Theoretical Course of English Grammar

ILIA STATE UNIVERSITY

NINO KIRVALIDZE

THEORETICAL COURSE
OF
ENGLISH GRAMMAR

TBILISI 2013

Script by prof. Nino Kirvalidze 1

 Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Lecture 1

Grammar in the systematic conception of language.

The development of grammar and its types.

Language is an essential feature that distinguishes us from other living beings. It certainly
figures centrally in our lives. We discover our identity as individuals and social beings when we
acquire language during childhood. Language is a means of cognition and communication. It
enables us to express our ideas and emotions, to think for ourselves or set control over others.
But language is first and foremost a means of transmitting information which helps us
cooperate with other people in our community. Language is so uniquely human, that our
species might be more appropriately named homo loquens than homo sapiens (Widdowson
1997: 4).
When you know a language, you can speak and be understood by others who know the
same language. Knowledge of a language enables you to combine words to form phrases, and
phrases to form sentences. But not every string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a
language. Therefore, in addition to knowing the words of the language, linguistic knowledge
includes rules for their combination to form sentences and make your own judgments. These
rules must be limited (finite) in length and number so that they can be stored in our brains.
Yet, they must permit us to form and understand an infinite set of new sentences (Fromkin et
al. 2003: 11). You cannot buy a dictionary of any language with all its sentences, because no
dictionary can list all the possible sentences. Knowing a language means being able to produce
new sentences never spoken before and to understand sentences never heard before. The
famous linguist Noam Chomsky refers to this ability as a creative aspect of language use:
creativity is a universal property of human language. Not every speaker of a language can create
great literature, but all persons who know a language, can and do create or understand an
infinite set of new sentences in the process of human discourse. Thus, creativity or creative

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aspect of language implies a human ability to create and understand an infinite set of new
sentences in the process of human discourse.
There is a difference between a person’s linguistic competence and his/her linguistic per-
formance. A person’s linguistic competence implies the knowledge which is necessary to
produce sentences of a particular language, while the application of such knowledge in the
process of human discourse determines his/her linguistic performance. Speakers’ linguistic
knowledge permits them to form sentences of any length by joining phrases and words together
or adding modifiers to a noun or a verb. For the most part, linguistic knowledge is not a
conscious knowledge. The linguistic system – the sounds, structures, meanings, words and rules
for putting them all together – is learned subconsciously when language is acquired in child-
hood, while in adulthood it is learned with awareness, i.e. with great efforts.
Language is a system of signs. It can function as a means of cognition and communication
due to the unity and interaction of its three constituent parts or subsystems. These parts are the
phonological system, the lexical system and the grammatical system. Without any of them
there is no human language in the above sense. The phonological system determines the
material (phonetical) appearance of its significative (i.e. meaningful) units. The lexical system is
the whole set of naming means of language, that is, the vocabulary of words and stable word-
groups. The grammatical system is the whole set of regularities, i.e. the set of rules (laws)
determining the formation of utterances (i.e. actualized in speech sentences) in the process of
discourse. Each of these three constituent parts of language is studied by a particular linguistic
discipline. The sound system is studied by phonology, the vocabulary of words is studied by
lexicology and the regulating rules of word and sentence formations are studied by grammar.
What is grammar? The word “grammar” derives from Greek and means “art of letters”
(gramma = letter). The term “grammar” is used in two meanings. On the one hand, in its wide
sense, the term refers to the explicit theory constructed by the linguist to describe the speaker’s
linguistic competence. On the other hand, in its narrow sense, the term “grammar” refers to the
study of morphology (i.e. the rules of word formation, parts of speech and their grammatical
categories) and syntax (i.e. the rules of sentence formation), often complemented by phonolo-
gy, lexicology, semantics and pragmatics (Fromkin et al. 2003: 14). Our ability to speak and

