Page 342 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes Thus recently it has developed a narrower interpretation and it tends to be restricted to the part of the
analysis of languages which was handled in classical grammar under die heading of inflexion
(treatment of the internal structure of words) and Syntax (the way in which words combine to form
sentences). Grammar, it has often been said, gives rules for combining words to form sentences.
There are, therefore, two divisions of grammar: words (morphology) and sentences (syntax). Within
linguistics, ‘grammar’, is thus used normally in a technical sense to distinguish it chiefly from
phonology or the study of the sounds of a language, and semantics, or die study of meaning. It lies ‘in
the middle’ of these two, and is related in a Janus-like way to both.

‘Grammar is the study of organization of words into various combinations often
representing many layers of structure such as phrases, sentences and complete
utterances.’

But more recently, say since 1957 (i.e. the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures), some new
dimensions have been added to ‘grammar’, and ‘the grammar of a language’, to quote Noam Chomsky,
the leader of the Transformational-Generative Grammar, has come to mean ‘the theory that deals
with the mechanisms of sentence constructions, which establish a sound-meaning relation in this
language’ (Selected Readings). Thus according to the latest interpretation of the term, grammar can be
said to include all the linguistic levels with rules of transformation. In brief, it is ‘a finite system of
rules which explains how languages pair off sound and meaning’ (S. K. Verma Linguistics). According
to R.H. Robins, ‘Grammar is concerned with the structure of stretches of utterance, or stretches of
writing, and with the grouping and classification of the recurrent elements of utterances by virtue of
the functional places they occupy and the relations they contract with one another in the structures.
Grammar is thus organized on two dimensions, syntagmatic and paradigmatic. It may be approached
from the point of view of the grammatical analysis of the actual utterance of a language, or from that
of the generation or production of utterances by Grammatical rules framed for that purpose’ (General
Linguistics). So broadly speaking, in present usage in linguistics, grammar is a description of the
structure of a language. And yet it was not the grammarian but the philosopher who created grammar,
for the philosopher studies the nature of things and recognizes their essential qualities.
The organization of a complete grammar according to the Transformational-Generative grammarians
may be as follows:
CONCEPTUAL (DEEP) STRUCTURE

Choice of Lexical Items
Syntactic/Grammatical Rules

SURFACE STRUCTURE

Phonological Rules

PHONETIC MANIFESTATION
Hence the grammar of a language often includes, in addition to grammatical categories and rules,
details of its pronunciation, transcription, and orthography.
Linguists like Chomsky and Fillmore make a distinction between Transformational-Generative
Grammar and a pedagogical grammar. Grammars designed for teaching purposes are often called
pedagogical grammar: they are performance-based. Grammars investigating language in general or
a specific language, may be called scientific grammars. Within the transformational-generative
framework such a grammar is competence based, and is economical, explicit and predictive. Grammars
may be synchronic, i.e. describing the language of a particular period, or diachronic, i.e. describing

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