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Unit 27: Grammar: Traditional to Transformational

After going through this rule the specific morpheme or words, lexical insertion rules come to fore, by Notes
the virtue of which these morphemes are inserted into the terminal nodes. The lexical insertion rules
are:
(i) Det ----------- this (ii) Det ----------- that
(iii) N ----------- boy (iv) N ----------- girl
(v) VP ----------- run (vi) P ----------- to
These rules are either called the phrase structure rules or the ‘re-write rules.
27.1 Some Misconceptions about Grammar

Grammar has been studied from the early days of literate civilization both from the point of view of
individual languages and from that of general linguistic theory. There is, however, a great deal of
confusion about it because of the very many different ways in which the term is used. There are some
misconceptions about grammar. These are:
1. A grammar of a language is a book written about it.
2. The grammar of the language is found only in the written language-spoken languages have no
grammar or at least fluctuate so much that they are only partially grammatical.
3. Some languages have grammar, others do not.
4. Grammar is something that can be good or bad, correct or incorrect. It is bad (incorrect) grammar
to say. ‘It is me’, for instance.
5. Some people know the grammar of their language, others do not.
6. All languages have the same grammar.
7. One language has less grammar than the others.
8. Grammar is only a utilitarian thing, i.e. a means of learning to use a language correctly.
We should free ourselves from misconceptions like these to understand the correct meaning of
grammar in terms of linguistics.

27.2 What is Grammar?

Grammar is a word that confuses considerably. It has been approached and defined differently by
different scholars and schools of linguistics. Etymologically, the term ‘grammar’ goes back (through
French and Latin) to a Greek word grammatkia or grammatika techne which may be translated as
‘the art of writing.’ But for a long time this term has been used very loosely to incorporate the whole
study of language. The Greeks considered grammar to be a branch of philosophy concerned with
‘the art of writing’. By the Middle Ages grammar had come to be regarded as a set of rules, usually in
the form of a text-book, dictating ‘correct’ usage. So in the widest and the traditional sense, grammar
came to mean a set of normative and prescriptive rules in order to set up a standard of ‘correct
usgage’. And grammar was both the art and the science of language. The grammarian until the
nineteenth century was the law-giver. Though it is still a valid interpretation for a lay man, no
contemporary or modern linguist will accept this definition of grammar in our age.
Today most linguists agree that grammar should be descriptive. Grattan and Gurrey (Our Living
Language, 1928) argue on similar lines: “The grammar of a language is not a list of rules imposed
upon its speakers by scholastic authorities, but is a scientific record of the actual phenomena of that
language, written and spoken. If any community habitually uses certain form of speech, these forms
are part of grammar of the speech of that community.” According to the structuralists, grammar is an
inventory or catalogue of elements classified with restrictions enumerated and relations made
physically manifested: it is a discovery of the organization of a sentence upon its immediate and
ultimate constituents: it is thus an inventory of units such as phonemes, morphemes, words, lexical
categories, phrases and clauses. In the words of Nelson Francis (Structure of American English),
‘Grammar is the study of organization of words into various combinations often representing many
layers of structure such as phrases, sentences and complete utterances.’

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