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Unit 27: Grammar: Traditional to Transformational

the development of a language, or comparative i.e. comparing and contrasting two or more different Notes
languages. Some contemporary grammarians (linguists) regard grammar as an all-encompassing
theory of linguistic analysis, i.e. transformational generative grammar, systemic grammar, tagmemics,
stratificational grammar. They are interested in establishing language universal too.
27.3 Kinds of Grammar

There are various kinds of grammar. Some major types of these have already been discussed. But
those already discussed were the recent phenomena. We will discuss now the old or traditional and
the new grammar and the major differences between the two.
Traditional Grammar
By traditional grammar is meant basically the Aristotelian orientation toward the nature of language
as exemplified in the work of ancient Greeks and Romans, the speculative work of the medievals,
and the prescriptive approach of the eighteenth century grammarians. The traditional grammar has
a long tradition behind it. There are ideas about sentence structure deriving from Aristotle and Plato,
ideas about the part of speech deriving from the Stoic grammarians, there are ideas about meaning
stemming from the scholastic debates of the Middle Ages, ideas about the relationship between
language and mind deriving from the seventeenth century philosophical controversies between
rationalists and empiricists, ideas about correctness in language coming from the eighteenth century
grammars of English, and ideas about the history of language deriving from the nineteenth century
emphasis on comparative philology.
It is the most widespread and influential method of discussing languages in the world, fairly well
understood and consistently applied by teachers. Traditional grammar distinguishes between rational,
emotional, automatic and purely conventional type of discourse in theory if not in grammatical practice.
It gives fairly a through and consistent analysis of the declarative sentence. It is the vehicle by means
of which ordinary students and scholars have mastered many languages for centuries.
In the words of Chomsky, “I think that we have much to learn from a careful study of what was
achieved by the universal grammarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seems to me,
in fact, that contemporary linguistics would do well to take their concept of language as a point of
departure for current work. Not only do they make a fairly clear and well-founded distinction between
deep and surface structure, but they also go on to study the nature of deep structure and provide
valuable hints and insights concerning the rules that relate the abstract underlying mental structures
to surface from the rules that we would now call grammatical transformations.” What is more,
universal grammar developed as part of a general philosophical tradition that provided deep and
important insights, also largely forgotten, into the use and acquisition of language, and furthermore,
into problems of perception and acquisition of knowledge in general. These insights can be exploited
and developed. The idea that the study of language should proceed within the framework of what
we might now-a-days call ‘cognitive psychology’, is sound. There is much truth in the traditional
view that language provides the most effective means for studying the nature and mechanisms of the
human mind and that only within this context can we perceive the larger issues that determine the
directions in which the study of languages should develop’ (Selected Readings).
Weaknesses of Traditional Grammar
Traditional grammar is inadequate and full of shortcomings. If it had been adequate and perfect,
there would have been no necessity of so many models of modern grammar. Traditional grammar is
based mainly on Indo-European classical languages; hence it is a poor model for the grammars of
languages that differ from Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. It does not adequately distinguish between all
the linguistic levels—phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic. It is normative and prescriptive
rather than explicit and descriptive. Its rules are illogical; it is inconsistent and inadequate as a
description of actual language in use. It neglects not only the contemporary usage but also the
functional and social varieties of language. Its approach is diachronic (historical) rather than synchronic
(contemporary). It tries to study a living language like a dead one. In his book The Structure of English
(1952), Fries challenges traditional grammars by calling them ‘not insightful’, ‘prescientific’,

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