HANDOUT ONE: PRESCRIPTIVE vs. DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR
1. What is Grammar? Usage vs. syntax and morphology
2. What types of grammar are there?
3. Mental grammar
4. Prescriptive grammar
5. Descriptive Grammar
Grammar is a set of laws (rules) behind language.
Grammar - is a more scientific aspect of the study of a language: it is made up of morphology (the
way morphemes combine into words) and syntax (the relation of words to one another). Grammar
gives
names
to
various
parts
of
speech
and
their
relations
(e.g.
adjectives,
nouns,
transitive/intransitive verbs; direct and indirect objects).
Syntax- part of linguistics which is concerned with the structure of sentences; i.e. it deals with the
ways in which words are arranged and joined together to form larger units-phrases, clauses, and
sentences- and with ways of analyzing these units. The word itself is derived from a Greek word
meaning “tying together” or “arranging”.
Linguists recognize three different things called grammar :
1. mental grammar
2. prescriptive grammar
3. descriptive grammar
Mental Grammar – speaker’s knowledge of language that allows him/her to produce and understand
grammatical utterances – i.e. speaker’s linguistic competence; it is subconscious and it is not a result
of any teaching
Competence vs. Performance
Competence: linguistic abilities of native speakers of a language which enable them to speak and
understand their language.
Grammatical Competence:
1.Phonetics: knowledge of how speech sounds are produced and perceived.
2.Phonology: knowledge of how speech sounds work together as a system.
3. Morphology: knowledge of how morphemes are combined together into words.
4. Syntax: knowledge of how to arrange words to form grammatical structures.
5. Semantics: knowledge of the meaning patterns in a language.
Pragmatic Competence: knowledge of how nonlinguistic information (context, personal beliefs,
background knowledge) influences speech comprehension and production.
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“Pragmatically anomalous” sentences vs ‘linguistically ill-formed” sentences
(a) My mother realizes that I’m a bad teacher
(b) My dog realizes that I’m a bad teacher
(c) My fish realizes that I’m a bad teacher
(d) My pen realizes that I’m a bad teacher
(e) My frying pan realizes that I’m a bad teacher
(f) My honesty realizes that I’m a bad teacher
(g) My death realizes that I’m a bad teacher
Most people would regard:
(a) as perfectly well-formed
(b) as slightly less natural
(c) as a bit eccentric
(d) as implausible
(e) as just plain daft
(f) and (g) as absolutely inconceivable
The oddity of these sentences seems to be largely pragmatic (i.e. not linguistic) in nature. (C) is not
linguistically ill-formed but pragmatically anomalous as it conflicts with our personal beliefs about the
world. It is linguistically well-formed as it is neither ungrammatical nor semantically ill-formed (the
sentence is not completely incomprehensible or meaningless). Thus, it is easy to be deceived into
thinking that a sentence is linguistically ill-formed in some way, when in fact very often the sentence is
merely “pragmatically anomalous”- i.e. it expresses an idea which may seem unacceptable. This
underlines
the
distinction between
acceptability
and well-formedness
(acceptability vs
grammaticality).
Performance: what people actually say or understand by what someone else says on a given
occasion.
Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammar:
Prescriptive Grammar: set of rules that specify which usages to adopt or avoid; dates back to the
approach taken by grammarians mainly in the eighteen-century England who set out rules for the
correct or proper use of English; they believed that the structure of sentences should be like the
structure of sentences in Latin.
Descriptive Grammar: set of rules that describe how people use their language; this approach had
been adopted after it had become clear that grammatical description of Latin is not a useful guide for
studying some languages, especially non-European languages (North American Indian languages);
this approach focuses on describing the regular structures of language as it is used, not according to
some view of how it should be.
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Some examples of prescriptive rules:
1. Never end a sentence with a preposition.
NO: Where do you come from?
YES: From where do you come?
2. Never split an infinitive:
NO: ...to boldly go where no one has gone before.
YES: ... to go boldly when no one has gone before.
3. Never use double negatives:
NO: I don’t have nothing.
YES: I don’t have anything. I have nothing.
4. “The verb “to be” takes the same case after it as before” (*It is me/ correct: It is I)
Examples of descriptive statements:
1. In English adjectives normally precede the nouns they modify.
2. Sentences containing double negatives are grammatical in some varieties of English. Very often
stress and intonation play a significant role.
Universal Grammar
UG is a genetic endowment (it is innate to the human species); internal tacit (unconscious) knowledge
of grammar. It constitutes the basis for acquiring language. It underlies all human languages.
UG lays down the basic principles, but each language is free to pick and choose the parameters along
which those principles are realized.
Parameters:
a) Word order
English – SVO - John kissed Mary.
Polish – SVO – Mama ugotowała zupę.
Zupę mama ugotowała – (SOV) We can still understand the sentence; in English however, SOV order
would be ungrammatical.
German allows for SOV – Hans hat Helga geküsst.
Arabic - VSO – Looks John at Mary.
b) Wh - question
All languages formulate them in different ways.
English – question word is moved to the initial position in a sentence. Questions in English show a
verb second structure: What have you done?
Japanese – the “wh” word does not move: You have lost what?
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Polish – more than one ‘wh” word can be moved: * Who what stole? It also does not make any
difference which word we front: Kto co ukradł? / Co kto ukradł?
c) pro-drop parameter (= null subject parameter)
Polish – In sentences: On usiadł/ On otworzył ‘on” can be omitted
In English we have to use a pronoun unless we have connections made by “and”
The innate linguistic endowment UG is not sufficient to enable one to speak a language. Our ability to
speak a language is based partly on the innate principles and parameters available in UG and partly
on the triggering experience of exposure to a specific language. On the basis of the parameters of UG
we develop a grammar of one (or more) specific languages: the ‘core grammar” of such a language.
Triggering experience Language X → UG (with parameters) → Core grammar Language X
The exposure to some languages, say English, will activate the innate principles of universal grammar.
The child will fix the choices to be made for the language in question, for instance, that the object
follows the verb, and will also learn the vocabulary of that language. Children acquire a language by
formulating a set of syntactic, morphological, phonological and semantic rules. For example they
formulate a morphological form which says that the plural form of nouns is formed by adding –s at the
end. Children formulate a rule which states that “You form the past tense by adding –(e)d to the stem
of the verb (that is why they make mistakes-by analogy-come, *comed as the rule is then
overgeneralized to ‘irregular” verbs like come, go, see etc).
Innateness theory
Our knowledge of language is partially innate and partially acquired.
Innate:
-
The fact that any other species will never be able to speak suggests that at some crude level we
must be endowed with the predisposition to learn languages that other organisms lack, i.e. some
part of our linguistic knowledge is innate
-
The linguistic knowledge that people end up with is strikingly similar, whereas the ability of paperfolding (acquired function) is not
-
poverty of stimulus – children are exposed to ill-formed sentences ( e.g. slips of the tongue,
speech errors, incomplete sentences etc.) but still they are able to acquire a proper command of a
language
-
the input to language acquisition is incomplete, which provides evidence for the fact that much of
the final state of competence is present in the initial state
-
our knowledge of language is not explicitly thought or learnt in any sense
-
age dependence on acquisition (formal syntax cannot be acquired after the critical period-that is
around the age of puberty)
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-
children are able to produce sentences which they have not heard before
-
with finite number of words we can produce an infinite number of sentences
-
the period of acquisition (which is very short/fast) goes to show that language is to some extent
innate
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