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understand, and to make judgments about the well-formedness of sentences, reveals our
knowledge of the grammar of our language. About two thousand years ago the Greek gramma-
rian Dionysius Thrax (დიონისე თრაკიელი) defined grammar as that which permits us either
to speak a language or to speak about it.
Grammars are of different kinds. A fully explicit grammar exhaustively describing the
grammatical constructions of a language is called a descriptive grammar. It does not teach the
rules of the language; it describes the rules that are already known. In other words, a descrip-
tive grammar of language does not tell you how you should speak; it only describes your
unconscious linguistic knowledge. Such a grammar is a model of the mental grammar every
speaker of the language knows.
A grammar that attempts to legislate what your grammar should be is called a prescriptive
grammar. From ancient times until the present, “purists” have believed that language change is
corruption, and that there are certain “correct” forms that all educated people should use in
speaking and writing. So, if the descriptive grammar only describes your unconscious linguistic
knowledge, the prescriptive grammar tells what rules you should know to speak the standard
language. Prescriptivists blame television, schools and even the National Council of Teachers
of English for failing to preserve the standard language and they attack those college and
university professors who suggest that African American English (AAE) and other dialects are
viable, living languages. Yet, the majority of linguists think that language is vigorous, dynamic
and constantly changing. All languages and dialects are expressive, complete and logical. They
are all rule governed and what is grammatical in one language may be ungrammatical in
another equally prestigious language. These scholars admit that the grammar and usage of
standard English may be dominant for social and political reasons, but other dialects are
linguistically equally complex, logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to
express any thought. If sentences are muddled, it is not because of the language but because of
the speakers. No grammar, therefore no language, is either superior or inferior to any other.
Languages of technologically undeveloped cultures are not grammatically primitive or ill-
formed in any way (Fromkin et al. 2003: 15).

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Finally, all these remarks apply to spoken language. Writing, which is not acquired sub-
consciously but must be taught, follows certain prescriptive rules of grammar, usage and style
that the spoken language does not, and is subject to little if any dialectal variation. Summing
up, we can say that a descriptive grammar of language does not tell you how you should speak;
it only describes your unconscious linguistic knowledge while a prescriptive grammar tells
what rules you should know to speak the standard language.
Different from them, a teaching grammar is used to learn another language or dialect.
Teaching grammars are used in school to fulfill language requirements. They can be helpful to
persons who do not speak the standard or prestige dialect, but find it would be advantageous
socially and economically to do so. Teaching grammars state explicitly the rules of the language,
list the words and their pronunciations and aid in learning a new language and dialect. It is
often difficult for adults to learn a second language without being instructed, even when living
for an extended period in a country where the language is spoken. Teaching grammars assume
that the student already knows one language and compares the grammar of the target language
with the grammar of the native language.
In 1957 Noam Chomsky developed a theory of Transformational Grammar, sometimes
called Transformational-Generative Grammar in his work Syntactic Structures. This theory
revolutionized the scientific study of language. According to this theory, Instead of starting
with minimal sounds, Chomsky began with kernel, i.e. elementary sentences, the number of
which is limited in any language. According to Transformational-Generative Grammar, by a
limited number of kernel (elementary) sentences and a set of transformational rules you can
generate (create) innumerable syntactic combinations. Each sentence in a language has two
levels of representation – a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure represents
the core semantic relations of a sentence which is mapped, i.e. explicated in the surface
structure via transformations. Chomsky believed that there would be considerable similarities
between deep structures of different languages, and that these structures would reveal proper-
ties, common to all languages. Chomsky and his followers formulated transformational rules,
which transform a sentence with a given grammatical structure (e. g. “John saw Mary.”) into a
sentence with a different grammatical structure but the same essential meaning (“Mary was

