Order from us for quality, customized work in due time of your choice.
The textbook identifies three views of grammar – traditional grammar, structural linguistics, and transformational grammar. Standard grammar refers to a set of prescriptive rules and concepts about the structure of language. This type of grammar has its roots in the principles formulated by the scholars of ancient Greece and Rome. D. Thrax distinguishes two descriptive units – the sentence, which defines the upper boundary of grammatical description, and the word. He defines a sentence as “expressing a complete thought” (Bauer, 2021). His principal merit was that he was one of the first to divide the lexical volume of language into different parts of speech according to the functions they perform.
Structural linguistics is a set of views on language and methods of its study, based on the understanding of language as a sign system with different structural elements. The writings of Ferdinand de Saussure greatly influenced the emergence of structural linguistics. Saussure wrote “Memoir on the original vowel system in the Indo-European languages,” his only book in his lifetime. It was dedicated to reconstructing the sound system of the Indo-European proto-language (Bauer, 2021). It contained innovative for its time ideas about the strict and uniform structure of its roots.
Transformational grammar is a theory of grammar that accounts for language constructions through linguistic transformations and phrase structures. After the publication of Noam Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” in 1957, transformational grammar dominated linguistics for the next few decades. Chomsky suggested a deep inaudible structure behind every sentence in the speaker’s mind, an interface to the mental lexicon (Coffey, 2021). Transformational rules transform the deep structure into a surface structure that corresponds more closely to what is said.
Works Cited
Bauer, L. (2021). The Linguistics Student’s Handbook. Edinburgh University Press.
Coffey, S. (2021). The History of Grammar in Foreign Language Teaching. Amsterdam University Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv1b0fvzr
Order from us for quality, customized work in due time of your choice.