foot, leg hand, arm
Russian: синий, голубой нога
рука
Similar differences may be easily found in tense and case-systems, in the
expression of genders in different languages, etc. Hjelmslev’s ideas lie at the basis
of componential analysis.
Descriptive linguistics in the USA
Descriptive linguistics developed from the necessity of studying half-known
and unknown languages of the Indian tribes. The comparative historical method
was of little use here, and the first step of work was to be keen observation and
rigid registration of linguistic forms.
The American languages belong to a type that has little in common with the
Indo-European languages, languages devoid of morphological forms of separate
words and of corresponding grammatical meanings. Descriptive linguists had
therefore to give up analysing sentences in terms of traditional parts of speech; it
was by far more convenient to describe linguistic forms according to their position
and their co-occurrence in sentences.
The American Descriptive School began with the works of Edward Sapir
and Leonard Bloomfield.
Sapir studied a great variety of languages. His most known work is
‘Language: An Introductory to the Study of Speech’ (1921).
Leonard Bloomfield’ book is of the same title as Sapir's ‘Language’. The
ideas laid down in the book were later developed by Z. S. Harris, Ch. C. Fries and
other contemporary linguistic students. Bloomfield understood language as a
workable system of signals. He understood grammar as meaningful arrangement of
linguistic forms from morphemes to sentences. Bloomfield also showed a new
approach to the breaking up of the word-stock into classes of words, the syntactical
or the positional approach. This division of the word-stock into classes of words is
later developed by Ch. Fries in his book ‘The Structure of English’. Perhaps
Bloomfield was the first to speak of ‘utterance’ as a linguistic unit.