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seen by John.”). Transformational grammar has been influential in universal grammar and in
psycholinguistics, particularly in the study of language acquisition by children.
The more languages of the world linguists investigate and describe the ways in which
they differ from each other, the more they discover that these differences are limited. There are
linguistic universals that pertain to all languages. These universal facts are:
1. Wherever humans exist, language exists.
2. There are no “primitive” languages – all languages are equally complex and
equally capable of expressing any idea in the universe. The vocabulary of any
language can be expended to include new words for new concepts.
3. All languages change through time.
4. The relationships between the sounds and meanings of spoken languages are for
the most part arbitrary, i.e. the forms (sounds) of linguistic signs bear no natural
resemblance to their meaning and the link between them is a matter of conven-
tion, and conventions differ radically across languages.
5. All human languages use a finite set of discrete sounds that are combined to form
meaningful elements or words, which themselves may be combined to form an
infinite set of possible sentences.
6. All grammars contain rules of a similar kind for the formation of words and sen-
tences.
7. Every spoken language includes discrete sound segments, that can all be defined
by a finite set of sound properties or features. Every spoken language has a class
of vowels and a class of consonants.
8. Similar grammatical categories, i.e. parts of speech (for example, noun, verb) are
found in all languages.
9. There are universal semantic properties like “male”, “female”, “animate” or “hu-
man”, found in every language in the world.
10. Every language has a way of negating, forming questions, issuing commands, re-
ferring to past or future time, and so on. Syntactic universals reveal that every
language has a way of forming different structural types of sentences.

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11. Speakers of all languages are capable of producing and comprehending an infinite
set of sentences.
12. Any normal child, born anywhere in the world, of any racial, geographical, social
or economic heritage, is capable of learning any language to which he or she is
exposed. The differences we find among languages cannot be due to biological
reasons.
These principles are revealed and studied by Universal Grammar, which defines the basis
of the specific grammars of all possible human languages and constitutes the innate component
of the human language faculty that makes normal language development possible. Strong
evidence for Universal grammar has been found by Noam Chomsky in the way children
acquire language. Children need not be deliberately taught as they are able to learn effortlessly
any human language to which they are exposed, and they learn it in definable stages, beginning
at a very early age. By four or five years of age, children have acquired nearly the entire adult
grammar. This suggests that children are born with a genetically endowed faculty to learn and
use human language, which is part of the Universal grammar. Universal Grammar aims to
uncover the principles which characterize all human languages and to reveal the innate
component of the human language faculty that makes language acquisition possible.
The aim of Theoretical Grammar of a language is to present a theoretical description of its
grammatical system, i.e. scientifically analyze and define main classes of words, so called parts
of speech, their grammatical categories and study the mechanisms of sentence formation in the
process of speech making.

Study Questions:

1. What are the functions of language?

2. What does creativity or a creative aspect of language imply?
3. What’s the difference between a person’s linguistic competence and his/her linguistic
performance?

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4. How is the knowledge of language acquired in childhood/in adulthood?

5. What are the three constituent parts(subsystems) of a language system? Define each of
them.
6. What’s the origin and the meaning of the word grammar ? The subject of grammar, its
two interpretation.
7. What’s the difference between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammars?
8. What’s the aim of Teaching Grammar?
9. What’s the essence of Chomskian Transformational-Generative Grammar?
10. What are the twelve universal principles of language? Learn them.
11. What’s the aim of Universal Grammar?
12. What’s the aim of Theoretical Grammar?

Lecture 2

Dimensions and levels of linguistic analysis: syntagmatic

and paradigmatic relations between lingual units.
Hierarchical structuring of language system.

By virtue of their potentiality of occurrence in a certain context lingual units enter into
relations of two different kinds. When elements combine with others along a horizontal
dimension, they enter into syntagmatic relations. Syntagmatic relations are immediate linear
relations between lingual units of the same level in a segmental sequence (string). For example:
“A very beautiful girl is talking to my brother in the yard.”
In this sentence syntagmatically connected are the words and word-groups: a girl, a beau-
tiful girl, is talking, a beautiful girl is talking, is talking to my brother, is talking in the yard.

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